s, but which is yet at the limits of all
things separate and themselves; accompanies every birth, and strikes
agony into every transition of death.

Those other much commoner epochs in the history of letters, which may be
called derivative, have this current and obvious quality, that their
beginnings merge into the soil that bred them, also (very often) their
decay will lapse imperceptibly into newer things. They are quite
definite, but also definitely parented. We know their special stuff and
harmony, but we can point out clearly enough the elements which formed
that stuff, the tones which unite in that harmony. We can show with
dates and citations the parts meeting and blending; our difficulty is
not to determine the influences which have mixed to make the general
school, but rather to fix the beginning and the end of its effect upon
men.

In the first of these the leader, sometimes the unique example of the
school, stands out great, but particular and clear, on a background
vague or dark. He is as stupendous, yet as sharp and certain, as a
mountain facing the morning, with only sky behind. In the second the
originator, if there be one, is vague, tentative, perhaps unknown. More
often many minor men together introduce a slow and general transition.

Now the French Renaissance has this peculiar mark, that it holds quite
plainly by one side of it to the first by the other to the second of
these spirits.

It was primal and catastrophic in that it made something completely new.
A new architecture, new cities, a new poetry, almost a new language, a
new kind of government--ultimately the modern world.

It was derivative in that the shock, the revelation, which produced it,
was the return of something allied to the French blood, something rooted
in the French memory. Rome surviving or risen had made that Italy, which
was now beginning to trouble the Alps, and would surely creep in by
every channel of influence, and at last pervade all Europe. Rome, also,
in her full vigour, had once framed and ordered Gaul. The French of the
Renaissance were woken suddenly, but as they started they recognized the
face and the hand of the awakener.

On this account you will find one mind indeed at the very beginning of
the change in letters, but not a dominating mind. There is but one man
who is certainly an origin, but he is not a master. You see an unique
and single personality, distinct but without force, founding no
school--the gra