The Renaissance | Page 3

eras of
more favourable conditions, in which the thoughts of men draw nearer
together than is their wont, and the many interests of the intellectual
world combine in one complete type of general culture. The fifteenth
century in Italy is one of these happier eras, and what is sometimes said
of the age of Pericles is true of that of Lorenzo:--it is an age productive
in personalities, many-sided, centralised, complete. Here, artists and
philosophers and those whom the action of the world has elevated and

made keen, do not live in isolation, but breathe a common air, and
catch light and heat from each other's thoughts. There is a spirit of
general elevation and enlightenment in which all alike communicate.
The unity of this spirit gives unity to all the various products of the
Renaissance; and it is to this intimate alliance with the mind, this
participation in the best thoughts which that age produced, that the art
of Italy in the fifteenth century owes much of its grave dignity and
influence.
I have added an essay on Winckelmann, as not incongruous with the
studies which precede it, because Winckelmann, coming in the
eighteenth century, really belongs in spirit to an earlier age. By his
enthusiasm for the things of the intellect [xv] and the imagination for
their own sake, by his Hellenism, his life-long struggle to attain the
Greek spirit, he is in sympathy with the humanists of a previous
century. He is the last fruit of the Renaissance, and explains in a
striking way its motive and tendencies.
1873.

TWO EARLY FRENCH STORIES
Yet shall ye be as the wings of a dove.
[1] THE history of the Renaissance ends in France, and carries us away
from Italy to the beautiful cities of the country of the Loire. But it was
in France also, in a very important sense, that the Renaissance had
begun. French writers, who are fond of connecting the creations of
Italian genius with a French origin, who tell us how Saint Francis of
Assisi took not his name only, but all those notions of chivalry and
romantic love which so deeply penetrated his thoughts, from a French
source, how Boccaccio borrowed the outlines of his stories from the old
French fabliaux, and how Dante himself expressly connects the origin
of the art of miniature-painting with the city of Paris, have often dwelt
on this notion of a Renaissance in the end of the twelfth and the
beginning of the thirteenth century, a Renaissance within the limits of

the middle age itself--a brilliant, but in part abortive effort to do for
human life and the human mind what was afterwards done in the
fifteenth. The word Renaissance, indeed, is now generally used to
denote not [2] merely the revival of classical antiquity which took place
in the fifteenth century, and to which the word was first applied, but a
whole complex movement, of which that revival of classical antiquity
was but one element or symptom. For us the Renaissance is the name
of a many-sided but yet united movement, in which the love of the
things of the intellect and the imagination for their own sake, the desire
for a more liberal and comely way of conceiving life, make themselves
felt, urging those who experience this desire to search out first one and
then another means of intellectual or imaginative enjoyment, and
directing them not only to the discovery of old and forgotten sources of
this enjoyment, but to the divination of fresh sources thereof--new
experiences, new subjects of poetry, new forms of art. Of such feeling
there was a great outbreak in the end of the twelfth and the beginning
of the following century. Here and there, under rare and happy
conditions, in Pointed architecture, in the doctrines of romantic love, in
the poetry of Provence, the rude strength of the middle age turns to
sweetness; and the taste for sweetness generated there becomes the
seed of the classical revival in it, prompting it constantly to seek after
the springs of perfect sweetness in the Hellenic world. And coming
after a long period in which this instinct had been crushed, that true
"dark age," in which so many sources of intellectual and imaginative
enjoyment had [3] actually disappeared, this outbreak is rightly called a
Renaissance, a revival.
Theories which bring into connexion with each other modes of thought
and feeling, periods of taste, forms of art and poetry, which the
narrowness of men's minds constantly tends to oppose to each other,
have a great stimulus for the intellect, and are almost always worth
understanding. It is so with this theory of a Renaissance within the
middle age, which seeks to establish a continuity between the most
characteristic work of that period, the sculpture of Chartres,