Henry Osborn Taylor

CHAPTER XXX

THE SPELL OF THE CLASSICS

I. Classical Reading.
II. Grammar.
III. The Effect upon the Mediaeval Man; Hildebert of Lavardin.

I

During all the mediaeval centuries, men approached the Classics expecting to learn from them. The usual attitude toward the classical heritage was that of docile pupils looking for instruction. One may recall the antecedent reasons of this, which have already been stated at length. In Italy, letters survived as the most impressive legacy from an overshadowing past. In the north, save where they lingered on from the antique time, they came in the train of Latin Christianity, and were offered to men under the same imposing conditions of a higher civilization authoritatively instructing ruder peoples. Moreover, between the ancient times which produced the classic literature and the Carolingian period there intervened centuries of degeneracy and transition, when the Classics were used pedagogically to teach grammar and rhetoric. Then grammars were composed or revised, and other handbooks of elementary instruction. The Classics still were loved; but how shall men love beyond their own natures? Gifted Jerome, great Augustine, loved them with an ardour bringing its own misgivings. Other lovers, like Ausonius and Apollinaris Sidonius, were pedantic imitators.

Both north and south of the Alps another and obviously enduring cause fostered the habit of regarding the Classics as storehouses of knowledge: the fact that they were such for all the mediaeval centuries. They included not only poetry and eloquence, but also history, philosophy, natural knowledge, law and polity. The knowledge contained in them exceeded what the men of western Europe otherwise possessed. As century after century passed, mediaeval men learned more for themselves, and also drew more largely on the classic store. Yet it remained unexhausted. The twelfth and thirteenth centuries constitute the great mediaeval epoch. Men were then opening their eyes a little to observe the natural world, and were thinking a little for themselves. Nevertheless the chief increase in knowledge issued from the gradual discovery and mastering of the works of Aristotle. These centuries, like their predecessors, make clear that men who inherit from a greater past a universal literature containing the best they can conceive and more knowledge than they can otherwise attain, will be likely to regard every part of this literature as in some way a source of knowledge, physical or metaphysical, historical or ethical. And the Classics merited such regard; for where they did not instruct in science, they imparted knowledge of life, and norms and instances of conduct, from which men still may draw guidance. We have outlearned the physics, and perhaps the metaphysics of the Greeks; their knowledge of nature, in comparison with ours, was but as a genial beginning; their polities and their formal ethics we have tried and tested; but we have not risen above the power and inspiration of the story of Greece and Rome, and the exemplifications of life in the Greek and Latin Classics. It has not ceased to be true that he who best loves the Classics, and most deeply feels and glories in their unique excellence as literature, is he who still draws life from them, and discipline and knowledge. Their true lovers, like the true lovers of all noble literature, are always in a state of pupilage to the poems and the histories they love.

Obviously then no final word lies in the statement that through the Middle Ages men turned to the Classics for instruction. They did indeed turn to them for all kinds of knowledge, and for discipline. Often they looked for instruction from Ovid or Virgil in a way to make us smile. Often they were like schoolboys, dully conning words which they did not feel and so did not understand. But in the tenth century, and in the twelfth, some men admired and loved the Latin Classics, and drew from them, as we may, lessons which are learned only by those who love aright.

It would be hard to say what the men of the Middle Ages did not thus gain. The pagan classical literature was one of humanity in its full range of interests. This was true of the Greek; and from the Greek, the universal human passed to the Latin, which the Middle Ages were to know. In both literatures, man was a denizen of earth. The laws of mortality and fate were held before his eyes; and the action of the higher powers bore upon mortal happiness, rather than upon any life to come. When reflecting upon the use and influence of the Classics through the Middle Ages, it is always to be kept in mind that the antique literature was the literature of this life and of this world; that it was universal in its humanity, and still in the Middle Ages might touch every human love and human interest not directly connected with the hopes and terrors of the Judgment Day.

So whenever educated mediaeval men were drawn by the ambitions or moved by the finer joys of human life, it lay in their path to seek instruction or satisfaction from some antique source. If a man wished the common education of a clerk, he drew it from antique text-books and their commentaries. Grammar and rhetoric meant Latin grammar and Latin rhetoric; dialectic also was Latin and antique. Likewise the quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music, could be studied only in Latin. These ordinary branches of education having been mastered, if then the man’s tastes or ambitions turned to the interests of earth (and who except the saintly recluse was not so drawn?) he would still look to the antique. A civilian or an ecclesiastic would need some knowledge of law, which for the most part was Roman, even when disguised as Canon law.[152] Did a man incline toward philosophy, and the scrutiny of life’s deeper problems, again the source was the antique; and when he lifted his mind to theology, he would still find himself reasoning in categories of antique dialectic. Finally, and this was a broad field of humane inclination, if a clerkly educated man loved poetry, eloquence, and history, for their own sakes, he also would turn to the antique.

There is scarcely need to revert again to the use of the Classics in the earlier Middle Ages. We have seen that in Italy they never ceased to form the conscious background to all intellectual life; and that in the north, letters came a handmaid in the train of Latin Christianity—a handmaid that was apt to assert her own value, and also charm the minds of men. From the first, it was the orthodox view that Latin letters should provide the education enabling men to understand the Christian religion adequately. This is the object set forth in Charlemagne’s Capitularies upon education.[153] Three hundred years later Honorius of Autun says in his sermonizing way:

“Not only, beloved, do the sacred writings lead us to eternal life, but profane letters also teach us; for edifying matter may be drawn from them. In view of sacred examples no one should be scandalized at this. For the children of Israel spoiled the Egyptians; they took gold and silver, gems and precious vestments, which they afterwards turned into God’s treasury to build the tabernacle.”[154]

Honorius used Augustine’s reference to the Egyptians, and followed this Augustinian view, always recognized as orthodox in the Middle Ages. It was narrower than the practice among those who followed letters. Gerbert at the close of the tenth century loved to teach and read the pagan writers, and drew from them training and discipline.[155] In the next century, the German monk Froumund of Tegernsee, with Bernward and Godehard, bishops of Hildesheim, are instances of German love of antique letters.[156] Yet lofty souls might choose to limit their reading of the Classics, at least in theory, to the needs of their Latinity. Such a one was Hugo of St.-Victor, scholar, theologian, man of genius;[157] he professed to care more for the Christian ardours of the soul than for learning even as a means of righteousness, and chose to take the side of those who would read the classic authors only so far as the needs of education demanded:

“There are two kinds of writings, first those which are termed the artes proper, secondly, those which are the supplements (appendentia) of the artes. Artes comprise the works grouped under (supponuntur) philosophy, those which contain some fixed and determined matter of philosophy, as grammar, dialectic and the like. Appendentia artium are those [writings] which touch philosophy less nearly and are occupied with some subject apart from it; and yet sometimes offer flotsam and jetsam from the artes, or simply as narratives smooth the road to philosophy. All the songs of poets are such—tragedies, comedies, satires, heroics, and lyrics too, and iambics, besides certain didactic works (didascalica); tales likewise, and histories; also the writings of those nowadays called philosophers, who extend a brief matter with lengthy circumlocution, and thus darken a simple meaning.

“Note then well the distinction I have drawn for thee: distinct and different (duo) are the artes and their appenditia, ... and often from the latter the student will gain much labour and little fruit. The artes, without their appenditia, may make the reader perfect; but the latter, without the artes, can bring no whit of perfection. Wherefore one should first of all devote himself to the artes, which are so fundamental, and to the aforesaid seven above all, which are the means and instruments (instrumenta) of all philosophy. Then let the rest be read, if one has leisure, since sometimes the playful mingled with the serious especially delights us, and we are apt to remember a moral found in a tale.”[158]

Temperament affected Hugo’s view. He was of the spiritual aristocracy, who may be somewhat disdainful of the common means by which men get their education and round out their natures. The mechanical monotony of pedagogy grated on him and evoked the ironical sketch of a school-room, which he put in his dialogue on the Vanity of the World. The little Discipulus, directed by his Magister, is surveying human things.

“Turn again, and look,” says the latter, “and what do you see?”

