ABSTRACT
Like Romanticism—the inevitable parallel, because of both periods’ bias towards individualism for its own sake —the Renaissance has recently lost much of its Victorian glamour. To Walter Pater, whose The Renaissance (1873) is still well worth reading in spite of the affected style, it was “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 experienced this desire to search out first one and then another means of intellectual or imaginative enjoyment, and directing them not only 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.” Pater’s emphasis, it will be seen, was not on the “old and forgotten sources”—not, therefore, on the rebirth as such of classical art and culture, so much as on the new forms of aesthetic activity the classical revival (also known as Humanism) may or may not have stimulated. The crucial words are new, liberal, comely.
