Deflating Humanism

In his English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, CS Lewis makes two deflationary comments about the effects of Renaissance humanism.

First, “The ‘barbarous’ books [of medieval Latin] have survived in the only sense that really matters: they are used as their authors meant them to be used. It would be hard to think of a single text in humanists’ Latin except the Utopia, of which we can say the same. Petrarch’s Latin poetry, Politian, Buchanan, even sweet Sannazarus, even Erasmus himself, are hardly ever opened except for an historical purpose. We read the humanists, in fact, only to learn about humanism; we read the ‘barbarous’ authors in order to be instructed or delighted about any theme they choose to handle” (20).

Second, he criticizes the desire of the Humanists to imitate the gravity and seriousness of classical literature: “This desire to be very ‘adult,’ as we now say, had some unfortunate consequences. The qualities which the humanists admired are, of course, to be found in Latin literature, even if less exclusively and continuously than they supposed. But few qualities are less suitable for imitation. Elevation and gravity of language are admirable, or even tolerable, only when they grow from elevation and gravity of thought. To imitate them directly is to manufacture a symptom. The trouble is not that such manufacture is impossible. It is only too possible: even now any clever boy can be taught to write Ciceronian prose. The gestures and accents of magnanimity, laboriously reproduced by little men, clever, meticulous, primed with the gradus or the phrase book, nervously avoiding what is ‘low,’ make an ugly spectacle. That was how the humanists came to create a new literary quality – vulgarity. It is hard to point to any medieval work that is vulgar. When medieval literature is bad, it is bad by honest, downright incompetence: dull, prolix, or incoherent. But the varnish and stucco of some neo-Latin work, the badness which no man could incur by sheer defect of talent but only by ‘endless labor to be wrong’ is a new thing. Vida’s Christiad is the supreme example. It polishes up the lowness of the gospel story as Virgil, in Scalinger’s opinion, polished up the lowness of Homer. . . .The influence of such poetry was deadly” (24).