I have spoken of the lesson which may be derived from studies even as humble as these studies of mine; since, in my opinion, we cannot treat history as a mere art--though history alone can gives us now-a-days tragedy which has ceased to exist on our stage, and wonder which has ceased to exist in our poetry--we cannot seek in it mere selfish enjoyment of imagination and emotion, without doing our soul the great injury of cheating it of some of those great indignations, some of those great lessons which make it stronger and more supple in the practical affairs of life. Each of these studies of mine brings its own lesson, artistic or ethical, important or unimportant; its lesson of seeking certainty in our moral opinions, beauty in all and whatever our forms of art, spirituality in our love. But besides these I seem to perceive another deduction, an historical fact with a practical application; to see it as the result not merely perhaps of the studies of which this book is the fruit, but of those further studies, of the subtler sides of Mediæval and Renaissance life and art which at present occupy my mind and may some day add another series of essays to this: a lesson still vague to myself, but which, satisfactorily or unsatisfactorily, I shall nevertheless attempt to explain; if indeed it requires to be brought home to the reader.
Of the few forms of feeling and imagination which I have treated--things so different from one another as the feeling for nature and the chivalric poem, as modern art, with its idealism and realism, and modern love--of these forms, emotional and artistic, which Antiquity did not know, or knew but little, the reader may have observed that I have almost invariably traced the origin deep into that fruitful cosmopolitan chaos, due to the mingling of all that was still unused of the remains of Antiquity with all that was untouched of the intellectual and moral riches of the barbarous nations, to which we give the name of Middle Ages; and that I have, as invariably, followed the development of these precious forms, and their definitive efflorescence and fruit-bearing, into that particular country where certain mediæval conditions had ceased to exist, namely Italy. In other words, it has seemed to me that the things which I have studied were originally produced during the Middle Ages, and consequently in the mediæval countries, France, Germany, Provence; but did not attain maturity except in that portion of the Middle Ages which is mediæval no longer, but already more than half modern, the Renaissance, which began in Italy not with the establishment of despotisms and the coming of Greek humanists, but with the independence of the free towns and with the revival of Roman tradition.