“I see the schools of learners. There is a great crowd, and of all ages, boys and youths, men young and old. They study various things. Some practise their rude tongue at the alphabet and at words new to them. Others listen to the inflection of words, their composition and derivation; then by reciting and repeating them they try to commit them to memory. Others furrow the waxen tablets with a stylus. Others, guiding the calamus with learned hand, draw figures of different shapes and colours on parchments. Still others with sharper zeal seem to dispute on graver matters and try to trip each other with twistings and impossibilities (gryphis?). I see some also making calculations, and some producing various sounds upon a cord stretched on a frame. Others, again, explain and demonstrate geometric figures; and yet others with various instruments show the positions and courses of the stars and the movement of the heavens. Others, finally, consider the nature of plants, the constitution of men, and the properties and powers of things.”

The Disciple is captivated with this many-coloured show of learning; but the Master declares it to be mostly foolishness, distracting the student from understanding his own nature, his Creator, and his future lot.[159]

These are examples, which might be multiplied indefinitely, of the pious mediaeval view that the artes, with a very little reading of the auctores, were proper for the educated Christian, whose need was to understand Scripture. Sometimes, stung, at least rhetorically, by fear of the lust and idolatry of the antique, mediaeval souls cry out against its lures, even as Jerome’s Christianly protesting nature dreamed that famous dream of exclusion from heaven as a “Ciceronian.” Alcuin, who led the educational movement under Charlemagne, gently chides one whose fondness for Virgil made him forget his friend—“would that the Gospels rather than the Aeneid filled thy breast.”[160] Three hundred years later, St. Peter Damiani, himself a virtuoso in letters and a sometime teacher of rhetoric, arraigns the monks for teaching grammar rather than things spiritual.[161] Damiani speaks with the harshness of one who fears what he loves. In France, about the same time, our worthy sermon-writer, Honorius of Autun, liked the profanities well enough, and drew from them apt moral tales, which preachers might introduce to rouse drowsy congregations. Yet he directs his pulpit-thunder at the cives Babyloniae, the superbi, who after their several tastes finger profane literature to their peril: “Those delighting in quibbling learn Aristotle: the lovers of war have Maro, and the lustful idlers their Naso. Lucan and Statius incite discords, while Horace and Terence equip the pert and wanton (petulantes)—but since the names of these are blotted from the book of life, I shall not commemorate them with my lips.”[162]

This with the excellent Honorius was pious rhetoric. Yet the love and fear of antique letters caused anxiety in many a mediaeval soul, deflected by them from its narrow path to the heavenly Jerusalem. Indeed the love of letters and of knowledge was to play its part, and might take one side or the other, according to the motive of their pursuit, in the great mediaeval psychomachia between the cravings of mortal life and the militant insistencies of the soul’s salvation. This conflict, not confined to mediaeval monks, has its universal aspects. It echoes in the sigh of Michelangelo over the

“affectuosa fantasia,
Che l’ arte si fece idolo e monarca,”

—which had so long drawn his heart from Eternity.[163]

Commonly, however, this conflict did not greatly disturb scholars who felt in some degree the classic spell so manifold of delight in themes delightful, of pleasure somehow drawn from clear statement and convincing sequence of thought, of even deeper happiness springing from the stirring of those faculties through which man rejoices in knowledge. To be sure, readers of the Classics, who drew joy from them or satisfaction, or humane instruction, were comparatively few in the mediaeval centuries, as they are to-day. And undoubtedly in the Middle Ages the Classics usually were read in unenlightened schoolboy fashion. Yet making these reservations, we may be sure that letters yielded up their joys to the chosen few in every mediaeval century. “Amor litterarum ab ipso fere initio pueritiae mihi est innatus,” wrote Lupus in the ninth.[164] Gerbert might have said the same, and many of the men who taught at Chartres in the generations following. So likewise might have said John of Salisbury. In studying the Classics he certainly looked to them for instruction. But he also loved them, and found companionship and solace in them, as he says, and as Cicero before him had said of letters.

We may ask ourselves what sort of pleasure do we get from reading the Classics? not necessarily a light distracting of the mind, but rather a deeper gratification: thought is aroused and satisfied, and our nature is appeased by the admirable presentation of things admirable. At the same time we may be conscious of discipline and benefit. There is good reason to suppose that a like pleasure, or satisfaction, with discipline and instruction, came to this exceedingly clever John from reading Terence, Virgil and Ovid, Horace, Juvenal, Lucan, Persius and Statius, Cicero, Seneca and Quintilian—for he read them all.[165] John is affected, impressed, and trained by his classic reading; he has absorbed his authors; he quotes from them as spontaneously and aptly as he quotes from Scripture. A quotation from the one or the other may give final point to an argument, and have its own eloquent suggestions. Sometimes the tone of one of his own letters—which usually are excellent in form and language—may agree with that of the pithy antique quotation garnishing it. A mediaeval writer was not likely to say just what we should when expressing ourselves on the same matter. Yet John makes quite clear to us how he cared for antique letters, in the Prologue to his Polycraticus, his chief work on philosophy and life; and we may take his word as to the satisfaction which he drew from them, since his own writings prove his assiduity in their cult. This prologue is somewhat cherchÉ, and imbued with a preciosity of sentiment putting one in mind of Cicero’s oration Pro Archia poeta.

“Most delightful in many ways, but in this especially, is the fruit of letters, that banishing the reserve of intervening place and time, they bring friends into each other’s presence, and do not suffer noteworthy things to be obliterated by dust. For the arts would have perished, laws would have vanished, the offices of faith and religion would have fallen away, and even the correct use of language would have failed, had not the divine pity, as a remedy for human infirmity, provided letters for the use of mortals. Ancient examples, which incite to virtue, would have corrected and served no one, had not the pious solicitude of writers transmitted them to posterity.... Who would know the Alexanders and the Caesars, or admire Stoics and Peripatetics, had not the monuments of writers signalized them? Triumphal arches promote the glory of illustrious men from the carved inscription of their deeds. Thereby the observer recognizes the Liberator of his Country, the Establisher of Peace. The light of fame endures for no one save through his own or another’s writing. How many and how great kings thinkest thou there have been, of whom there is neither speech nor cogitation? Vainly have men stormed the heights of glory, if their fame does not shine in the light of letters. Other favour or distinction is as fabled Echo, or the plaudits of the Play, ceasing the moment it has begun.

“Besides all this, solace in grief, recreation in labour, cheerfulness in poverty, modesty amid riches and delights, faithfully are bestowed by letters. For the soul is redeemed from its vices, and even in adversity refreshed with sweet and wondrous cheer, when the mind is intended upon reading or writing what is profitable. Thou shalt find in human life no more pleasing or more useful employment; unless perchance when, with heart dilated through prayer and divine love, the mind perceives and arranges within itself, as with the hand of meditation, the great things of God. Believe one who has tried it, that all the sweets of the world, compared with these exercises, are wormwood.”[166]

Hereupon, still addressing himself to his friend and patron, Thomas À Becket, John suggests that these recreations are peculiarly beneficial to men in their circumstances, burdened with affairs; and he puts his principles in practice, by launching forth upon his lengthy work of learned and philosophic disquisition.

To supplement this outline of John’s appreciation of the Classics, it will be interesting to look into the literary interpretation of a classical poem, from the pen of one of his contemporaries. So little is known of the author, Bernard Silvestris, that he usually has been confused with his more famous fellow, Bernard of Chartres. We may refer to both of them again.[167] Here our business is solely with the Commentum Bernardi Silvestris super sex libros Aeneidos Virgilii.[168] The writer draws from the Saturnalia of the fifth-century grammarian, Macrobius; but his allegorical interpretation of the Aeneid seems to be his own. He finds in the Aeneid a twofold consideration, in that its author meant to teach philosophic truth, and at the same time was not inattentive to the poetic plot.

