THE GREAT EVENTS

(FROM DANTE TO GUTENBERG: THE EARLIER RENAISSANCE)

CHARLES F. HORNE

Fifty years ago the term "renaissance" had a very definite meaning to
scholars as representing an exact period toward the close of the
fourteenth century when the world suddenly reawoke to the beauty of the
arts of Greece and Rome, to the charm of their gayer life, the splendor
of their intellect. We know now that there was no such sudden
reawakening, that Teutonic Europe toiled slowly upward through long
centuries, and that men learned only gradually to appreciate the finer
side of existence, to study the universe for themselves, and look with
their own eyes upon the life around them and the life beyond.

Thus the word "renaissance" has grown to cover a vaguer period, and
there has been a constant tendency to push the date of its beginning
ever backward, as we detect more and more the dimly dawning light amid
the darkness of earlier ages. Of late, writers have fallen into the way
of calling Dante the "morning star of the Renaissance"; and the period
of the great poet's work, the first decade of the fourteenth century,
has certainly the advantage of being characterized by three or four
peculiarly striking events which serve to typify the tendencies of the
coming age.

In 1301 Dante was driven out of Florence, his native city-republic, by a
political strife. In this year, as he himself phrases it, he descended
into hell; that is, he began those weary wanderings in exile which ended
only with his life, and which stirred in him the deeps that found
expression in his mighty poem, the _Divina Commedia_.[1] Throughout his
masterpiece he speaks with eager respect of the old Roman writers, and
of such Greeks as he knew--so we have admiration of the ancient
intellect. He also speaks bitterly of certain popes, as well as of other
more earthly tyrants--so we have the dawnings of democracy and of
religious revolt, of government by one's self and thought for one's
self, instead of submission to the guidance of others.

More important even than these in its immediate results, Dante, while he
began his poem in Latin, the learned language of the time, soon
transposed and completed it in Italian, the corrupted Latin of his
commoner contemporaries, the tongue of his daily life. That is, he wrote
not for scholars like himself, but for a wider circle of more worldly
friends. It is the first great work in any modern s