THE RENAISSANCE

(1)

There are times in every man's experience when some sudden widening of
the boundaries of his knowledge, some vision of hitherto untried and
unrealized possibilities, has come and seemed to bring with it new life
and the inspiration of fresh and splendid endeavour. It may be some
great book read for the first time not as a book, but as a revelation;
it may be the first realization of the extent and moment of what
physical science has to teach us; it may be, like Carlyle's "Everlasting
Yea," an ethical illumination, or spiritual like Augustine's or John
Wesley's. But whatever it is, it brings with it new eyes, new powers of
comprehension, and seems to reveal a treasury of latent and unsuspected
talents in the mind and heart. The history of mankind has its parallels
to these moments of illumination in the life of the individual. There
are times when the boundaries of human experience, always narrow, and
fluctuating but little between age and age, suddenly widen themselves,
and the spirit of man leaps forward to possess and explore its new
domain. These are the great ages of the world. They could be counted,
perhaps, on one hand. The age of Pericles in Athens; the less defined
age, when Europe passed, spiritually and artistically, from what we call
the Dark, to what we call the Middle Ages; the Renaissance; the period
of the French Revolution. Two of them, so far as English literature is
concerned, fall within the compass of this book, and it is with one of
them--the Renaissance--that it begins.

It is as difficult to find a comprehensive formula for what the
Renaissance meant as to tie it down to a date. The year 1453 A.D., when