experiences these impressions strongly, and drives directly at the discrimination and analysis of them, has no need to trouble himself with the abstract question what beauty is in itself, or what its exact relation to truth or experience?metaphysical questions, as unprofitable as metaphysical questions elsewhere. He may pass them all by as being, answerable or not, of no interest to him.
The aesthetic critic, then, regards all the objects with which he has to do, all works of art, and the fairer forms of nature and human life, as powers or forces producing pleasurable sensations, each of a more or less peculiar or unique kind. This influence he feels, and wishes to explain, by analyzing and reducing it to its elements. To him, the picture, the landscape, the engaging personality in life or in a book, 'La Gioconda,' the hills of Carrara, Pico of Mirandola,2 are valuable for their virtues, as we say, in speaking of a herb, a
1. Matthew Arnold, 'The Function of Criticism at of the Renaissance. 'La Gioconda': another name the Present Time' (1864; p. 1384). for Leonardo da Vinci's painting the Mona Lisa 2. Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494), Italian phi-(1503?6; see below). 'The hills of Carrara': marble losopher and classical scholar, subject of an essay quarries in Italy, particularly associated with by Pater that was included in Studies in the History Michelangelo.
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wine, a gem; for the property each has of affecting one with a special, a unique, impression of pleasure. Our education becomes complete in proportion as our susceptibility to these impressions increases in depth and variety. And the function of the aesthetic critic is to distinguish, to analyze, and separate from its adjuncts, the virtue by which a picture, a landscape, a fair personality in life or in a book, produces this special impression of beauty or pleasure, to indicate what the source of that impression is, and under what conditions it is experienced. His end is reached when he has disengaged that virtue, and noted it, as a chemist notes some natural element, for himself and others; and the rule for those who would reach this end is stated with great exactness in the words of a recent critic of Sainte-Beuve: De se borner a connaitre de pres les belles choses, et a sen nourrir en exquis amateurs, en humanistesaccomplish
What is important, then, is not that the critic should possess a correct
abstract definition of beauty for the intellect, but a certain kind of tempera
ment, the power of being deeply moved by the presence of beautiful objects.
He will remember always that beauty exists in many forms. To him all periods,
types, schools of taste, are in themselves equal. In all ages there have been
some excellent workmen, and some excellent work done. The question he asks
is always: In whom did the stir, the genius, the sentiment of the period find
itself? where was the receptacle of its refinement, its elevation, its taste? 'The
ages are all equal,' says William Blake, 'but genius is always above its age.'4 Often it will require great nicety to disengage this virtue from the commoner elements with which it may be found in combination. Few artists, not Goethe or Byron even, work quite cleanly, casting off all debris, and leaving us only what the heat of their imagination has wholly fused and transformed. Take, for instance, the writings of Wordsworth. The heat of his genius, entering into the substance of his work, has crystallized a part, but only a part, of it; and in that great mass of verse there is much which might well be forgotten. But scattered up and down it, sometimes fusing and transforming entire compositions, like the stanzas on Resolution and Independence, or the Ode on the Recollections of Childhood,5 sometimes, as if at random, depositing a fine crystal here or there, in a matter it does not wholly search through and transmute,
we trace the action of his unique, incommunicable faculty, that strange, mys
tical sense of a life in natural things, and of man's life as a part of nature,
drawing strength and color and character from local influences, from the hills
and streams, and from natural sights and sounds. Well! that is the virtue, the
active principle in Wordsworth's poetry; and then the function of the critic of
Wordsworth is to follow up that active principle, to disengage it, to mark the
degree in which it penetrates his verse.
The subjects of the following studies are taken from the history of the Renaissance, and touch what I think the chief points in that complex, manysided movement. I have explained in the first of them what I understand by the word, giving it a much wider scope than was intended by those who originally used it to denote that revival of classical antiquity in the fifteenth century which was only one of many results of a general excitement and enlightening
3. To confine themselves to knowing beautiful ought to be 'a recent critique.' things intimately, and to sustain themselves by 4. From Blake's annotations to The Works of Sir these, as sensitive amateurs and accomplished Joshua Reynolds (1778). The 'genius' was the humanists do (French). In 1980 the editor Donald German artist Albrecht Diirer (1471-1528). j. Hill discovered that this quotation is by the 5. Wordsworth's ode is actually titled 'Intimations French man of letters Charles-Augustin Sainte-of Immortality from Recollections of Early Child- Beuve (1804-1869) rather than about him; hood'; both poems were published in 1807. therefore, Hill conjectures that 'a recent critic'
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STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF THE RENAISSANCE / 150 9
of the human mind, but of which the great aim and achievements of what, as
Christian art, is often falsely opposed to the Renaissance, were another result.
This outbreak of the human spirit may be traced far into the Middle Age itself,
with its motives already clearly pronounced, the care for physical beauty, the
worship of the body, the breaking down of those limits which the religious
system of the Middle Age imposed on the heart and the imagination. 1 have
