and sorted and
classified by the Renaissance; and now that the national edifice had
been dismantled and dilapidated, and the national activity was
languishing, it all lay in confusion, awaiting only the hand of those
who would carry it away and use it once more. To Italy therefore
Englishmen of thought and fancy were dragged by an impulse of adventure
and greed as irresistible as that which dragged to Antwerp and the Hanse
ports, to India and America, the seekers for gold and for soil. To Italy
they flocked and through Italy they rambled, prying greedily into each
cranny and mound of the half-broken civilization, upturning with avid
curiosity all the rubbish and filth; seeking with aching eyes and
itching fingers for the precious fragments of intellectual splendour;
lingering with fascinated glance over the broken remnants and deep,
mysterious gulfs of a crumbling and devastated civilization. And then,
impatient of their intoxicating and tantalizing search, suddenly grown
desperate, they clutched and stored away everything, and returned home
tattered, soiled, bedecked with gold and with tinsel, laden with an
immense uncouth burden of jewels, and broken wealth, and refuse and
ordure, with pseudo-antique philosophy, with half-mediaeval Dantesque and
Petrarchesque poetry, with Renaissance science, with humanistic pedantry
and obscenity, with euphuistic conceits and casuistic quibble, with art,
politics, metaphysics--civilization embedded in all manner of rubbish
and abomination, soiled with all manner of ominous stains. All this did
they carry home and throw helter-skelter into the new-kindled fire of
English intellectual life, mingling with it many a humble-seeming
Northern alloy; cleaning and compounding, casting into shapes, mediaeval
and English, this strange Corinthian brass made of all these
heterogeneous remnants, classical, Italian, Saxon, and Christian. A
strange Corinthian brass indeed; and as various in tint, in weight, and
in tone, in manifold varieties of mixture, as were the moulds into which
it was cast: the white and delicate silver settling down in the gracious
poetic moulds of Sidney and Spenser; the glittering gold, which can buy
and increase, in the splendid, heavy mould of Bacon's prose; and the
copper, the iron, the silver and gold in wondrous mixture, with wondrous
iridescences of colour and wondrous scale of tone, all poured into the
manifold moulds, fantastic and beautiful and grand, of Shakespeare.