bles, had a wide field
for their ambition among the necessarily dissolved civic institutions;
and their easy success contributed to confirm the general tendency of
the day to say with Commines, "Qui a le succes a l'honneur," and to
confound these two words and ideas. Nor was this yet all: the men of the
Renaissance discovered the antique world, and in their wild, blind
enthusiasm, in their ardent, insatiable thirst for its literature,
swallowed it eagerly, dregs and all, till they were drunk and poisoned.

These are the main causes of the immorality of the Renaissance: first,
the general disbelief in all accepted doctrines, due to the falseness
and unnaturalness of those hitherto prevalent; secondly, the success of
unscrupulous talent in a condition of political disorder; thirdly, the
wholesale and unjudging enthusiasm for all that remained of Antiquity,
good or bad. These three great causes, united in a general intellectual
ebullition, are the explanation of the worst feature of the Renaissance:
not the wickedness of numberless single individuals, but the universal
toleration of it by the people at large. Men like Sigismondo Malatesta,
Sixtus IV., Alexander VI., and Caesar Borgia might be passed over as
exceptions, as monstrous aberrations which cannot affect our judgment of
their time and nation; but the general indifference towards their vices
shown by their contemporaries and countrymen is a conclusive and
terrible proof of the moral chaos of the Renaissance. It is just the
presence of so much instinctive simplicity and virtue, of childlike
devotion to great objects, of patriarchal simplicity of manners, of all
that is loveable in the books of men like Vespasiano da Bisticci and
Leon Battista Albert; of so much that seems like the realization of the
idyllic home and merchant life of Schiller's "Song of the Bell," by the
side of all the hideous lawlessness and vice of the despots and
humanists; that makes the Renaissance so drearily painful a spectacle.
The presence of the good does not console us for that of the evil,
because it neither mitigates nor even shrinks from it; we merely lose
our pleasure in the good nature and simplicity of AEneas Sylvius when we
see his cool admiration for a man of fraud and violence like Sforza; we
begin to mistrust the purity and integrity of the upright Guarino da
Verona when we hear his lenient judgment of the infamous Beccadelli; we
require of the virtuous that they should not only