As regards their origin, in art as in politics there is but
one origin for all revolutions, a desire on the part of man for a
nobler form of life, for a freer method and opportunity of
expression. Yet, I think that in estimating the sensuous and
intellectual spirit which presides over our English Renaissance,
any attempt to isolate it in any way from in the progress and
movement and social life of the age that has produced it would be
to rob it of its true vitality, possibly to mistake its true
meaning. And in disengaging from the pursuits and passions of this
crowded modern world those passions and pursuits which have to do
with art and the love of art, we must take into account many great
events of history which seem to be the most opposed to any such
artistic feeling.
Alien then from any wild, political passion, or from the harsh
voice of a rude people in revolt, as our English Renaissance must
seem, in its passionate cult of pure beauty, its flawless devotion
to form, its exclusive and sensitive nature, it is to the French
Revolution that we must look for the most primary factor of its
production, the first condition of its birth: that great
Revolution of which we are all the children though the voices of
some of us be often loud against it; that Revolution to which at a
time when even such spirits as Coleridge and Wordsworth lost heart
in England, noble messages of love blown across seas came from your
young Republic.
It is true that our modern sense of the continuity of history has
shown us that neither in politics nor in nature are there
revolutions ever but evolutions only, and that the prelude to that
wild storm which swept over France in 1789 and made every king in
Europe tremble for his throne, was first sounded in literature
years before the Bastille fell and the Palace was taken. The way
for those red scenes by Seine and Loire was paved by that critical
spirit of Germany and England which accustomed men to bring all
things to the test of reason or utility or both, while the
discontent of the people in the streets of Paris was the echo that
followed the life of Emile and of Werther. For Rousseau, by silent
lake and mountain, had called humanity back to the golden age that
still lies before us and preached a return to nature, in passionate
eloquence whose music still lingers about our keen northern air.
And Goethe and Scott had brought romance back again from the prison
she had lain in for so 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 in 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.
