III

THE CLASSICAL RENAISSANCE AND ITS DISEASES

The Classical Renaissance is nothing more than a big kink in the long slope; but it is a very big one.  It is an intellectual event.  Emotionally the consumption that was wasting Europe continued to run its course; the Renaissance was a mere fever-flash.  To literature, however, its importance is immense:  for literature can make itself independent of spiritual health, and is as much concerned with ideas as with emotions.  Literature can subsist in dignity on ideas.  Finlay’s history of the Byzantine Empire provokes no emotion worth talking about, yet I would give Mr. Finlay a place amongst men of letters, and I would do as much for Hobbes, Mommsen, Sainte-Beuve, Samuel Johnson, and Aristotle.  Great thinking without great feeling will make great literature.  It is not for their emotional qualities that we value many of our most valued books.  And when it is for an emotional quality, to what extent is that emotion aesthetic?  I know how little the intellectual and factual content of great poetry has to do with its significance.  The actual meaning of the words in Shakespeare’s songs, the purest poetry in English, is generally either trivial or trite.  They are nursery-rhymes or drawing-room ditties;—­

  “Come away, come away, death,
    And in sad cypress let me be laid;
  Fly away, fly away, breath;
    I am slain by a fair cruel maid.”

Could anything be more commonplace?

        “Hark, hark! 
          Bow, wow,
        The watch-dogs bark;
          Bow, wow,
        Hark, hark!  I hear
  The strain of strutting chanticleer
      Cry, Cock-a-diddle-dow!”

What could be more nonsensical?  In the verse of our second poet, Milton—­so great that before his name the word “second” rings false as the giggle of fatuity—­the ideas are frequently shallow and the facts generally false.  In Dante, if the ideas are sometimes profound and the emotions awful, they are also, as a rule, repugnant to our better feelings:  the facts are the hoardings of a parish scold.  In great poetry it is the formal music that makes the miracle.  The poet expresses in verbal form an emotion but distantly related to the words set down.  But it is related; it is not a purely artistic emotion.  In poetry form and its significance are not everything; the form and the content are not one.  Though some of Shakespeare’s songs approach purity, there is, in fact, an alloy.  The form is burdened with an intellectual content, and that content is a mood that mingles with and reposes on the emotions of life.  That is why poetry, though it has its raptures, does not transport us to that remote aesthetic beatitude in which, freed from humanity, we are up-stayed by musical and pure visual form.