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It is a fact of capital importance in the development of human genius that the great revolution in Christendom against Christianity, a revolution that began with the Renaissance and is not yet completed, should have found angels to herald it, no less than that other revolution did which began at Bethlehem; and that among these new angels there should have been one so winsome, pure, and rapturous as Shelley.
I resolved to quit it, to leave my books, to abjure Renaissance morals, and to go forth with Carlotta into the wilderness and the sunshine, there to fulfil whatever destiny the high gods should decree. Again I sit on the housetop in Mogador on the Morocco coast, where a month ago I began to write these latter pages. Time has passed quickly since that day.
And there is small place for fiction, and none at all for the novel and the short story as we know them, in what has been preserved of classic literature. The early Renaissance, with its Sidney for spokesman, attacked the rising Elizabethan drama because it was unclassical.
Why, then, are the two succeeding centuries called the period of the new birth, the Renaissance, as if there was a sudden reawakening after a long sleep, as if Europe first began in the fourteenth century to turn to books and art? The word renaissance was originally used by writers who had very little appreciation of the achievements of the thirteenth century.
Then the Renaissance style had to lose itself in the baroque struggles of the final period of the madrigal drama struggles of artistic impulse against an impossible style of structure and the uncultivated taste of the auditors. Then and then only was the time for revolt and the revolt came.
It would be a fine thing to release the mistreated, velvety wood from its grotesqueries, and give it a renaissance in graceful cabinets, small tables, footstools, and the many small things that could be so easily made from huge unwieldy wardrobes and beds and bureaux. The workmen of to-day have their eyes opened.
Interior decoration necessarily followed suit; instead of the curled endive scrolls enclosing the irregular panel, and the superabundant foliage in ornament, we have rectangular panels formed by simpler mouldings, with broken corners, having a patera or rosette in each, and between the upright panels there is a pilaster of refined Renaissance design.
The guesses of the ancients stimulated the exertions of the moderns. The whole world's history seemed once more to be one. The great achievements of the Renaissance were the discovery of the world and the discovery of man. Under these two formulas may be classified all the phenomena which properly belong to this period.
And then Tavannes passed out of the blinding sunshine, and out of earshot of their babble, and had plain in his sight across the quadrangle, the new facade, Italian, graceful, of the Renaissance; which rose in smiling contrast with the three dark Gothic sides that now, the central tower removed, frowned unimpeded at one another. But what was this which lay along the foot of the new Italian wall?
It seems to be an accident that happened once or twice in the Past, among the Greeks, at the Renaissance, in Spain, in Holland, which no amount of art-schools and art-publications can coax back. To found Academies and R.A.-ships is to spur a dead horse. Look at the Greek sculptures, look at the Italian pictures, and ask yourself what we have to put beside them after all our endless exhibitions!
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