“Since then Virgil in this poem is both philosopher and poet, we shall first expound the purpose and method of the poet.... His aim is to unfold the calamities of Aeneas and other Trojans, and the labours of the exiles. Herein disregarding the truth of history as told by Dares the Phrygian,[169] and seeking to win the favour of Augustus, he adorns the facts with figments. For Virgil, greatest of Latin poets, wrote in imitation of Homer, greatest of Greek poets. As Homer in the Iliad narrates the fall of Troy and in the Odyssey the exile of Ulysses; so Virgil in the second Book briefly relates the overthrow of Troy, and in the rest the labours of Aeneas. Consider the twin order of narration, the natural and the artistic (artificialem). The natural is when the narrative proceeds according to the sequence of events, telling first what happened first. Lucan and Statius keep to this order. The artistic is when we begin in the middle of the story, and thence revert to the commencement. Terence writes thus, and Virgil in this work. It would have been the natural order to have described first the destruction of Troy, and then brought the Trojans to Crete, from Crete to Sicily, and from Sicily to Libya. But he first brings them to Dido, and introduces Aeneas relating the overthrow of Troy and the other things that he has suffered.[170]

“Up to this point we show how he proceeds: next let us observe why he does it so. With poets there is the reason of usefulness, as with a satirist; the reason of pleasure, as with a writer of comedies; and again these two combined, as with the historical poet. As Horace says:

‘Aut prodesse volunt aut delectare poetae,
Aut simul et iucunda et idonea dicere vitae.’

“This kind of a historical poem is shown by its figurative and polished diction and in the various mischances and deeds narrated. If any one will study to imitate it he will gain skill in writing. The narrative also contains instances and arguments for following the right and avoiding what is evil. Hence a twofold profit to the reader: skill in writing, gained through imitation, and prudence in conduct, drawn from example and precept. For instance, in the labours of Aeneas we have an example of endurance; and one of piety, in his affection for Anchises and Ascanius. From the reverence which he shows the gods, from the oracles which he supplicates, from the sacrifices which he offers, from the vows and prayers which he pours forth, we feel drawn to religion: while through Dido’s unbridled love, we are recalled from desire for the forbidden.”

The above is excellent, but not particularly original. It shows, however, that Bernard could appreciate the Aeneid in this way. His allegorical interpretation is of a piece with current mediaeval methods. Yet to take a poem allegorically was not distinctively mediaeval; for Homer and other poets had been thus expounded from the days of Plato, who did not himself approve. With Bernard, each Book of the Aeneid represents one of the ages of man, the first Book betokening infancy, the second boyhood, and so forth. Allegorical etymologies are applied to the names of the personages; and in general the whole natural course and setting of the poem is taken allegorically. “The sea is the human body moved and tossed by drunkenness and lusts, which are represented by waves.” Aeneas, to wit, the human soul joined to its body, comes to Carthage, the mundane city where Dido reigns, which is lust; this allegory is unfolded in detail. So the interpretation ambles on, not more and not less jejune than such ingenuities usually are.

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Classical studies reached their zenith in the twelfth century. For in every way that century surpassed its predecessors; and in classical studies it excelled the thirteenth, which devoted to them a smaller portion of its intellectual energies. The twelfth century, to be sure, was prodigiously interested in dialectic and theology. Yet these had not quite engulfed the humanities; nor had any newly awakened interest in physical or experimental science distracted the eyes of men from the charms of the ancient written page. The change took place in the thirteenth century. Its best intellectual efforts, north of the Alps at least, were directed to the study and theological appropriation of the Aristotelian encyclopaedia of metaphysics and universal knowledge.[171] The effect of Aristotle was totally unliterary. And the minds of men, absorbed in mastering this giant mass of knowledge and argument, ceased to regard literary form and the humane aspects of Latin literature.

Until the thirteenth century, dialectic and theology were not completely severed from belles lettres. The Platonic-Augustinian theology of the twelfth century had been idealizing and imaginative, not to say poetical. Such an interesting exponent of it as Hugo of St. Victor appears as a literary personage, despite his stinted advocacy of classical study. One notes that for his time the chief single source of physical knowledge was the Latin version of the Timaeus, certainly not a prosaic composition. Thus, for the twelfth century, an effective cause of the continuance of the study of letters lay herein: whatever branch of natural knowledge might allure the student, he could not draw it bodily from a serious but unliterary repository, like the Physics or De animalibus of Aristotle, which were not yet available; he must follow his bent through the writings of various Latin poets as well as prose-writers. In fine, the sources of profane knowledge open to the twelfth century were literary in their nature, and might form part of the literature which would be read by a student of grammar or rhetoric.

One sees this in John of Salisbury. There may have been a few men who knew more than he did of some particular topic. But his range and readiness of knowledge were unique. And it is evident from his writings that his knowledge (except in logic) had no special or scientific source, but was derived from a promiscuous reading of Latin literature. As a result, he is himself a literary man. One may say much the same of his younger contemporary, Alanus de Insulis.[172] He too has gathered knowledge from literary sources, and he himself is one of the best Latin poets of the Middle Ages. Another extremely poetic philosopher was Bernard Silvestris, the interpreter of Virgil. His De mundi unitate is a Pantheistic exposition of the Universe; it is also a poem; and incidentally it affords another illustration of the general fact, that before the works of Aristotle were made known and expounded in the thirteenth century, all kinds of natural and quasi-philosophic knowledge were drawn from a variety of writings, some of them poor enough from any point of view, but none of them distinctly scientific and unliterary, like the works of Aristotle. Formal logic or dialectic, as cultivated by Abaelard for example, appears as an exception. It had been specialized and more scientifically treated than any branch of substantial knowledge; for indeed it was based on the logical treatises of Aristotle, most of which were in use before Abaelard’s death, and all of which were known to Thierry of Chartres and John of Salisbury.[173]

The contrast between the cathedral school of Chartres and the University of Paris illustrates the change from the twelfth to the thirteenth century. The former has been spoken of in a previous chapter, where its story was brought down to the times of its great teachers, Bernard and Thierry, of whom we shall have to speak in connection with the teaching of grammar and the reading of classical authors. The school flourished exceedingly until the middle of the twelfth century.[174] By that time the schools of Paris had received an enormous impetus from the popularity of Abaelard, and scholars had begun to push thither from all quarters. But it was not till the latter part of the century that the University, with its organization of Masters and Faculties, began visibly to emerge out of the antecedent cathedral school.[175] Chartres was a home of letters; and there Latin literature was read enthusiastically. But in Paris Abaelard was pre-eminently a dialectician; and after he died, through those decades when the University was coming into existence, the tide of study set irresistibly toward theology and metaphysics. Students and masters of the Faculty of Arts outnumbered all the other Faculties; nevertheless, counting not by tumultuous numbers, but by intellectual strength, the great matter was Theology, and the majority of the Masters in the Arts were students in the divine science. The Arts were regarded as a preparatory discipline. So through its great period, which roughly coincides with the thirteenth century, the University of Paris was for all Europe the supreme seat of Dialectic, Metaphysics, and Theology, and yet no kindly nurse of belles lettres.

The tendencies of Oxford were not quite the same as those of Paris, yet Latin literature as such does not seem to have been cultivated there for its own fair sake. This apparently was unaffected by the fact that a movement for “close” or exact scholarship existed at the English university. Grosseteste, its first great chancellor, teacher and inspirer, unquestionably introduced, or encouraged, the study of Greek; and his famous pupil, Roger Bacon, was a serious Greek scholar, and wrote a grammar of that tongue. But neither Grosseteste nor Bacon appears to have been moved by any literary interest in Greek literature; both one and the other urged the importance of Greek, and of Hebrew too and Arabic, in order to reach a surer knowledge of Scripture and Aristotle. They sought to open the veritable founts of theology and natural knowledge, an intelligent aim indeed, but quite unliterary. In spirit both these men belong to the thirteenth century, not to the twelfth.[176]

