tained in itself, in well-balanced proportion, the three great elements of artistic effective ness. It will probably be granted that the period of the Renascence is the most notable age in the history of art and letters, if one regards the breadth of its activity as well as the height of its loftiest achievements. The age of Pericles in Greece, however we may compare Sophocles and Shakespeare, Phidias and Michelangelo, was much more restricted both in point of time and of extent. If our theory is correct, then, we ought to find in the Renascence testimony to the activity, in fair equilibrium, of all the faculties under discussion. The evidence of the workings of the imagination in this period is not far to seek. Historian after historian has laid stress on the breaking down at that time of the walls which had limited the intellectual vision, and on the growth of an insatiable curiosity, peering out on all sides into the unknown. The records of the century of exploration that followed the discovery of the New World by Columbus are full of the spirit of wide-eyed wonder in which the prows of England and Spain were pushed into strange seas; and the tales of marvellous adventure brought back by these splendid pirates stimulated to the highest degree the imaginations of those who stayed at home. In a more intellectual sphere, the rebirth of the study of classical antiquity operated with hardly less power on the imaginations of the learned. The spirit of humanism lay in the cultivation of imaginative sympathy with men of all races and times, in the escape through this power from the narrow limits of actual present conditions. The rise of the new astronomy opened to the receptive mind such possibilities of cosmic speculation that even now the imagination reels under the effort to grasp them. These and a hundred other features of that time are the commonplaces of the histories, and are touched on here merely to recall the obvious fact of the unparalleled multiplicity of imaginative stimuli in the Europe of the Renascence. The activity of the rational element in the life of that time is less prominent, yet by no means absent. The theological thinking of the Protestant Reformation may seem far from pure rationalism to-day, yet, when one considers the Lutheran criticism of the abuse of indulgences, the logical structure of the Calvinistic system, the wide emphasis laid by Protestantism at the outset on the right of individual judgment, one sees that this religious revolution meant, with whatever else, a profound stirring of the reasoning powers. Nor was this confined to the Reformed party. The movement produced a period of theological controversy, and the impulse to find a reasoned standing ground affected the defence as well as the attack. Some of the factors already cited for their imaginative significance were of importance for the reason also. The Copernican hypothesis was based by its author quite as much on a priori reasoning as on observation, and the whole struggle to emerge from the scholastic tradition meant a vigorous assertion of the rational judgment. Along with the broadening of imaginative sympathy from the study of the classics, came an intense, if partial, realization of their beauty of form and style, and a vigorous attempt both to emulate these and to find from the study of Aristotle the laws of literary composition. It is in the commentators of this period that one finds the source of that stream of criticism which carried down to the eighteenth century, in however perverted a form, the rationalized æsthetic by which the neoclassical writers sought both to create and to criticize. Reason, then, was abundantly active also. Nor was the sense of fact lacking to that age. In it the modern sciences of observation and experiment took their rise. With all their far-reaching imaginings and rational speculation, the men of the Renascence had a most vivid and intense sense of the actual. In contrast with the other-worldliness of the Middle Age, it was a very worldly time, when men were by no means inclined to ignore the good things of this life. Science and exploration had their material as well as their imaginative and rational sides; and the abundance of social satire in the literature of the time bears witness of the persistence of the tendency to look facts in the face, and even to take a grim satisfaction in reversing the romantic surface and displaying the seamy side. VII It is to be admitted that in any age evidences of all these tendencies could be exposed : the distinction of the Renascence is in the vigor and intensity of the activity of all of them. None is negligible; and in the high degree of the development of all is to be found one explanation of the full-blooded completeness of the art and literature of the time. Yet so long a historical digression would hardly be justifiable here, were it not for its importance as a background for the great literary figures of the period. For England, if not for the world, the Renascence culminates in Shakespeare; and, while it is useless to deny or explain away the miracle of genius, it can be shown that the supreme effectiveness of Shakespeare in the picturing of human life finds some explanation in the balance of the elements under discussion, both in his age and in his own temperament. The most remarkable characteristic of the earliest work of Shakespeare is its Realism. Reasoned adaptation of means to ends in the mastery of form it undoubtedly has, but this is along somewhat conventional lines, and he is, in the main, trying his hand at other men's devices. Imagination is present in the tentative creation of somewhat vague types of character, in the vivid conjuring up of mental images. But these are heavily impressed |
