d of taste. As regards
their origin, in art as in politics there is but one origin for all
revolutions, a desire on the part of man for a nobler form of life, for a
freer method and opportunity of expression. Yet, I think that in
estimating the sensuous and intellectual spirit which presides over our
English Renaissance, any attempt to isolate it in any way from the
progress and movement and social life of the age that has produced it
would be to rob it of its true vitality, possibly to mistake its true
meaning. And in disengaging from the pursuits and passions of this
crowded modern world those passions and pursuits which have to do with
art and the love of art, we must take into account many great events of
history which seem to be the most opposed to any such artistic feeling.

Alien then from any wild, political passion, or from the harsh voice of a
rude people in revolt, as our English Renaissance must seem, in its
passionate cult of pure beauty, its flawless devotion to form, its
exclusive and sensitive nature, it is to the French Revolution that we
must look for the most primary factor of its production, the first
condition of its birth: that great Revolution of which we are all the
children, though the voices of some of us be often loud against it; that
Revolution to which at a time when even such spirits as Coleridge and
Wordsworth lost heart in England, noble messages of love blown across
seas came from your young Republic.

It is true that our modern sense of the continuity of history has shown
us that neither in politics nor in nature are there revolutions ever but
evolutions only, and that the prelude to that wild storm which swept over
France in '89 and made every king in Europe tremble for his throne, was
first sounded in literature years before the Bastille fell and the Palace
was taken. The way for those red scenes by Seine and Loire was paved by
that critical spirit of Germany and England which accustomed men to bring
all things to the test of reason or utility or both, while the discontent
of the people in the streets of Paris was the echo that followed the life
of Emile and of Werther. For Rousseau, by silent lake and mountain, had
called humanity back to the golden age that still lies before us and
preached a return to nature, in passionate eloquence whose music still
lingers about our keen northern air. And Goethe and Scott had brought
romance back again from the prison she had lain in for so