Italy was the home of the Renaissance movement, and attention has been chiefly given to the most exaggerated forms which it there assumed, while its simpler, I might almost say its normal, development, has been somewhat overlooked. Let me try and put before you in its simplest form the chief object of that intellectual movement which we have agreed to call the Renaissance.
The great formative power of ancient life was the culture derived from Hellas. Culture after all means an attitude towards life, and the attitude expressed by Hellenic thought was one of clear outlook upon the world, frank acceptance of things as they were, and resoluteness in clothing them with beautiful form. These qualities of the Hellenic mind were to some degree impressed upon the sterner and more practical mind of Rome, which gave them wide dominion. But Rome, with all its capacity for action, lacked the faculty of preserving by perpetual readjustments the spiritual conceptions on which natural life must ultimately be based. Each step in Rome's expansion left it poorer in actual contents, till it fell through sheer exhaustion. In the downfall of material civilisation, in the miseries of barbarian invasions, the new power of Christianity alone survived and was strong enough to build up again the life of man upon an enduring basis; but the task was enormous, the struggle was arduous, and amid the general wreckage only such elements of the old civilisation survived as had been absorbed by Christianity. This revived society bore manifold traces of the conflict which had been necessary to train and discipline the conscience
