Literature is never pure art.  Very little literature is a pure expression of emotion; none, I think is an expression of pure inhuman emotion.  Most of it is concerned, to some extent, with facts and ideas:  it is intellectual.  Therefore literature is a misleading guide to the history of art.  Its history is the history of literature; and it is a good guide to the history of thought.  Yet sometimes literature will provide the historian of art with a pretty piece of collateral evidence.  For instance, the fact that Charles the Great ordained that the Frankish songs should be collected and written down makes a neat pendant to the renaissance art of Aachen.  People who begin to collect have lost the first fury of creation.  The change that came over plastic art in France towards the end of the twelfth century is reflected in the accomplished triviality of Chretien de Troyes.  The eleventh century had produced the Chanson de Roland, a poem as grand and simple as a Romanesque church.  Chretien de Troyes melted down the massive conceptions of his betters and twisted them into fine-spun conceits.  He produced a poem as pinnacled, deft, and insignificant as Rouen Cathedral.  In literature, as in the visual arts, Italy held out longest, and, when she fell, fell like Lucifer, never to rise again.  In Italy there was no literary renaissance; there was just a stirring of the rubbish heap.  If ever man was a full-stop, that man was Boccaccio.  Dante died at Ravenna in 1321.  His death is a landmark in the spiritual history of Europe.  Behind him lies that which, taken with the Divina Commedia, has won for Italy an exaggerated literary reputation.  In the thirteenth century there was plenty of poetry hardly inferior to the Lamento of Rinaldo; in the fourteenth comes Petrarch with the curse of mellifluous phrase-making.

May God forget me if I forget the great Italian art of the fifteenth century.  But, a host of individual geniuses and a cloud of admirable painters notwithstanding, the art of the fifteenth century was further from grace than that of the Giottesque painters of the fourteenth.  And the whole output of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is immeasurably inferior to the great Byzantine and Romanesque production of the eleventh and twelfth.  Indeed, it is inferior in quality, if not in quantity, to the decadent Byzantine and Italian Byzantine of the thirteenth.  Therefore I will say that, already at the end of the fourteenth century, though Castagno and Masolino and Gentile da Fabriano and Fra Angelico were alive, and Masaccio and Piero and Bellini had yet to be born, it looked as if the road that started from Constantinople in the sixth century were about to end in a glissade.  From Buda-Pest to Sligo, “late Gothic” stands for something as foul almost as “revival.”  Having come through the high passes, Europe, it seemed, was going to end her journey by plunging down a precipice.  Perhaps it would have been as well; but it was not to be.  The headlong rush was to be checked.  The descent was to be eased by a strange detour, by a fantastic adventure, a revival that was no re-birth, a Medea’s cauldron rather, an extravagant disease full of lust and laughter; the life of the old world was to be prolonged by four hundred years or so, by the galvanising power of the Classical Renaissance.