hese advantages
developed, the moral vitality of the Italians was rapidly decreasing,
and a horrible moral gangrene beginning to spread: liberty was
extinguished; public good faith seemed to be dying out; even private
morality flickered ominously; every free State became subject to a
despot, always unscrupulous and often infamous; warfare became a mere
pretext for the rapine and extortions of mercenaries; diplomacy grew to
be a mere swindle; the humanists inoculated literature with the
filthiest refuse cast up by antiquity; nay, even civic and family ties
were loosened; assassinations and fratricides began to abound, and all
law, human and divine, to be set at defiance.

The nations who came into contact with the Italians opened their eyes
with astonishment, with mingled admiration and terror; and we, people of
the nineteenth century, are filled with the same feeling, only much
stronger and more defined, as we watch the strange ebullition of the
Renaissance, seething with good and evil, as we contemplate the
enigmatic picture drawn by the puzzled historian, the picture of a
people moving on towards civilization and towards chaos. Our first
feeling is perplexity; our second feeling, anger; we do not at first
know whether we ought to believe in such an anomaly; when once we do
believe in it, we are indignant at its existence. We accuse these
Italians of the Renaissance of having wilfully and shamefully perverted
their own powers, of having wantonly corrupted their own civilization,
of having cynically destroyed their own national existence, of having
boldly called down the vengeance of Heaven; we lament and we accuse,
naturally enough, but perhaps not justly.

Let us ask ourselves what the Renaissance really was, and what was its
use; how it was produced, and how it necessarily ended. Let us try to
understand its inherent nature, and the nature of what surrounded it,
which, taken together, constitute its inevitable fate; let us seek the
explanation of that strange, anomalous civilization, of that life in
death, and death in life. The Renaissance, inasmuch as it is something
which we can define, and not a mere vague name for a certain epoch, is
not a period, but a condition; and if we apply the word to any period in
particular, it is because in it that condition was peculiarly marked.

The Renaissance may be defined as being that phase in mediaeval history
in which the double influence, feudal and ecclesiastic, which had