sible.

I call it our English Renaissance because it is indeed a sort of new
birth of the spirit of man, like the great Italian Renaissance of the
fifteenth century, in its desire for a more gracious and comely way of
life, its passion for physical beauty, its exclusive attention to form,
its seeking for new subjects for poetry, new forms of art, new
intellectual and imaginative enjoyments: and I call it our romantic
movement because it is our most recent expression of beauty.

It has been described as a mere revival of Greek modes of thought, and
again as a mere revival of mediaeval feeling. Rather I would say that to
these forms of the human spirit it has added whatever of artistic value
the intricacy and complexity and experience of modern life can give:
taking from the one its clearness of vision and its sustained calm, from
the other its variety of expression and the mystery of its vision. For
what, as Goethe said, is the study of the ancients but a return to the
real world (for that is what they did); and what, said Mazzini, is
mediaevalism but individuality?

It is really from the union of Hellenism, in its breadth, its sanity of
purpose, its calm possession of beauty, with the adventive, the
intensified individualism, the passionate colour of the romantic spirit,
that springs the art of the nineteenth century in England, as from the
marriage of Faust and Helen of Troy sprang the beautiful boy Euphorion.

Such expressions as 'classical' and 'romantic' are, it is true, often apt
to become the mere catchwords of schools. We must always remember that
art has only one sentence to utter: there is for her only one high law,
the law of form or harmony--yet between the classical and romantic spirit
we may say that there lies this difference at least, that the one deals
with the type and the other with the exception. In the work produced
under the modern romantic spirit it is no longer the permanent, the
essential truths of life that are treated of; it is the momentary
situation of the one, the momentary aspect of the other that art seeks to
render. In sculpture, which is the type of one spirit, the subject
predominates over the situation; in painting, which is the type of the
other, the situation predominates over the subject.

There are two spirits, then: the Hellenic spirit and the spirit of
romance may be taken as forming the essential elements of our conscious
intellectual tradition, of our permanent standar