The Classical Renaissance was a new reading of human life, and what it added to the emotional capital of Europe was a new sense of the excitingness of human affairs.  If the men and women of the Renaissance were moved by Art and Nature, that was because in Art and Nature they saw their own reflections.  The Classical Renaissance was not a re-birth but a re-discovery; and that superb mess of thought and observation, lust, rhetoric, and pedantry, that we call Renaissance literature, is its best and most characteristic monument.  What it rediscovered were the ideas from the heights of which the ancients had gained a view of life.  This view the Renaissance borrowed.  By doing so it took the sting out of the spiritual death of the late Middle Ages.  It showed men that they could manage very well without a soul.  It made materialism tolerable by showing how much can be done with matter and intellect.  That was its great feat.  It taught men how to make the best of a bad job; it proved that by cultivating the senses and setting the intellect to brood over them it is easy to whip up an emotion of sorts.  When men had lost sight of the spirit it covered the body with a garment of glamour.

That the Classical Renaissance was essentially an intellectual movement is proved, I think, by the fact that it left the uneducated classes untouched almost.  They suffered from its consequences; it gave them nothing.  A wave of emotion floods the back-gardens; an intellectual stream is kept within the irrigation channels.  The Classical Renaissance made absolute the divorce of the classes from the masses.  The mediaeval lord in his castle and the mediaeval hind in his hut were spiritual equals who thought and felt alike, held the same hopes and fears, and shared, to a surprising extent, the pains and pleasures of a simple and rather cruel society.  The Renaissance changed all that.  The lord entered the new world of ideas and refined sensuality; the peasant stayed where he was, or, as the last vestiges of spiritual religion began to disappear with the commons, sank lower.  Popular art changed so gradually that in the late fifteenth and in the sixteenth century we still find, in remote corners, things that are rude but profoundly moving.  Village masons could still create in stone at the time when Jacques Coeur was building himself the first “residence worthy of a millionaire” that had been “erected” since the days of Honorius.  But that popular art pursued the downhill road sedately while plutocratic art went with a run is a curious accident of which the traces are soon lost; the outstanding fact is that with the Renaissance Europe definitely turns her back on the spiritual view of life.  With that renunciation the power of creating significant form becomes the inexplicable gift of the occasional genius.  Here and there an individual produces a work of art, so art comes to be regarded as something essentially sporadic and peculiar.  The artist is reckoned a freak.  We are in the age of names and catalogues and genius-worship.  Now, genius-worship is the infallible sign of an uncreative age.  In great ages, though we may not all be geniuses, many of us are artists, and where there are many artists art tends to become anonymous.