In Italy, one does not find that the passage from the twelfth to the thirteenth century displays the decline in classical studies which is apparent north of the Alps. The reasons seem obvious. The passion for metaphysical theology did not invade this land of practical ecclesiasticism and urban living, where pagan antiquity, dumb, broken, and defaced, yet everywhere surviving, was the medium of life and thought and temperamental inclination in the thirteenth as well as in the twelfth century. Nor was Italy as yet becoming scientific, or greatly interested in physical hypothesis; although medicine was cultivated in various centres, Salerno, for example, and Bologna. But for the twelfth, and for the thirteenth century as well, Italy’s great intellectual achievement was in the two closely neighbouring sciences of canon and civil law. These made the University of Bologna as pre-eminent in law as Paris was in theology. There had been schools of grammar and rhetoric at Bologna and Ravenna, before the lecturing of Irnerius on the Pandects drew to the first-named town the concourse of mature and seemly students who were gradually to organize themselves into a university.[177] Thus at Bologna law flourished and grew great, springing upward from an antecedent base of grammatical if not literary studies. The study of the law never cut itself away from this foundation. For the exigencies of legal business demanded training in the scrivener’s and notarial arts of inditing epistles and drawing documents, for which the ars dictaminis, to wit, the art of composition was of primary utility. This ars, teaching as it did both the general rules of composition and the more specific forms of legal or other formal documents, pertained to law as well as grammar. Of the latter study it was perhaps in Italy the main element, or, rather, end. But even without this hybrid link of the dictamen, grammar was needed for the interpretation of the Pandects; and indeed some of the glosses of Irnerius and other early glossators are grammatical rather than legal explanations of the text. We should bear in mind that this august body of jurisprudential law existed not in the inflated statutory Latin of Justinian’s time, but in the sonorous and correct language of the earlier empire, when the great Jurists lived, as well as Quintilian. Accordingly a close study of the Pandects required, as well as yielded, a knowledge of classical Latinity. Thus law tended to foster, rather than repress, grammar and rhetoric; and had no unfavourable effect on classical studies. And even as such studies “flourished” in Italy in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, they did not cease to “flourish,” there in the thirteenth, in the same general though rather dull and uncreative way. For it will hereafter appear that the productions of the Latin poets and rhetoricians of Italy were below the literary level of those composed north of the Loire in France, or in England.

II

From the days of the Roman Empire, the study of grammar was, and never ceased to be, the basis of the conscious and rational knowledge of the Latin tongue. The Roman boys studied it at Rome; the Latin-speaking provincials studied it, and all people of education who remained in the lands of western Europe which once had formed part of the Empire; its study was renewed under Charlemagne; he and Alcuin and all the scholars of the ninth century were deeply interested in what to them represented tangible Latinity, and in fact was to be a chief means by which their mediaeval civilization should maintain its continuity with its source. For grammar was most instrumental in preserving mediaeval Latin from violent deflections, which would have left the ancient literature as the literature of a forgotten tongue. Had mediaeval Latin failed to keep itself veritable Latin; had it instead suffered transmutation into local Romance dialects, the Latin classics, and all that hung from them, might have become as unknown to the Middle Ages as the Greek, and even have been lost forever. It was the study of Latin grammar, with classic texts to illustrate its rules, that kept Latin Latin, and preserved standards of universal usage throughout western Europe, by which one language was read and spoken everywhere by educated people. From century to century this language suffered modification, and varied according to the knowledge and training of those who used it; yet its changes were never such as to destroy its identity as a language, or prevent the Latin writer of one age or country from understanding whatever in any land or century had been written in that perennial tongue.

Therefore fortunately, as the Carolingian scholars studied Latin grammar, so likewise did those of all succeeding mediaeval generations, thereby holding themselves to at least a homogeneity, though not an unvarying uniformity, of usage. Evidently, however, the method of grammatical instruction had to vary with the needs of the learners and the teachers’ skill. The Romans prattled Latin on their mothers’ knees; and so, with gradually widening deflections, did the Latinized provincials. Neither Roman nor Provincial prattled Ciceronian periods, or used quite the vocabulary of Virgil; yet it was Latin that they talked. Thenceforward there was to be a difference between the people who lived in countries where Romance dialects had emerged from the spoken Latin and prevailed, and those people who spoke a Teuton speech. Although always drawing away, the natal speech of Romance peoples was so like Latin, that in learning it they seemed rather to correct their vulgar tongue than to acquire a new language. So it was in the Christian parts of Spain, in Gaul, and, above all, in Italy, where the vulgar dialects were tardiest in taking distinctive form. Nevertheless, as the Romance dialects, for instance in the country north of the Loire, developed into the various forms of what is called Old French, young people at school would have to learn Latin as a quasi-foreign tongue. Across the Rhine in Germany boys ordinarily had to learn it at school, as a strange language, just as they must to-day; and every effort was devoted to this end.[178] It was not likely that the grammars composed for Roman boys, or at least for boys who spoke Latin from their infancy, would altogether meet the needs of German, or even French, youth. Yet only gradually and slowly in the Middle Ages were grammars put together to make good the insufficiencies of Donatus and Priscian.

The former was the teacher of St. Jerome. He composed a short work, in the form of questions and answers, explaining the eight parts of speech, but giving no rules of gender, or forms of declension and conjugation, needed for the instruction of those who, unlike the Roman youth, could not speak the language. This little book went by the name of the Ars minor. The same grammarian composed a more extensive work, the third book of which was called the Barbarismus, after its opening chapter. It defined the figures of speech (figurae, locutiones), and was much used through the mediaeval period.

The Ars minor explained in simple fashion the elements of speech. But the Institutiones grammaticae of Priscian, a contemporary of Cassiodorus, offered a mine of knowledge. Of its eighteen books the first sixteen were devoted to the parts of speech and their forms, considered under the variations of gender, declension, and conjugation. The remaining two treated of constructio or syntax. As early as the tenth century Priscian was separated into these two parts, which came to be known as Priscianus major and minor. The Priscian manuscripts, whose name is legion, usually present the former. Diffuse in language, confused in arrangement, and overladen perhaps with its thousands of examples, it was berated for its labyrinthine qualities even in the Middle Ages; yet its sixteen books remained the chief source of etymological knowledge. Priscianus minor was less widely used.

The grammarians of the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries followed Donatus and Priscian, making extracts from their works, or abridgements, and now and then introducing examples of deviation from the ancient usage. The last came usually from the Vulgate text of Scripture, which sometimes departed from the idioms or even word-forms approved by the old authorities.[179] The Ars minor of Donatus became enveloped in commentaries; but Priscian was so formidable that in these early centuries he was merely glossed, that is, annotated in brief marginal fashion.It would be tedious to dwell upon mediaeval grammatical studies. But the tendencies characterizing them in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries may be indicated briefly. The substance of the Priscianus major was followed by mediaeval grammarians. That is to say, while admitting certain novelties,[180] they adhered to its rules and examples relating to the forms of words, their declension and conjugation. But the Priscianus minor, although used, was departed from. In the first place its treatment of its subject (syntax) was confused and inadequate. There was, however, a broader reason for seeking rules elsewhere. Mediaeval Latin, in its progress as a living or quasi-living language, departed from the classical norms far more in syntax and composition than in word-forms. The latter continued much the same as in antiquity. But the popular and so to speak Romance tendencies of mediaeval Latin brought radical changes of word-order and style, which worked back necessarily upon the rules of syntax. These had been but hazily stated by the old writers, and the task of constructing an adequate Latin syntax remained undone. It was a task of vital importance for the preservation of the Latin tongue. Word-forms alone will not preserve the continuity of a language; it is essential that their use in speech and writing should be kept congruous through appropriate principles of syntax. Such were intelligently formulated by mediaeval grammarians. The result was not exactly what it would have been had the task been carried out in the fourth century: yet it has endured in spite of the attacks, pseudo-attacks indeed, of the cinquecento; and the mediaeval treatment of Latin syntax is the basis of the modern treatment. One may add that syntax or constructio was taken broadly as embracing not only the agreements of number and gender, and the governing[181] of cases, but also the order of words in a sentence, which had changed so utterly between the time of Cicero and Thomas Aquinas.

