Add to this the deadening effect of licentious
excess, and--since do what he might, the worst was believed of him--a
total indifference to the moral laws recognized by others. Such men can
hardly be conceived to exist without an inordinate pride. They needed
it, if only to keep their heads above water, and were confirmed in it
by the admiration which alternated with hatred in the treatment they
received from the world. They are the most striking examples and
victims of an unbridled subjectivity.
The attacks and the satirical pictures began, as we have said, at an
early period. For all strongly marked individuality, for every kind of
distinction, a corrective was at hand in the national taste for
ridicule. And in this case the men themselves offered abundant and
terrible materials which satire had but to make use of. In the
fifteenth century, Battista Mantovano, in discoursing of the seven
monsters, includes the humanists, with any others, under the head
'Superbia.' He describes how, fancying themselves children of Apollo,
they walk along with affected solemnity and with sullen, malicious
looks, now gazing t their own shadow, now brooding over the popular
praise they hunted after, like cranes in search of food. But in the
sixteenth century the indictment was presented in full. Besides
Ariosto, their own historian Gyraldus gives evidence of this, whose
treatise, written under Leo X, was probably revised about the year
1540.
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