many
centuries--and what is romance but humanity?

Yet in the womb of the Revolution itself, and in the storm and terror of
that wild time, tendencies were hidden away that the artistic Renaissance
bent to her own service when the time came--a scientific tendency first,
which has borne in our own day a brood of somewhat noisy Titans, yet in
the sphere of poetry has not been unproductive of good. I do not mean
merely in its adding to enthusiasm that intellectual basis which is its
strength, or that more obvious influence about which Wordsworth was
thinking when he said very nobly that poetry was merely the impassioned
expression in the face of science, and that when science would put on a
form of flesh and blood the poet would lend his divine spirit to aid the
transfiguration. Nor do I dwell much on the great cosmical emotion and
deep pantheism of science to which Shelley has given its first and
Swinburne its latest glory of song, but rather on its influence on the
artistic spirit in preserving that close observation and the sense of
limitation as well as of clearness of vision which are the
characteristics of the real artist.

The great and golden rule of art as well as of life, wrote William Blake,
is that the more distinct, sharp and defined the boundary line, the more
perfect is the work of art; and the less keen and sharp the greater is
the evidence of weak imitation, plagiarism and bungling. 'Great
inventors in all ages knew this--Michael Angelo and Albert Durer are
known by this and by this alone'; and another time he wrote, with all the
simple directness of nineteenth-century prose, 'to generalise is to be an
idiot.'

And this love of definite conception, this clearness of vision, this
artistic sense of limit, is the characteristic of all great work and
poetry; of the vision of Homer as of the vision of Dante, of Keats and
William Morris as of Chaucer and Theocritus. It lies at the base of all
noble, realistic and romantic work as opposed to colourless and empty
abstractions of our own eighteenth-century poets and of the classical
dramatists of France, or of the vague spiritualities of the German
sentimental school: opposed, too, to that spirit of transcendentalism
which also was root and flower itself of the great Revolution, underlying
the impassioned contemplation of Wordsworth and giving wings and fire to
the eagle-like flight of Shelley, and which in the sphere of philosophy,
though displaced by the