The general result of it consists in
this--that by the side of the Church which had hitherto held the
countries of the West together (though it was unable to do so much
longer) there arose a new spiritual influence which, spreading itself
abroad from Italy, became the breath of life for all the more
instructed minds in Europe. The worst that can be said of the movement
is, that it was antipopular, that through it Europe became for the
first time sharply divided into the cultivated and uncultivated
classes. The reproach will appear groundless when we reflect that even
now the fact, though clearly recognized, cannot be altered. The
separation, too, is by no means so cruel and absolute in Italy as
elsewhere. The most artistic of her poets, Tasso, is in the hands of
even the poorest.
The civilization of Greece and Rome, which, ever since the fourteenth
century, obtained so powerful a hold on Italian life, as the source and
basis of culture, as the object and ideal of existence, partly also as
an avowed reaction against preceding tendencies--this civilization had
long been exerting a partial influence on mediaeval Europe, even beyond
the boundaries of Italy. The culture of which Charlemagne was a
representative was, in face of the barbarism of the seventh and eighth
centuries, essentially a Renaissance, and could appear under no other
form.
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