CHAPTER XIV

SOME OLD SCHOLARS

HE study door is rarely closed. For the most part, it stands open to those vague and wandering sounds which rather serve to convey a sense of companionship than to interrupt thought and dissipate interest. The deepest studies sometimes miss their best results because they are too solitary. The scholar must keep out of the bustle of active life; but if he cross the line of sympathy, if he lose touch with his day and his fellows, there is an end of his usefulness. Nothing interprets a great book or a great picture like human life; it is the only commentary on the growth of art which is worth studying, for in it alone are to be found the secrets and the meaning of art. The scholar must always be

in the best sense a man of the world: one by whom the faces and souls of men are daily read with the insight of sympathy; one to whom the great movement of humanity is the supreme fact to be felt, to be studied, to be interpreted. It is this vital relation to his own age which distinguishes the scholar from the pedantthe man to whom the heart of knowledge reveals itself from the man whose fellowship with the past is always only "dust to dust, ashes to ashes."

It was just this vitality, this living relation to living things, which separated the first great modern scholar from the generations of forgotten Dry-as-Dusts who preceded him. Petrarch really escaped from a sepulchre when he stepped out of the cloister of medievalism, with its crucifix, its pictures of unhealthy saints, its cords of self-flagellation, and found the heavens clear, beautiful, and well worth living under, and the world full of good things which one might desire and yet not be given over to evil. He ventured to look at life for himself, and he found it full of wonderful power and dignity. He opened

his Virgil, brushed aside the cobwebs which monkish brains had spun over the beautiful lines, and met the old poet as one man meets another; and, lo! there rose before him a new, untrodden, and wholly human world, free from priestcraft and pedantry, near to nature, and unspeakably alluring and satisfying. Digging down through a vast overgrowth of superstition and pedantry, Petrarch found the real soil of life once more, and found that antiquity had its roots there quite as much as mediævalism; that the Greeks and Romans were flesh and blood quite as truly as the image-worshipping Italians. Then came the inevitable thought that these men were not outcasts from the grace and care of heaven, "dead and damned heathen," whose civilisation had been a mere worthless husk to protect the later Christian society, but that they belonged in the divinely appointed order of history, had lived their lives and done their work and gone to their rest as the later generations were doing. The moment Petrarch understood these very simple but then very radical truths his whole attitude toward the

past was changed; it was no longer a forbidden country, but a fresh, untrodden world, rich in all manner of noble activities and experiences, full of character, significance, divinity. There is no need to recall the mighty stirrings of soul that followed; in Humanism the mind had come into fresh contact with life and received a new and overmastering impulse. 'The new learning ran like fire over Italy; old men forsook their vices for the charms of scholarship, young men exchanged their pleasures for the garb and habits of the student; the air was charged with the electricity of new thought, and all minds turned to the future with a prophetic sense of the great new age on whose threshold they stood.

It was inevitable that in the course of time Humanism itself should become pedantic and formal, should lose its hold. upon the turbulent and restless life about it, and should finally give place to a later and still more vital scholarship. Nothing pauses in the sublime evolution of history; there is no place of rest in that pilgrimage which is an eternal truth seeking. It

would be interesting to trace the inner history of the learning which Petrarch and Boccaccio and the men of the great Italian Revival carried through Europe, and to meet here and there some large-minded, noble-hearted scholar, standing book in hand, but always with the windows of his chamber open to the fields and woods, always with the doors of his life open to human need and fellowship. For true scholarship never dies; the fire sometimes passes from one to another in the hollow of a reed, as in the earliest time, but it never goes out. I confess that I can never read quite unmoved the story of the Brethren of the Common Life, those humble-minded, patient teachers and thinkers whose devotion and fire of soul for a century and a half made the choice treasures of Italian palaces and convents and universities a common possession along the low-lying shores of the Netherlands. The asceticism of this noble brotherhood was no morbid and divisive fanaticism; it was a denial of themselves that they might have the more to give. The visions

which touched at times the bare walls of