These general statements find illustration in the famous Doctrinale of Alexander de Villa-Dei, whose author was born in Normandy in the latter half of the twelfth century. He studied at Paris, and in course of time was summoned by the Bishop of Dol to instruct his nepotes in grammar. While acting as their tutor, he appears to have helped their memory by setting his rules in rhyme; and the bishop asked him to write a Summa of grammar in some such fashion. Complying, he composed the Doctrinale in the year 1199, putting his work into leonine or rhyming hexameter, to make it easier to memorize. Rarely has a school-book met with such success. It soon came into use in Paris and elsewhere, and for some three hundred years was the common manual of grammatical teaching throughout western Europe. It was then attacked and apparently driven from the field by the so-called Humanists, who, however, failed to offer anything better in its place, and plagiarized from the work which they professed to execrate.[182]

The etymological portions of the Doctrinale follow the teachings of the Priscianus major; the part devoted to syntax, or constructio, shows traces of the influence of the Priscianus minor. But Alexander’s treatment of syntax is more systematic and elaborate than Priscian’s; and he did not hesitate to defer to the Vulgate and other Christian Latin writings. Thus he made his work conform to contemporary usage, which its purpose was to set forth. He did the same in the section on Prosody, in which he says that the ancient metricians distinguished a number of feet no longer used, and he will confine himself to six—the dactyl, spondee, trochee, anapaest, iambus, and tribrach.[183] In contradiction to classical usage he condemns elision;[184] and in his chapter on accent he throws over the ancient rules:

“Accentus normas legitur posuisse vetustas;
Non tamen has credo servandas tempore nostro.”[185]

Alexander was not really an innovator. He followed previous grammarians in condemning elision, and in what he says of quantity and accent. In his syntax he endeavoured to set forth rules conforming to the best Latin usage of his time, like other mediaeval grammarians before him. He was indeed vehement in his advocacy of recent and Christian authors as standards of writing, and he inveighed against the scholars of Orleans, who read the Classics, and would have us sacrifice to the gods and observe the indecent festivals of Faunus and Jove.[186] But others defended the Orleans school, and perhaps still regarded the Classics as the best arbiters of grammar and eloquence. There exist thirteenth-century grammars which follow Priscian more closely than Alexander does.[187] Yet his work represents the dominant tendencies of his time.

Twelfth and thirteenth century grammarians recommended to their pupils a variety of reading, in which mediaeval and early Christian compositions held as large a place as Virgil and Ovid. The Doctrinale advocates no work more emphatically than Petrus Riga’s Aurora, a versified paraphrase of Scripture. Its author was a chorister in Rheims, and died in 1209.[188] The works of scholastic philosophers were not cited as frequently as the compositions of verse-writers; yet mediaeval grammarians were influenced by the language of philosophy, and drew from its training principles which they applied to their own science. Grammar could not help becoming dialectical when the intellectual world was turning to logic and metaphysics. Commencing in the twelfth century, overmasteringly in the thirteenth, logic penetrated grammar and compelled an application of its principles. Often grammarians might better have looked to linguistic usage than to dialectic; yet if grammar was to become a rational science, it had to systematize itself through principles of logic, and make use of dialectic in its endeavour to state a reason for its rules. Those who applied logic to grammar at least endeavoured to distinguish between the two, not always fruitfully. But a real difference could not fail to assert itself inasmuch as logic was in truth of universal application, while mediaeval grammar never ceased to be the grammar of the Latin language. Nevertheless its terminology was largely drawn from logic.[189]

So dialectic brought both good and ill, proving itself helpful in the regulation of syntax, but banefully affecting grammarians with the conviction that language was the creature of reason, and must conform to principles of logic. One likewise notes with curious interest, that, from their dialectic training apparently, grammarians first found as many species of grammar as languages,[190] and then forsook this idea for the view that, in order to be a science, grammar must be universal, or, as they phrased it, one, and must possess principles not applicable specially to Greek or Latin, but to congruous construction in the abstract; “de constructione congrua secundum quod abstrahit ab omni lingua speciali,” are the words of the English thirteenth-century philosopher and grammarian, Robert Kilwardby.[191] A like idea affected Roger Bacon, who composed a Greek grammar,[192] which appears to have been intended as the first part of a work upon the grammars of the learned languages other than Latin. It was adapted to afford a grounding in the elements of Greek: yet it touches matters in a way showing that the writer had thought deeply on the affinities of languages and the common principles of grammar. Of this the following passage is evidence:

“Therefore, because I wish to treat of the properties of Greek grammar, it should be known that there are differences in the Greek language, to be hereafter noted in giving the names of these dialects (idiomata). And I call them idiomata and not linguas, because they are not different languages, but different properties which are peculiarities (idiomata) of the same language.[193] Wishing to set forth Greek grammar, for the use of the Latins, it is necessary to compare it with Latin grammar, because I commonly speak Latin myself, seeing that the crowd does not know Greek; also because grammar is of one and the same substance in all languages, although varying in its non-essentials (accidentaliter), also because Latin grammar in a certain special way is derived from Greek, as Priscian says, and other grammarians.”[194]

The dialecticizing of grammar took place in the north, under influences radiating from Paris, the chief dialectic centre. These did not deeply affect grammatical studies in Italy, or in the Midi of France, which in some respects exhibited like intellectual tendencies. Grammar was zealously studied in Italy, but it did not there become either speculative or dialectical. To be sure northern manuals were used, especially the Doctrinale; but the study remained practical, an art rather than a science, and its chief element, or end, was the ars dictaminis or dictandi. The grammatical treatises of Italians were treatises upon this art of epistolary composition and the proper ways of drawing documents. These works were studied also in the North, where the ars dictaminis was by no means neglected.[195]

Latin grammar, although over-dialecticized in the North, and in Italy made very practical, remained of necessity the foundation of classical studies, and of mediaeval literary effort, in prose and verse. As the basis of liberal studies, it had no truer home than the cathedral school of Chartres.[196] Contemporary writers picture the manner in which this study was there made to perform its most liberal office, under favourable mediaeval conditions, in the first half of the twelfth century. The time antedates the Doctrinale, and one notes at once that the Chartrian masters used the ancient grammatical authorities. This is shown by the Eptateuchon of Thierry, who was headmaster (scholasticus) and then Chancellor there for a number of years between 1120 and 1150. As its name implies, the work was a manual, or rather an encyclopaedia, of the Seven Arts. Thierry compiled it from the writings of the “chief doctors on the arts.” He transcribed the Ars minor of Donatus and then portions of his larger work. Having commended this author for his conciseness and subtilty, Thierry next copied out the whole of Priscian. As text-books for the second branch of the Trivium, he gives Cicero’s De inventione rhetorica libri 2, Rhetoricorum ad Herennium libri 4, De partitione oratoria dialogus, and concludes with the rhetorical writings of Martianus Capella and J. Severianus.[197]

So much for the books. Now for the method of teaching as described by John of Salisbury. He gives the practice of Bernard of Chartres, Thierry’s elder brother, who was scholasticus and Chancellor before him, in the first quarter of the twelfth century. John has been advocating the study of grammar as the fundamentum atque radix of those exercises by which virtue and philosophy are reached; and he is advising a generous reading of the Classics by the student, and their constant use by the professor, to illustrate his teaching.

“This method was followed by Bernard of Chartres, exundissimus modernis temporibus fons litterarum in Gallia. By citations from the authors he showed what was simple and regular; he brought into relief the grammatical figures, the rhetorical colours, the artifices of sophistry, and pointed out how the text in hand bore upon other studies; not that he sought to teach everything in a single session, for he kept in mind the capacity of his audience. He inculcated correctness and propriety of diction, and a fitting use of congruous figures. Realizing that practise strengthens memory and sharpens faculty, he urged his pupils to imitate what they had heard, inciting some by admonitions, others by whipping and penalties. Each pupil recited the next day something from what he had heard on the preceding. The evening exercise, called the declinatio, was filled with such an abundance of grammar that any one, of fair intelligence, by attending it for a year, would have at his fingers’ ends the art of writing and speaking, and would know the meaning of all words in common use. But since no day and no school ought to be vacant of religion, Bernard would select for study a subject edifying to faith and morals. The closing part of this declinatio, or rather philosophical recitation, was stamped with piety: the souls of the dead were commended, a penitential Psalm was recited, and the Lord’s Prayer.

