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To me one of the things in history the most to be regretted is that the Christ’s own renaissance which had produced the Cathedral of Chartres, the Arthurian cycle of legends, the life of St Francis of Assisi, the art of Giotto, and Dante’s Divine Comedy, was not allowed to develop on its own lines but was interrupted and spoiled by the dreary classical Renaissance that gave us Petrarch, and Raphael’s frescoes, and Palladian architecture, and formal French tragedy, and St Paul’s Cathedral, and Pope’s poetry, and everything that is made from without and by dead rules, and does not spring from within through some spirit informing it[109a]. But wherever there is a romantic movement in Art, there somehow, and under some form, is Christ, or the soul of Christ. He is in Romeo and Juliet, in the Winter’s Tale, in Provencal poetry, in “The Ancient Mariner,” in “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” and in Chatterton’s “Ballad of Charity.” [109b]
对于我，历史上最令人遗憾的一件事是，基督本身的复兴，既然产生了沙特尔城的大教堂、阿瑟王记的传奇、阿西西城的圣弗兰西斯的生平、乔托的艺术、但丁的《神曲》，却不让按其自身的主线发展，反而被无聊的古典复兴打断了、破坏了。这古典复兴给我们留下了彼特拉克的商籁诗体、拉斐尔的壁画、帕拉第奥的建筑风格、重形式的法国悲剧、圣保罗大教堂、蒲伯的诗，以及各种来自外部、靠死的规则形成的东西，而不是通过某种精神的点化从内部跃然而出[109a]。但是不管何时何地，只要艺术上出现浪漫主义运动，不知为什么就有基督，或者基督的灵魂，以某种形式出现。在《罗密欧与朱丽叶》中，在《冬天的童话》中，在普罗旺斯人的诗中、在柯尔律治的《古舟子咏》中，在济慈的《无情妖女》中，在查特顿的《仁爱之歌》中[109b]。
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