ld as they
knew it, and something of its grace and beauty. If we say that the
history of the plastic arts in Europe from the fourteenth to the
seventeenth centuries is the history of the discovery and presentation
first of reality, and then of reality as transformed by the highest
imaginative conception of beauty, this must not be understood to mean
that reality and beauty had been absent from those arts in the Middle
Ages.

If then we trace the development of Italian art, we shall first observe
in such work as that of Masaccio in the Brancacci chapel at Florence
just the same characteristic interest in the appearance and the
varieties of human life as we find in the work of Boccaccio and Chaucer,
and in the succession of the great Tuscan and Umbrian and Venetian
painters and sculptors the same transformation of the bare reality of
life by the magic of the imaginative sense of beauty and of passion as
in the great drama. It is not, I think, merely fanciful to say that the
real counterpart of the English and Spanish drama is to be found in the
Italian painters and sculptors of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries
and in the Flemish artists of the early seventeenth. It is certainly
true that each of these great artists had his own individual and
distinctive genius, but the exquisite grace and beauty of the Umbrians
and Tuscans have never been matched save in the romantic comedy of
Shakespeare, and the presentation of the tragic passion of the human
soul in _King Lear_ has only once been equalled, and that is in the
dreadful beauty and horror of the Night and Day, the Evening and the
Morning of Michelangelo.

* * * * *

I do not think I need say much about the classical movement in art and
literature, for we all know that it was international. It was begun by
Petrarch, not indeed the Petrarch of the sonnets, for these are only a
later form of the Troubadour lyric, and do not show any special trace of
the classical influence, but the Petrarch whose letters were the first
summons of Europe to a new and indefatigable work of the rediscovery of
the ancient world. It was an Italian with whom the classical movement
began, but it was only in the hands of two northern artists that it
achieved a satisfying development in literature: the one a Frenchman,
Racine, the other an Englishman, Milton. Neither are, I imagine, really
classical at all, but of the two, Milton, as he was by far the more
learn