The Long Century:
The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance
By John Hale
Atheneum, 648 pages, $35.90
One could say that history is the future of literature. Less gnomically, one might suggest that what has happened to historians as they have moved into the academy and become professionalized is a further extension of the process already under way in which all serious writing flees the marketplace, abandons the general reader and retires to fortified bastions in English and Creative Writing departments.
On the other hand, every now and again books like John Hale’s “The Long Century: The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance” appear-books that rely on the seemingly outmoded assumption that the world is what it was and that there are people out there in that world who read history for . . . fun! To be amused and entertained!
In a small-beans way, the assumption is no doubt valid. Robert Frost used to keep a copy of Gibbon beside his bed and turn a few pages every night as he waited for sleep’s embrace. And, strangely enough, even the newest technologies reaffirm this possibility of a general audience for history.
Cable television, which has brought us a goodly number of shopping channels and old movies, also offers on university-based stations all over the country programs like Eugen Weber’s elegant lectures on The Western Tradition and, on The Learning Channel, James Burke’s witty “Connections” and “Connections2,” essays in the history of science and technology made palatable by a winning personality and a series of lively illustrations and interesting scenic backgrounds. Such programs are probably an intermediary step toward the CD-ROM that combines text, illustration, music and heaven knows what else, invites reader interaction and may turn Everyman’s home into an intellectual theme park.
But Hale, emeritus professor of Italian and Italian literature at London University and former chairman of the Trustees of the National Gallery, is defiantly old fashioned-so much so as to include his thanks to a typist for transcribing his handwritten manuscript. And there are other backward-looking characteristics in evidence, including a relaxed familiarity with a wide range of art and literature, as well as political and economic history.
The arrangement of the volume is thematic, as Hale explores the words of his title. He discusses the idea of Europe and what it means to be European-the extent to which an identity was informed by religion or by separate language or nationality. He talks about the Renaissance and what that was. And he discusses civilization and asks what the term actually refers to (“Is ice hockey a part of civilization?”).And Hale’s topics provide a framework in which he can point to apt allusion and odd curiosities and tell us amusing stories.
For example, Hale begins his section on civilization by saying, “In March 1772 Boswell called on Dr. Johnson as he was preparing the fourth edition of his great Dictionary. Fertile as usual with bright, up-to-date ideas, Boswell suggested the inclusion of the word `civilization’. This, he thought, would be a useful general term to oppose `barbarity’ because `civility’ was more socially narrow. The lexicographer would have none of it: `He would not admit civilization, but only civility.’ To civilize, in the sense of extending the values of civility to those not irredeemably barbarous, was acceptable as a verb, but the process had not gone so far that civilization could be used of society as a whole. Nowhere else did Johnson show himself more directly the heir of the social and intellectual values of the Renaissance.”
Hale leads us on a graceful and elegant tour of “the long century,” the years between 1450 and 1620, and there isn’t a page without some shrewd observation or witty remark. As he discusses the general notion of patriotism and invites us to imagine what it was like back in those times, he reminds us, for instance, that “The great majority of men and women seldom travelled more than fifteen miles from their homes and lived in an isolation that inhibited any sentiment that can even be called patriotic save in the narrowest and most occasional of terms.”
Unlike Jacob Burckhardt, whose “Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy,” first published in 1860, was a pioneering work, Hale offers us a more genial kind of sightseeing tour of the Renaissance, replete with illustrations of paintings, woodcuts and old maps. The book it most closely reminds me of is Theodore Zeldin’s lovely, languid “France 1848-1945” of some 20 years ago.
As Hale observes of the Renaissance label, “So much glamour has accrued to the term, with its implication that mankind can heave itself free from the dragging weight of centuries and make a fresh, born again, start, and so great is its convenience in directing attention to the dovetail connecting one phase of a particular country’s experience to the next, that to reject it is artificial. As long, that is, as it is accepted that its use is also artificial; it implies that the achievement of a few men of genius can represent the circumstances of the many: it would be hazardous to put the formative agents of cultural change, as contributors or patrons, at more than a thousandth part of the population of Europe.”
Indeed, what seems most interesting about Hale’s approach is his awareness of its limitations and the way he manages to convey something of the beastliness that everywhere surrounds the enclaves of cultural progress he celebrates. It wasn’t all Michelangelo, Montaigne, Rubens and Shakespeare. He lets us know, for instance, of the initiation rites of the Hanseatic merchant guilds of Bergen in which journeyman aspirants were “hoisted feet first up a chimney until nearly asphyxiated. Next they were thrown three times from a boat far out in the harbour and pushed back until the last moment each time they tried to climb back. Last, naked in the guildhall, they were whipped until bloody and then had to sing a comic song to round off the entertainment.”
The historian’s job, it was once assumed, is to make the past come alive for willing, informed and interested readers. Scribbling away in longhand, James Hale imagined not only the decorum of a printed text with its illustrations but a world in which an audience for such productions can still be found. If he is wrong, I’m not sure I want to know.
