going to end her journey by plunging down a precipice.
Perhaps it would have been as well; but it was not to be. The headlong
rush was to be checked. The descent was to be eased by a strange detour,
by a fantastic adventure, a revival that was no re-birth, a Medea's
cauldron rather, an extravagant disease full of lust and laughter; the
life of the old world was to be prolonged by four hundred years or so,
by the galvanising power of the Classical Renaissance.

III

THE CLASSICAL RENAISSANCE AND ITS DISEASES

The Classical Renaissance is nothing more than a big kink in the long
slope; but it is a very big one. It is an intellectual event.
Emotionally the consumption that was wasting Europe continued to run its
course; the Renaissance was a mere fever-flash. To literature, however,
its importance is immense: for literature can make itself independent of
spiritual health, and is as much concerned with ideas as with emotions.
Literature can subsist in dignity on ideas. Finlay's history of the
Byzantine Empire provokes no emotion worth talking about, yet I would
give Mr. Finlay a place amongst men of letters, and I would do as much
for Hobbes, Mommsen, Sainte-Beuve, Samuel Johnson, and Aristotle. Great
thinking without great feeling will make great literature. It is not for
their emotional qualities that we value many of our most valued books.
And when it is for an emotional quality, to what extent is that emotion
aesthetic? I know how little the intellectual and factual content of
great poetry has to do with its significance. The actual meaning of the
words in Shakespeare's songs, the purest poetry in English, is generally
either trivial or trite. They are nursery-rhymes or drawing-room
ditties;--

"Come away, come away, death,
And in sad cypress let me be laid;
Fly away, fly away, breath;
I am slain by a fair cruel maid."

Could anything be more commonplace?

"Hark, hark!
Bow, wow,
The watch-dogs bark;
Bow, wow,
Hark, hark! I hear
The strain of strutting chanticleer
Cry, Cock-a-diddle-dow!"

What could be more nonsensical? In the verse of our second poet,
Milton--so great that before his name the word "second" rings false as
the giggle of fatuity--the ideas are frequently shallow and the facts
generally false. In Dante, if the ideas are sometimes profound and the
emotions awful, they are also, as a rule, repugnant to our better
feelings: