In those days the only men who cared to analyse the ideas that were drifting through society, or to give them any permanent form by writing, were men who, in the modern sense of the words, were artists — men who, by the singular effect of temperament upon the perception of things, were constrained to take distinct and individual shape of expression in language. For my own part, I sometimes wonder whether this fact may not account for many otherwise incomprehensible peculiarities in the intellectual life of our time. The men who did the shaping were of small number; they were not academical intellects;—we cannot, without injustice to them, call them philosophers;—they were artists. They were such as edited their views by a taste or an æsthetic sense; and so, perhaps, they failed in the higher sense of philosophy; but they gave us, none the less, certain types, certain forms of life, certain accessible ideals, which are those that most of us, in the long run, live by.
The connexion between the artist's personal life and the life which he represents is always a subtle, and sometimes an obscure one. We say rightly that the artist must live; but what we mean is, that the artist must live intensely, with the whole force of his individuality; and that in such living he must make a complete and self-consistent personal experience. We demand of him that he should give us, not the mere record of events, but the transfigured record, the chosen and illuminated portion of experience, which has been seen through his mind's eye and described in the terms of his private emotion. Hence it follows that the literary artist is not to be judged by the loftiness of his aims in the abstract, but by the sincerity and completeness of the personal life which his works interpret.
But there is another respect in which the aesthetic temper has been, and still is, of supreme importance to a society which is in the act of forming itself. The Renaissance itself, the period of which we have been speaking, was in that sense an æsthetic movement — a movement of recovery and of re-adjustment, which had for its aim the re-establishment of certain sensuous standards, the revaluation of noble objects and noble forms, and the substitution of a new type of human interest for the cold scholastic or the languid medieval temper. It was, in short, an attempt to make life more vivid, more concrete, more rich in imaginative content; and such an attempt must always be in great part æsthetic in its origin and in its means.