“For those boys who had to write exercises in prose or verse, he selected the poets and orators, and showed how they should be imitated in the linking of words and the elegant ending of passages. If any one sewed another’s cloth into his garment, he was reproved for the theft, but usually was not punished. Yet Bernard gently pointed out to awkward borrowers that whoever imitated the ancients (majores) should himself become worthy of imitation by posterity. He impressed upon his pupils the virtue of economy, and the values of things and words: he explained where a meagreness and tenuity of diction was fitting, and where copiousness or even excess should be allowed, and the advantage of due measure everywhere. He admonished them to go through the histories and poems with diligence, and daily to fix passages in their memory. He advised them, in reading, to avoid the superfluous, and confine themselves to the works of distinguished authors. For, he said (quoting from Quintilian) that to follow out what every contemptible person has said, is irksome and vainglorious, and destructive of the capacity which should remain free for better things. To the same effect he cited Augustine, and remarked that the ancients thought it a virtue in a grammarian to be ignorant of something. But since in school exercises nothing is more useful than to practise what should be accomplished by the art, his scholars wrote daily in prose and verse, and proved themselves in discussions.”[198]

This passage indicates with what generous use of the auctores Bernard expounded grammar and explained the orators and poets; how he assigned portions of their works for memorizing, and with what care he corrected his pupils’ prose and metrical compositions, criticizing their knowledge and their taste. He was a man mindful of his Christian piety toward the dead and living, but caring greatly for the Classics, and loving study. “The old man of Chartres (senex Carnotensis),” says John of Salisbury, meaning Bernard, “named wisdom’s keys in a few lines, and though I am not taken with the sweetness of the metre, I approve the sense:

‘Mens humilis, studium quaerendi, vita quieta,
Scrutinium tacitum, paupertas, terra aliena....’”[199]

Bernard, Thierry, and other masters and scholars of their school, as the advocates of classical education, detested the men called by John of Salisbury Cornificiani, who were for shortening the academic course, as one would say to-day, so that the student might finish it up in two or three years, and proceed to the business of life. A good many in the twelfth century adopted this notion, and turned from the pagan classics, not as impious, but as a waste of time. Some of the good scholars of Chartres lost heart, among them William of Conches and a certain Richard, both teachers of John of Salisbury. They had followed Bernard’s methods; “but when the time came that so many men, to the great prejudice of truth, preferred to seem, rather than be, philosophers and professors of the arts, engaging to impart the whole of philosophy in less than three years, or even two, then my masters vanquished by the clamour of the ignorant crowd, stopped. Since then, less time has been given to grammar. So it has come about that those who profess to teach all the arts, both liberal and mechanical, are ignorant of the first of them, without which vainly will one try to get the rest.”[200]

Upon these people who seemed charlatans, and yet may have represented tendencies of the coming time, Thierry, Gilbert de la PorrÈe,[201] and John of Salisbury poured their sarcasms. The controversy may have clarified Bernard’s consciousness of the value of classical studies and deepened his sense of obligation to the ancients, until it drew from him perhaps the finest of mediaeval utterances touching the matter: “Bernard of Chartres used to say that we were like dwarfs seated on the shoulders of giants. If we see more and further than they, it is not due to our own clear eyes or tall bodies, but because we are raised on high and upborne by their gigantic bigness.”[202]

Echoes of this same controversy—have they ever quite died away?—are heard in letters of the scholarly Peter of Blois, who was educated at Paris in the middle of the twelfth century, became a secretary of Henry Plantagenet and spent the greater part of his life in England, dying about the year 1200. He writes to a friend:

“You greatly commend your nephew, saying that never have you found a man of subtler vein: because, forsooth, skimming over grammar, and skipping the reading of the classical authors, he has flown to the trickeries of the logicians, where not in the books themselves but from abstracts and note-books, he has learned dialectic. Knowledge of letters cannot rest on such, and the subtilty you praise may be pernicious. For Seneca says, nothing is more odious than subtilty when it is only subtilty. Some people, without the elements of education, would discuss point and line and superficies, fate, chance and free-will, physics and matter and the void, the causes of things and the secrets of nature and the sources of the Nile! Our tender years used to be spent in rules of grammar, analogies, barbarisms, solecisms, tropes, with Donatus, Priscian, and Bede, who would not have devoted pains to these matters had they supposed that a solid basis of knowledge could be got without them. Quintilian, Caesar, Cicero, urge youths to study grammar. Why condemn the writings of the ancients? it is written that in antiquis est scientia. You rise from the darkness of ignorance to the light of science only by their diligent study. Jerome glories in having read Origen; Horace boasts of reading Homer over and over. It was much to my profit, when as a little chap I was studying how to make verses, that, as my master bade me, I took my matter not from fables but from truthful histories. And I profited from the letters of Hildebert of Le Mans, with their elegance of style and sweet urbanity; for as a boy I was made to learn some of them by heart. Besides other books, well known in the schools, I gained from keeping company with Trogus Pompeius, Josephus, Suetonius, Hegesippus, Quintus Curtius, Tacitus and Livy, all of whom throw into their histories much that makes for moral edification and the advance of liberal science. And I read other books, which had nothing to do with history—very many of them. From all of them we may pluck sweet flowers, and cultivate ourselves from their urbane suavity of speech.”[203]

In another letter Peter writes to his bishop of Bath, as touching the accusation of some “hidden detractor,” that he, Peter, is but a useless compiler, who fills letters and sermons with the plunder of the ancients and Holy Writ:

“Let him cease, or he will hear what he does not like; for I am full of cracks, and can hold in nothing, as Terence says. Let him try his hand at compiling, as he calls it.—But what of it! Though dogs may bark and pigs may grunt, I shall always pattern on the writings of the ancients; with them shall be my occupation; nor ever, while I am able, shall the sun find me idle.”[204]

It is evident how broadly Peter of Blois, or John of Salisbury, or the Chartrians, were read in the Latin Classics. Peter mentions even Tacitus, a writer not thought to have been much read in the Middle Ages. We have been looking at the matter rather in regard to poetry and eloquence—belles lettres. But one may also note the same broad reading (among the few who read at all) on the part of those who sought for the ethical wisdom of the ancients. This is apparent (perhaps more apparent than real) with Abaelard, who is ready with a store of antique ethical citations.[205] It is also borne witness to by the treatise Moralis philosophia de honesto et utili, placed among the works of Hildebert of Le Mans,[206] but probably from the pen of William of Conches, grammaticus post Bernardum Carnotensem opulentissimus, as John of Salisbury calls him.[207] In some manuscripts it is entitled Summa moralium philosophorum, quite appropriately. One might hardly compare it for organic inclusiveness with the Christian Summa of Thomas Aquinas; but it may very well be likened to the more compact Sentences of the Lombard[208] which were so solidly put together about the same time. The Lombard drew his Sentences from the writings of the Church Fathers; William’s work consists of moral extracts, mainly from Cicero, Seneca, Sallust, Terence, Horace, Lucan, and BoËthius. The first part, De honesto, reviews Prudentia, Justitia, Fortitudo, and under these a number of particular virtues in correspondence with which the extracts are arranged. The De utili considers the adventitious goods of circumstance and fortune.

The extracts forming the substance of this work were intelligently selected and smoothly joined; and the treatise was much used by those who studied the antique philosophy of life. It was drawn upon, for instance, by that truculent and well-born Welshman, Giraldus Cambrensis, in his De instructione principum, which the author wrote partly to show how evilly Henry Plantagenet performed the functions of a king. This irrepressible claimant of St. David’s See had been long a prickly thorn for Henry’s side.[209] But he was a scholar, and quotes from the whole range of the Latin Classics.

III

When a man is not a mere transcriber, but puts something of himself into the product of his pen, his work will reflect his personality, and may disclose the various factors of his spiritual constitution. To discover from the writings of mediaeval scholars the effect of their classical studies upon their characters is of greater interest than to trace from their citations the authors read by them. Such a compilation as the Summa moralium which has just been noticed, while plainly disclosing the latter information, tells nothing of the personality of him who strung the extracts together. Yet he had read writings which could hardly have failed to influence him. Cicero and Seneca do not leave their reader unchanged, especially if he be seeking ethical instruction. And there was a work known to this particular compiler which moved men in the Middle Ages. Deep must have been the effect of that book so widely read and pondered on and loved, the De consolatione of BoËthius with its intimate consolings, its ways of reasoning and looking upon life, its setting of the intellectual above the physical, its insistence that mind rather than body makes the man. Imagine it brought home to a vigorous struggling personality—imagine Alfred reading and translating it, and adding to it from the teachings of his own experience.[210] The study of such a book might form the turning of a mediaeval life; at least could not fail to temper the convulsions of a soul storm-driven amid unreconcilable spiritual conflicts.

