The
word Renaissance, indeed, is now generally used to denote not merely
that 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 merely 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.
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