the facts are the hoardings of a parish scold. In great poetry
it is the formal music that makes the miracle. The poet expresses in
verbal form an emotion but distantly related to the words set down. But
it is related; it is not a purely artistic emotion. In poetry form and
its significance are not everything; the form and the content are not
one. Though some of Shakespeare's songs approach purity, there is, in
fact, an alloy. The form is burdened with an intellectual content, and
that content is a mood that mingles with and reposes on the emotions of
life. That is why poetry, though it has its raptures, does not transport
us to that remote aesthetic beatitude in which, freed from humanity, we
are up-stayed by musical and pure visual form.

The Classical Renaissance was a new reading of human life, and what it
added to the emotional capital of Europe was a new sense of the
excitingness of human affairs. If the men and women of the Renaissance
were moved by Art and Nature, that was because in Art and Nature they
saw their own reflections. The Classical Renaissance was not a re-birth
but a re-discovery; and that superb mess of thought and observation,
lust, rhetoric, and pedantry, that we call Renaissance literature, is
its best and most characteristic monument. What it rediscovered were the
ideas from the heights of which the ancients had gained a view of life.
This view the Renaissance borrowed. By doing so it took the sting out of
the spiritual death of the late Middle Ages. It showed men that they
could manage very well without a soul. It made materialism tolerable by
showing how much can be done with matter and intellect. That was its
great feat. It taught men how to make the best of a bad job; it proved
that by cultivating the senses and setting the intellect to brood over
them it is easy to whip up an emotion of sorts. When men had lost sight
of the spirit it covered the body with a garment of glamour.

That the Classical Renaissance was essentially an intellectual movement
is proved, I think, by the fact that it left the uneducated classes
untouched almost. They suffered from its consequences; it gave them
nothing. A wave of emotion floods the back-gardens; an intellectual
stream is kept within the irrigation channels. The Classical Renaissance
made absolute the divorce of the classes from the masses. The mediaeval
lord in his castle and the mediaeval hind in his hut were spiritual
equals who thought and felt ali