It is difficult for us in these later days to conceive the profound and stirring influence of such an alteration on thought and literature.  To the men at the end of the fifteenth century scarcely a year but brought another bit of received and recognized thinking to the scrap-heap; scarcely a year but some new discovery found itself surpassed and in its turn discarded, or lessened in significance by something still more new.  Columbus sailed westward to find a new sea route, and as he imagined, a more expeditious one to “the Indies”; the name West Indies still survives to show the theory on which the early discoverers worked.  The rapidity with which knowledge widened can be gathered by a comparison of the maps of the day.  In the earlier of them the mythical Brazil, a relic perhaps of the lost Atlantis, lay a regularly and mystically blue island off the west coast of Ireland; then the Azores were discovered and the name fastened on to one of the islands of that archipelago.  Then Amerigo reached South America and the name became finally fixed to the country that we know.  There is nothing nowadays that can give us a parallel to the stirring and exaltation of the imagination which intoxicated the men of the Renaissance, and gave a new birth to thought and art.  The great scientific discoveries of the nineteenth century came to men more prepared for the shock of new surprises, and they carried evidence less tangible and indisputable to the senses.  Perhaps if the strivings of science should succeed in proving as evident and comprehensible the existences which spiritualist and psychical research is striving to establish, we should know the thrill that the great twin discoverers, Copernicus and Columbus, brought to Europe.

(2)

This rough sketch of the Renaissance has been set down because it is only by realizing the period in its largest and broadest sense that we can understand the beginnings of our own modern literature.  The Renaissance reached England late.  By the time that the impulse was at its height with Spenser and Shakespeare, it had died out in Italy, and in France to which in its turn Italy had passed the torch, it was already a waning fire.  When it came to England it came in a special form shaped by political and social conditions, and by the accidents of temperament and inclination in the men who began the movement.  But the essence of the inspiration remained the same as it had been on the Continent, and the twin threads of its two main impulses, the impulse from the study of the classics, and the impulse given to men’s minds by the voyages of discovery, runs through all the texture of our Renaissance literature.