of the attainment of perfect truth.




THE ENGLISH RENAISSANCE OF ART




AMONG the many debts which we owe to the supreme aesthetic faculty
of Goethe is that he was the first to teach us to define beauty in
terms the most concrete possible, to realise it, I mean, always in
its special manifestations. So, in the lecture which I have the
honour to deliver before you, I will not try to give you any
abstract definition of beauty - any such universal formula for it
as was sought for by the philosophy of the eighteenth century -
still less to communicate to you that which in its essence is
incommunicable, the virtue by which a particular picture or poem
affects us with a unique and special joy; but rather to point out
to you the general ideas which characterise the great English
Renaissance of Art in this century, to discover their source, as
far as that is possible, and to estimate their future as far as
that is possible.

I call it our English Renaissance because it is indeed a sort of
new birth of the spirit of man, like the great Italian Renaissance
of the fifteenth century, in its desire for a more gracious and
comely way of life, its passion for physical beauty, its exclusive
attention to form, its seeking for new subjects for poetry, new