The Renaissance | Page 2

themselves
equal. In all ages there have been some excellent workmen, and some
excellent work done. The question he asks is always:--In whom did the
stir, the genius, the sentiment of the period find itself? where was the
receptacle of its refinement, its elevation, its taste? "The ages are all
equal," says William Blake, "but genius is always above its age."

Often it will require great nicety to disengage this virtue from the
commoner elements with which it may be found in combination. Few
artists, not Goethe or Byron even, work quite cleanly, casting off all
débris, and leaving us only what the heat of their imagination has
wholly [xi] fused and transformed. Take, for instance, the writings of
Wordsworth. The heat of his genius, entering into the substance of his
work, has crystallised a part, but only a part, of it; and in that great
mass of verse there is much which might well be forgotten. But
scattered up and down it, sometimes fusing and transforming entire
compositions, like the Stanzas on Resolution and Independence, or the
Ode on the Recollections of Childhood, sometimes, as if at random,
depositing a fine crystal here or there, in a matter it does not wholly
search through and transmute, we trace the action of his unique,
incommunicable faculty, that strange, mystical sense of a life in natural
things, and of man's life as a part of nature, drawing strength and colour
and character from local influences, from the hills and streams, and
from natural sights and sounds. Well! that is the virtue, the active
principle in Wordsworth's poetry; and then the function of the critic of
Wordsworth is to follow up that active principle, to disengage it, to
mark the degree in which it penetrates his verse.
The subjects of the following studies are taken from the history of the
Renaissance, and touch what I think the chief points in that complex,
many-sided movement. I have explained in the first of them what I
understand by the word, [xii] giving it a much wider scope than was
intended by those who originally used it to denote that revival of
classical antiquity in the fifteenth century which was only one of many
results of a general excitement and enlightening of the human mind, but
of which the great aim and achievements of what, as Christian art, is
often falsely opposed to the Renaissance, were another result. This
outbreak of the human spirit may be traced far into the middle age itself,
with its motives already clearly pronounced, the care for physical
beauty, the worship of the body, the breaking down of those limits
which the religious system of the middle age imposed on the heart and
the imagination. I have taken as an example of this movement, this
earlier Renaissance within the middle age itself, and as an expression of
its qualities, two little compositions in early French; not because they

constitute the best possible expression of them, but because they help
the unity of my series, inasmuch as the Renaissance ends also in France,
in French poetry, in a phase of which the writings of Joachim du Bellay
are in many ways the most perfect illustration. The Renaissance, in
truth, put forth in France an aftermath, a wonderful later growth, the
products of which have to the full that subtle and delicate sweetness
which belongs to a refined and comely [xiii] decadence, just as its
earliest phases have the freshness which belongs to all periods of
growth in art, the charm of ascêsis, of the austere and serious girding of
the loins in youth.
But it is in Italy, in the fifteenth century, that the interest of the
Renaissance mainly lies,--in that solemn fifteenth century which can
hardly be studied too much, not merely for its positive results in the
things of the intellect and the imagination, its concrete works of art, its
special and prominent personalities, with their profound aesthetic
charm, but for its general spirit and character, for the ethical qualities of
which it is a consummate type.
The various forms of intellectual activity which together make up the
culture of an age, move for the most part from different starting-points,
and by unconnected roads. As products of the same generation they
partake indeed of a common character, and unconsciously illustrate
each other; but of the producers themselves, each group is solitary,
gaining what advantage or disadvantage there may be in intellectual
isolation. Art and poetry, philosophy and the religious life, and that
other life of refined pleasure and action in the conspicuous places of the
world, are each of them confined to its own circle of ideas, and those
who prosecute either of them are generally little [xiv] curious of the
thoughts of others. There come, however, from time to time,