th and the beginning of
the thirteenth century, a Renaissance within the limits of the middle
age itself--a brilliant, but in part abortive effort to do for human
life and the human mind what was afterwards done in the fifteenth. The
word Renaissance, indeed, is now generally used to denote not merely
that revival of classical antiquity which took place in the fifteenth
century, and to which the word was first applied, but a whole complex
movement, of which that revival of classical antiquity was but one
element or symptom. For us the Renaissance is the name of a many-sided
but yet united movement, in which the love of the things of the
intellect and the imagination for their own sake, the desire for a more
liberal and comely way of conceiving life, make themselves felt, urging
those who experience this desire to search out first one and then
another means of intellectual or imaginative enjoyment, and directing
them not merely to the discovery of old and forgotten sources of this
enjoyment, but to the divination of fresh sources thereof--new
experiences, new subjects of poetry, new forms of art. Of such feeling
there was a great outbreak in the end of the twelfth and the beginning
of the following century. Here and there, under rare and happy
conditions, in Pointed architecture, in the doctrines of romantic love,
in the poetry of Provence, the rude strength of the middle age turns to
sweetness; and the taste for sweetness generated there becomes the seed
of the classical revival in it, prompting it constantly to seek after
the springs of perfect sweetness in the Hellenic world. And coming after
a long period in which this instinct had been crushed, that true "dark
age," in which so many sources of intellectual and imaginative enjoyment
had actually disappeared, this outbreak is rightly called a Renaissance,
a revival.

Theories which bring into connexion with each other modes of thought and
feeling, periods of taste, forms of art and poetry, which the narrowness
of men's minds constantly tends to oppose to each other, have a great
stimulus for the intellect, and are almost always worth understanding.
It is so with this theory of a Renaissance within the middle age, which
seeks to establish a continuity between the most characteristic work of
the middle age, the sculpture of Chartres and the windows of Le Mans,
and the work of the later Renaissance, the work of Jean Cousin and
Germain Pilon, and thus heals that rupture b