One may look back even to the time of Alfred or Charlemagne and note suggestions coming from classical reading. For instance, the antique civilization being essentially urban, words denoting qualities of disciplined and polished men had sprung from city life, as contrasted with rustic rudeness. Thus the word urbanitas passed over into mediaeval use when the quality itself hardly existed outside of the transmitted Latin literature. For an Anglo-Saxon or a Frank to use and even partly comprehend its significance meant his introduction to a new idea. Alcuin writes to Charlemagne that he knows how it rejoices the latter to meet with zeal for learning and church discipline, and how pleasing to him is anything which is seasoned with a touch of wit—urbanitatis sale conditum.[211] And again, in more curious phrase, he compliments a certain worthy upon his metrical exposition of the creed, “wherein I have found gold-spouting whirlpools (aurivomos gurgites) of spiritual meanings abounding with gems of scholastic wit (scholasticae urbanitatis).”[212] Though doubtless this “scholastic wit” was flat enough, it was something for these men to get the notion of what was witty and entertaining through a word so vocalized with city life as urbanitas, a word that we have seen used quite knowingly by the more sophisticated scholar, Peter of Blois.

Again, it is matter of common observation that a feeling for nature’s loveliness depends somewhat on the growth of towns. But mediaeval men constantly had the idea suggested to them by the classic poetry of city-dwelling poets. Here are some lines by Alcuin or one of his friends, expressing sentiments which never came to them from the woods with which they were disagreeably familiar:

“O mea cella, mihi habitatio, dulcis, amata,
Semper in aeternum, o mea cella, vale.
Undique te cingit ramis resonantibus arbos,
Silvula florigeris semper onusta comis.”[213]

These are little hints of the effect of the antique literature upon men who still were somewhat rough-hewn. Advancing a century and a half, the influence of classic study is seen, as it were, “in the round” in Gerbert.[214] It is likewise clear and full in John of Salisbury, of whom we have spoken, and shall speak again.[215] For an admirable example, however, of the subtle working of the antique literature upon character and temperament, we may look to that scholar-prelate whose letters the youthful Peter of Blois studied with profit, Hildebert of Lavardin, Bishop of Le Mans, and Archbishop of Tours. He shows the effect of the antique not so strikingly in the knowledge which he possessed or the particular opinions which he entertained, as in the balance and temperance of his views, and incidentally in his fine facility of scholarship.

Hildebert was born at Lavardin, a village near the mouth of the Loire, about the year 1055. He belonged to an unimportant but gentle family. Dubious tradition has it that one of his teachers was Berengar of Tours, and that he passed some time in the monastery of Cluny, of whose great abbot, Hugh, he wrote a life. It is more probable that he studied at Le Mans. But whatever appears to have been the character of his early environment, Hildebert belongs essentially to the secular clergy, and never was a monk. While comparatively young, he was made head of the cathedral school of Le Mans, and then archdeacon. In the year 1096, the old bishop of Le Mans died, and Hildebert, then about forty years of age, was somewhat quickly chosen his successor, by the clergy and people of the town, in spite of the protests of certain of the canons of the cathedral. The none too happy scholar-bishop found himself at once a powerless but not negligible element of a violently complicated feudal situation. There was the noble Helias, Count of Maine, who was holding his domain against Robert de Bellesme, the latter slackly supported by William Rufus of England, who claimed the overlordship of the land. Helias reluctantly acquiesced in Hildebert’s election. Not so Rufus, who never ceased to hate and persecute the man that had obtained the see which had been in the gift of his father, William the Conqueror. It happened soon after that Count Helias was taken prisoner by his opponent, and was delivered over to Rufus at Rouen. But Fulk of Anjou now thrust himself into this feudal mÊlÉe, appeared at Le Mans, entered, and was acknowledged as its lord. He left a garrison, and departed before the Red King reached the town. The latter began its siege, but soon made terms with Fulk, by which Le Mans was to be given to Rufus, Helias was to be set free, and many other matters were left quite unsettled.

Now Rufus entered the town (1098), where Hildebert nervously received him; Helias, set free by the King, offered to become his feudal retainer; Rufus would have none of him; so Helias defied the King, and was permitted to go his way by that strange man, who held his knightly honour sacred, but otherwise might commit any atrocity prompted by rage or greed. It was well for Helias that trouble with the French King now drew Rufus to the north. The next year, 1099, Rufus in England heard that the Count had renewed the war, and captured Le Mans, except the citadel. He hurried across the channel, rushed through the land, entered Le Mans, and passed on through it, chasing Helias. But the war languished, and Rufus returned to Le Mans, or to what was left of it. Hildebert had cause to tremble. He had met the King on the latter’s hurried arrival from England for the war. Rufus had spoken him fair. But now, at Le Mans, he was accused before the monarch of complicity in the revolt. Quickly flared the King’s anger against the man whom he never had ceased to detest. He ordered him to pull down the towers of his cathedral, which rose threatening and massive over the city’s ruins and the citadel of the King. What could the defenceless bishop do to avert disgrace and the desolation of his beloved church? Words were left him, but they did not prove effectual. Rufus commanded him to choose between immediate compliance and going to England, there to submit himself to the judgment of the English bishops. He accepted the latter alternative, and followed the King, leaving his diocese ruined and his people dispersed. In England, Rufus dangled him along between fear and hope, till at last the disheartened prelate returned to the Continent, having ambiguously consented to pull down those towers. But instead, he set to work to repair the devastation of his diocese. The reiterated mandate of the King was not long in following him, and this time coupled with an accusation of treason. Hildebert’s state was desperate. His clergy were forbidden to obey him, his palace was sacked, his own property destroyed. Such were William’s methods of persuasion. Then the King proposed that the bishop should purge himself by the ordeal of hot iron. Hildebert, the bishop, the theologian, the scholar, was almost on the verge of taking up the challenge, when a letter from Yves, the saintly Bishop of Chartres, dissuaded him. At this moment, with ruin for his portion, and no escape, an arrow ended the Red King’s life in the New Forest. It was the year of grace 1100.

Now, what a change! Henry Beauclerc was from the first his friend, as William Rufus to the last had been his enemy. Hitherto Hildebert has appeared weakly endeavouring to elude destruction, and perhaps with no unshaken loyalty in his bosom toward any cause except his dire necessities. Henceforth, sailing a calmer sea, he repays Henry’s favour with adherence and admiration. He has no support to offer Anselm of Canterbury, still struggling with the English monarchy over investitures; nor has he one word of censure for the clever cold-eyed scholar King who kept his brother, Robert of Normandy, a prisoner for twenty-eight years till he died.

Hildebert had still thirty years of life before him; nor were they all to be untroubled. Shortly after the Red King’s death, he made a voyage to Rome, to obtain the papal benediction. To judge from his poems, he was deeply impressed with the ruins of the ancient city. Returning he devoted himself to the affairs of his diocese and to rebuilding the cathedral and other churches of Le Mans. In 1125, in spite of his unwillingness, for he was seventy years old, he was enthroned Archbishop of Tours, where he was to be worried by disputes with Louis le Gros of France over investitures. But he acquitted himself with vigour, especially through his letters. A famous one relates to this struggle of his closing years:

“In adversity it is a comfort to hope for happier times. Long has this hope flattered me; and as the harvest in the fields cheers the countryman, the expectation of a fair season has comforted my soul. But now I no longer hope for the clearing of the cloudy weather, nor see where the storm-driven ship, on whose deck I sit, may gain the harbour of rest.

“Friends are silent; silent are the priests of Jesus Christ. And those also are silent through whose prayers I thought the king would be reconciled with me. I thought indeed, but in their silence the king has added to the pain of my wounds. Yet it was theirs to resist the injury to the canonical institutes of the Church. Theirs was it, if the matter had demanded it, to raise a wall before the house of Israel. Yet with the most serene king there is call for exhortation rather than threat, for advice rather than command, for instruction rather than the rod. By these he should have been drawn to agree, by these reverently taught not to sheath his arrows in an aged priest, nor make void the canonical laws, nor persecute the ashes of a church already buried, ashes in which I eat the bread of grief, in which I drink the cup of mourning, from which to be snatched away and escape is to pass from death to life.

