IV

LEON BATTISTA ALBERTI1

THIS present age of literary dilettanteism, of elegant scribbling, has chosen to represent the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as the most glorious epoch of the Italian people, as the Renaissance of all grandeur and all beauty. We men and women of today admire civilization through guide-books and picture-postcards; powerless to create new monuments, we boast that we love the monuments of old; incapable of heroic action, we sit by the fire and read of the heroes of Homer and Villani. We prefer the polished elegance of church or palace to the bristling stone of the fortress-and we exalt the Quattrocento. Our own literary epoch has magnified a former literary epoch; and the legend of the "Dark Ages" still endures.

The fifteenth century was a time of rebirth, but it was a time of death as well; and we have failed to ask whether the renewal of certain elements of life brought full compensation for the loss of the elements that disappeared. The very

'Written in 1904, for the fifth centenary of Alberti's birth.

gentleness of our sedentary culture has led us to love and admire the extraordinary century that witnessed our undoing and initiated our deepest decadence. decadence. The Quattrocento marks the transition from the active, original, rough, strong civilization of the Middle Ages to the verbal, imitative, insincere, pacific civilization of the succeeding centuries. In the Quattrocento the man of action yields to the man of words; the book takes the place of the sword; the fortress becomes a villa garden; skeptical dilettanteism casts out faith. Great words win honor such as hitherto had been accorded to great deeds alone. Achievement ended, men tell of past achievement. Art and literature, which had served for the expression of spiritual energy, become clever means of acquiring fame and power.

The man who knew little of letters but was strong in body and austere in spirit, the conqueror of kingdoms, the governor of cities, gives way to the insinuating humanist; and the humanist, grown lean in the study of Cicero, admiring strenuous deeds in safe seclusion, becomes the historian of the past and the prophet of the future, but has neither the wit nor the power to act in the present. To a civilization of muscles, stone, and iron, there succeeds a civilization of nerves, pens, and papers. There are poets a-plenty for the writing of pæans, but there are no heroes for

them to celebrate. As a philosopher might put it, the dominion of the external gives place to the dominion of the internal.

The period we are wont to call the Renaissance appears, then, to be in certain respects a period of weakening and decline. And if Italy would return to a life more intense and more energetic than that which now she leads amid verbal pyrotechnics and the academic discourses of Parliament, she must resolutely expel the dangerous maladies which the Renaissance introduced into her blood, must return to deeper and more bitter springs, must forget the lust of ornament and the delights of rhetoric, must set herself to action rather than to speech, to new achievement rather than to admiration.

Such thoughts as these might well be suggested by the centenary of Leon Battista Alberti if such occasions, instead of serving merely for the display of erudition and municipal vanity, really led us to seek the essential message and the continuing inspiration of the great men they celebrate.

For Alberti signifies the passage from the heroic, active life of the Middle Ages to the graceful, wordy epoch that ensued, and illustrates, even more clearly than Petrarch or Leonardo, that softening of the conceptions of life which was to lead at last to the spiritual degeneration of the seventeenth century. He is indeed, to bor

row Emerson's term, the "representative man" of the Quattrocentro, of an age sad and wondrous in its ambiguity and its versatility. His life is truly a mirror of the time.

Consider his ancestry. He came of that glorious Alberti family which has given Florence so many successful merchants, energetic statesmen, and turbulent partisans. Shortly before the time of his birth the family had been banished, and Leon Battista was born in exile in Genoa, where his kinsmen continued their mercantile pursuits and plotted a return to Florence. He might have become a merchant-politician like his ancestors, might have won riches and governed men. preferred, on the contrary, to devote himself to letters. Study attracted him. He wished to know Greek and Latin, to read Plato and Virgil; he had no desire to export cloths to the East, or to measure his strength with the leader of a hostile faction.

He

In his childhood his father sought to train his body, to make him strong and handsome; and they tell us, indeed, that he could tame wild horses, and that he used to climb pathless mountains. But the lure of letters called him to Bologna and the law; and he turned to study with such ardor that he lost his health and became a lean and trembling scholar, suffering from nervous ills and absentmindedness.

Even so the whole race was losing its vigor amid studies and pleasures, and the time of its ignoble paralysis was near at hand.

But study consoled Alberti for all that he had lost; letters and philosophy led him to scorn all else. Perilous indeed is contact with the ancients! The men of the Quattrocento, like barbarians come to a marvelous city, were overwhelmed with reverence for the divine Latin works. They had no hope of reaching higher excellence; they sought a similar perfection; they could but imitate. Their greatest desire was that scholars should think their writings a recovered treasure. So when Alberti, in spare hours at Bologna, wrote a comedy, the Philodoxeos, in which he allegorized his love of learning, he himself spread the rumor that it was a new-found piece by an ancient writer of comedies named Lepidus-and had the satisfaction of deceiving his literary friends.

There no longer existed that indifference to glory which had marked the obscure artisans of the Middle Ages, the nameless builders and sculptors of the great cathedrals; nor had there yet appeared the complacent modern genius, who, sure of himself and of the novelty of his work, sends it forth under his own name. The men of the Quattrocento sought shelter under