LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES 65

In Tfie Knights of Aristophanes, Demosthenes has the happy thought1
of routing Cleon by enlisting against him a sausage-monger who out-
Cleons Cleon and so vanquishes him; and, if we take this cue from an
Athenian playwright, our first retort to Collingwood's ipse dixit2 will be
to pit against it one of Spengler's which makes a precisely contrary asser-
tion in terms that are even more magisterial.

'The Renaissance was ... a rebellion against the spirit of [a] Faustian
music, cast in the form of the fugue and breathing the spirit of the woods,
which was at that moment on the point of asserting its dictatorship over
the whole orchestra of the Western Civilisation's divers forms of self-
expression (uber die gesamte Formensprache der abendlandischen Kultur).
It [? i.e. the Renaissance] was a logically consistent consequence of the
mature Gothic style in which this [Faustian spirit's] will to power had
emerged undisguised. It [? i.e. the Renaissance] never attempted to deny
either that its genesis was this or that its nature was (as in fact it was) that
of a mere counter-movement; and the character of such a counter-move-
ment was bound to be determined from first to last by the contours of the
original movement whose negative effect upon the hesitant soul had
declared itself in this reaction.

'It is consistent with the- origin and nature of the Renaissance that this
movement should lack (as it does lack) all genuine depth—and this in the
double sense of a shallowness in its ideas and a shallowness in their
manifestations. In point of ideas, one need only remind himself of the
passionateness of the abandon with which the Gothic spirit (Weltgefuhl)
discharged itself over the whole landscape of the Western Culture in order
to appreciate the character of the movement that was started, about the
year 1420, by a little group of chosen spirits: scholars, artists and humanists.
In the outburst of the Gothic spirit, it was a question of "to be or not to
be" for a new type of spiritual life (ernes neuen Seelentums); in the Renais-
sance it was just a question of taste. The Gothic spirit seizes in its grip the
whole of Life, and penetrates into its most secret recesses. It created a
new kind of human being and a new kind of world. .. . The Renaissance
took possession of a few of the arts, and that was the whole story. It pro-
duced no change at all in Western Europe's intellectual outlook or emotional
attitude to life. It made itself felt in matters of costume and mannerism
without penetrating to the roots of existence. Between Dante and Michael
Angelo—both of whom already overstep the Renaissance's chronological
limits—this movement cannot muster any representative who can claim to
rank as a genius. And, as for the manifestations in which the ideas of the Re-
naissance expressed themselves, these never gained any hold on the people—
no, not even in Florence. In the depths of the people's soul—and this alone
makes it possible for us to understand the epiphany of Savonarola and the
power, of a wholly different order of potency, that he was able to exert over
men's feelings—in the depths of the people's soul the Gothic undercurrent
flows serenely along its musical course to its Baroque fulfilment. . . .3

* See 11. 141-9,

2 In the passage quoted above, Collingwood adopts and asserts, without entering into
any argument of the case, a disputable, and in fact long since successfully disputed, view
of the role of the Italian Renaissance in Western history. The context shows that he has
been moved to take up this dogmatic position by a belief that, in the Renaissance of
Hellenism, the Western World was doing 'exactly* [sic] what is done by 'the historian
who studies a. civilisation other than his own'. Collingwood's view of the historian's
relation to the objects that he studies is examined on pp. 718-37, below.

3 Spengler, O.;Der UntergangdesAbendlandes, vol. i (Munich 1920, Beck), pp. 320-1;