Chapter I

In imagination we dramatise the Renaissance as a sweeping revolution. Whether humanists or modernists, we look upon it as a beginning, or a resumption, at all events as the turning-point from which we are the continuators in a straight line. Historians of philosophy, of letters, of politics, of science all concur. More impressively still the men of the Renaissance themselves were quite conscious of the change--Bessarion, Aldus, Erasmus, da Vinci, Galileo, Bruno, to take names at random. The shift of curiosity from the divine to the secular, and the responsive shift of discipline from scholasticism to humanism opened out new vistas to the voyaging mind. It would be hard to exaggerate the almost theatric reversals which the times witnessed and welcomed.

Sweeping as it was, however, the revolution of the Renaissance was less radical than that of the second half of the nineteenth century. In contrast to the latter the changes wrought by the Renaissance were on the level of explicit ideas. The essential stuff of thought was unchanged. New ideas were astir, but the elements of which they were built were the old elements. Theology gave way to humanism; God as the centre gave way to man as the centre. But after all, God had been conceived as a father and man as a child of God, and, God or man, their psychology was the same. The very literature which had laid the premisses of mediæval thought--the Bible--permeated the consciousness of the humanistic period yet more deeply.

The shift of discipline from sacred to profane letters, as a consequence, made no profound break in the consciousness itself. The major impulses of the two periods blended easily and naturally. The religious impulse of the Middle Ages lent itself triumphantly to literary expression; there was the _Divine Comedy_. The literary impulse of the Renaissance lent itself no less triumphantly to religious themes; there was _Paradise Lost_. Natural science, indeed, began its modern course under the impulse of the Renaissance. Still, from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, while the common discipline of the West was humanistic, natural science did not profoundly alter the minds of men. It was an incident, a special play of curiosity and thought on the part of men whose minds were formed and informed in the medium of humane letters. Even Doctor Johnson had his chemical apparatus.

Not until the latter half of the nineteenth century did the common discipline of letters begin to give way. Up to that time, therefore, there had been a basic continuity in the cultivated consciousness of the West, not only from the Middle Ages but from high antiquity itself. For the Renaissance was avowedly a resumption of the broken threads of ancient thought. And its humanism, however loosely it spliced the break, was evidence that here too the essential elements of its reason were the same. What so intoxicated the Renaissance mind was the very spontaneity of its grasp of ancient ideas. And this affinity has been the mark of humanism ever since.

Now continuity is not necessarily a virtue. Nothing, alas, is so persistent as error and evil. One aspect of the shift to modernism, however, seems to me itself an evil, promising persistence--a rupture at the basis of reason. Modernism, indeed, also had its dramatic confrontations, its moments of intense self-consciousness. New conceptions came into tragic conflict with old, yielding many a Robert Elsmere, and many a family cleavage like that between the elder and the younger Gosse. Such conflicts are disconcerting and painful, and for a generation or two terribly impressive. It is not to such overt changes, however, that I refer. They belong to the normal life of the mind. It is the very function of intellect to incur and mediate them. One is inclined to bid the intellect be a man and face the frank hazards of the life of reason. I refer rather to a change, not in ideas, but prior to ideas, among the ultimate premisses of thought, in the discipline by which the powers of the mind and the fortunes of ideas are themselves in a large measure disposed. And this change, it seems to me, has proved a scotching of the goose that lays the golden egg.