Politics, Literature and National Character by Madame de Stael

Author:Madame de Stael [Stael, Madame de]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780765806451
Publisher: TaylorFrancis
Published: 2017-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter X. Italian and Spanish Literature

The patronage of the princes of Italy contributed much to the Renaissance but it necessarily hindered philosophy. This hindrance would have persisted even if religious superstition had not in several ways adulterated the search for truth.

We must recall here once more the meaning that I have consistently attached to the word philosophy in the course of this work. I call philosophy the investigation of the source of all political and religious institutions, the analysis of the personalities and events of history—in short, the study of man and of the natural rights of man. Philosophy in this sense presupposes freedom or must lead to it.

The men of letters of Italy, needing the money and the approval of the princes to recover the ancient manuscripts that were to serve them as a guide, were further than those of any other country from that sort of independence necessary to philosophy of such a kind. There was a host of academies and universities in the large cities of Italy. These associations were singularly fitted for the scholarly labors that were to bring so many masterpieces out of oblivion. But public establishments are by their very nature completely obedient to governments. Public bodies, like Estates, social classes, and religious sects, are extremely useful for some specific purposes but are much less favorable than individual efforts and talent to the continuous advancement of philosophical learning.

We should add to these general considerations that the long and patient research required to examine and analyze ancient manuscripts particularly suited the monastic life; and it was indeed the monks who were the most actively engaged in literary studies. Thus the very causes of the rebirth of literature in Italy set themselves against the development of natural reason. The Italians cleared the first passage in the road along which the human mind has since made such great progress, but they themselves were fated never to advance on the path they had opened.

Poetry and the fine arts, by their unique charms, intoxicate the imagination, but the writers in prose are, in general, neither moralists nor philosophers and their attempts at eloquence produce only exaggeration. Nevertheless, as it is the nature of the human mind always to go forward, the Italians, to whom philosophy was forbidden and who could not in poetry go beyond perfection—the limit of all the arts—were renowned for the remarkable progress they steadily made in the sciences. After the age of Leo X, after Ariosto and Tasso, their poetry declined; but they had Galileo, Cassini, and others; and even recently many useful discoveries in physics have associated them with the intellectual improvement of the human species.

Superstition indeed tried to persecute Galileo, but several princes of Italy itself came to his help. Religious fanaticism is the enemy of the sciences and arts as well as of philosophy, but absolute monarchy or feudal aristocracy often protects the sciences and the arts while detesting independence only in philosophy.

Let us examine in each branch of human understanding, in philosophy, eloquence, and poetry, the causes of the successes and faults of Italian literature.

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