The Humanists
Who now were those who acted as mediators between their own age and a
venerated antiquity, and made the latter a chief element in the culture
of the former?
They were a crowd of the most miscellaneous sort, wearing one face
today and another tomorrow; but they clearly felt themselves, and it
was fully recognized by their time that they formed, a wholly new
element in society. The 'clerici vagantes' of the twelfth century may
perhaps be taken as their forerun- ners--the same unstable existence,
the same free and more than free views of life, and the germs at all
events of the same pagan tendencies in their poetry. But now, as
competitor with the whole culture of the Middle Ages, which was
essentially clerical and was fostered by the Church, there appeared a
new civilization, founding itself on that which lay on the other side
of the Middle Ages. Its active representatives became influential
because they knew what the ancients knew, because they tried to write
as the ancients wrote, because they began to think, and soon to feel,
as the ancients thought and felt. The tradition to which they devoted
themselves passed at a thousand points into genuine reproduction.
Some modern writers deplore the fact that the germs of a far more
independent and essentially national culture, such as appeared in
Florence about the year 1300, were afterwards so completely swamped by
the humanists.
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