“Yet amid these dire straits, anger has never triumphed over me, that I should raise a hue and cry against the anointed of the Lord, or wrest peace from him with the strong hand and by the arm of the Church. Suspect is the peace to which high potentates are brought not by love, but by force. Easily is it broken, and sometimes the final state is worse than the first. There is another way by which, Christ leading, I can better reach it. I will cast my thought upon the Lord, and He will give me the desire of my heart. The Lord remembered Joseph, forgotten by Pharaoh’s chief butler when prosperity had returned to him; He remembered David abandoned by his own son. Perhaps He will remember even me, and bring the tossing ship to rest on the desired shore. He it is who looks upon the petition of the meek, and does not spurn their prayers. He it is in whose hand the hearts of kings are wax. If I shall have found grace in His eyes, I shall easily obtain the grace of the king or advantageously lose it. For to offend man for the sake of God is to win God’s grace.”[216]

Hildebert was a classical scholar, and in his time unmatched as a writer of Latin prose and verse. Many of his elegiac poems survive, some of them so antique in sentiment and so correct in metre as to have been taken for products of the pagan period. One of the best is an elegy on Rome obviously inspired by his visit to that city of ruins:

“Par tibi, Roma, nihil, cum sis prope tota ruina.”

Its closing lines are interesting:

“Hic superÛm formas superi mirantur et ipsi,
Et cupiunt fictis vultibus esse pares.
Non potuit natura deos hoc ore creare
Quo miranda deÛm signa creavit homo.
Vultus adest his numinibus, potiusque coluntur
Artificum studio quam deitate sua.
Urbs felix, si vel dominis urbs illa careret,
Vel dominis esset turpe carere fide!”

Such phrases, such frank admiration for the idols of pagan Rome, are startling from the pen of a contemporary of St. Bernard. The spell of the antique lay on Hildebert, as on others of his time. “The gods themselves marvel at their own images, and desire to equal their sculptured forms. Nature was unable to make gods with such visages as man has created in these wondrous images of the gods. There is a look (vultus) about these deities, and they are worshipped for the skill of the sculptor rather than for their divinity.”[217] Hildebert was not only a bishop, he was a Christian; but the sense and feeling of ancient Rome had entered into him. Besides the poem just quoted, he wrote another, either in Rome or after his return, Christian in thought but most antique in sympathy and turn of phrase.

“Dum simulacra mihi, dum numina vana placerent,
Militia, populo, moenibus alta fui;
········
ruit alta senatus
Gloria, procumbunt templa, theatra jacent.”

The antique feeling of these lines is hardly balanced by the expressed sentiment: “plus Caesare Petrus!”[218] And again we hear the echo of the antique in

“Nil artes, nil pura fides, nil gloria linguae,
Nil fons ingenii, nil probitas sine re.”[219]

Hildebert has also a poem “On his Exile,” perhaps written while in England with the Red King. Quite in antique style it sings the loss of friends and fields, gardens and granaries, which the writer possessed while prospera fata smiled. Then

“Jurares superos intra mea vota teneri!”

—a very antique sentiment. But the Christian faith of the despoiled and exiled bishop reasserts itself as the poem closes.[220] Did Hildebert also write the still more palpably “antique” elegiacs on Hermaphrodite, and other questionable subjects?[221] That is hard to say. He may or may not have been the author of a somewhat scurrilous squib against a woman who seems to have sent him verses:

“Femina perfida, femina sordida, digna catenis.
“O miserabilis, insatiabilis, insatiata,
Desine scribere, desine mittere, carmina blandia,
Carmina turpia, carmina mollia, vix memoranda,
Nec tibi mittere, nec tibi scribere, disposui me.
“Mens tua vitrea, plumbea, saxea, ferrea, nequam,
Fingere, fallere, prodere, perdere, rem putat aequam.”[222]

With all his classical leanings, the major part of Hildebert was Christian. His theological writings which survive, his zeal against certain riotous heretics, and in general his letters, leave no doubt of this. It is from the Christian point of view that he gives his sincerest counsels; it is from that that he balances the advantages of an active or contemplative life, the claims of the Christian vita activa and vita contemplativa. Yet his classic tastes gave temperance to his Christian views, and often drew him to sheer scholarly pleasures and to an antique consideration of the incidents of life.

How sweetly the elements were mixed in him appears in a famous letter written to William of Champeaux, that Goliath of realism whom Abaelard discomfited in the Paris schools. The unhappy William retreated a little way across the Seine, and laid the foundations of the abbey of St. Victor in the years between 1108 and 1113. He sought to abandon his studies and his lectures, and surrender himself to the austere salvation of his soul, and yet scarcely with such irrevocable purpose as would rebuff the temperate advice of Hildebert’s letter proffered with tactful understanding.

“Over thy change of life my soul is glad and exults, that at length it has come to thee to determine to philosophize. For thou hadst not the true odour of a philosopher so long as thou didst not cull beauty of conduct from thy philosophic knowledge. Now, as honey from the honeycomb, thou hast drawn from that a worthy rule of living. This is to gather all of thee within virtue’s boundaries, no longer huckstering with nature for thy life, but attending less to what the flesh is able for, than to what the spirit wills. This is truly to philosophize; to live thus is already to enter the fellowship of those above. Easily shalt thou come to them if thou dost advance disburdened. The mind is a burden to itself until it ceases to hope and fear. Because Diogenes looked for no favour, he feared the power of no one. What the cynic infidel abhorred, the Christian doctor far more amply must abhor, since his profession is so much more fruitful through faith. For such are stumbling-blocks of conduct, impeding those who move toward virtue.

“But the report comes that you have been persuaded to abstain from lecturing. Hear me as to this. It is virtue to furnish the material of virtue. Thy new way of life calls for no partial sacrifice, but a holocaust. Offer thyself altogether to the Lord, since so He sacrificed Himself for thee. Gold shines more when scattered than when locked up. Knowledge also when distributed takes increase, and unless given forth, scorning the miserly possessor, it slips away. Therefore do not close the streams of thy learning.”[223]

Eventually William followed this, or other like advice. One sees Hildebert’s sympathetic point of view; he entirely approves of William’s renunciation of the world—a good bishop of the twelfth century might also have wished to renounce its troublous honours! Yes, William has at last turned to the true and most disburdened way of living. But this abandonment of worldly ends entails no abandonment of Christian knowledge or surrender of the cause of Christian learning. Nay, let William resume, and herein give himself to God’s will without reserve.

So the letter presents a temperate and noble view of the matter, a view as sound in the twentieth century as in the twelfth. And a like broad consideration Hildebert brings to a more particular discussion of the two modes of Christian living, the vita activa and the vita contemplativa, Leah and Rachel, Martha and Mary. He amply distinguishes these two ways of serving God from any mode of life with selfish aims. It happened that a devout monk and friend of Hildebert was made abbot of the monastery of St. Vincent, in the neighbourhood of Le Mans. The administrative duties of an abbot might be as pressing as a bishop’s, and this good man deplored his withdrawal from a life of more complete contemplation. So Hildebert wrote him a long discursive letter, of which our extracts will give the thread of argument:

“You bewail the peace of contemplation which is snatched away, and the imposed burden of active responsibilities. You were sitting with Mary at the feet of the Lord Jesus, when lo, you were ordered to serve with Martha. You confess that those dishes which Mary receives, sitting and listening, are more savoury than those which zealous Martha prepares. In these, indeed, is the bread of men, in those the bread of angels.”

And Hildebert descants upon the raptures of the vita contemplativa, of which his friend is now bereft.

“The contemplative and the active life, my dearest brother, you sometimes find in the same person, and sometimes apart. As the examples of Scripture show us. Jacob was joined to both Leah and Rachel; Christ teaches in the fields, anon He prays on the mountains; Moses is in the tents of the people, and again speaks with God upon the heights. So Peter, so Paul. Again, action alone is found, as in Leah and Martha, while contemplation gleams in Mary and Rachel. Martha, as I think, represents the clergy of our time, with whom the press of business closes the shrine of contemplation, and dries up the sacrifice of tears.

“No one can speak with the Lord while he has to prattle with the whole world. Such a prattler am I, and such a priest, who when I spend the livelong day caring for the herds, have not a moment for the care of souls. Affairs, the enemies of my spirit, come upon me; they claim me for their own, they thieve the private hour of prayer, they defraud the services of the sanctuary, they irritate me with their stings by day and infest my sleep; and what I can scarcely speak of without tears, the creeping furtive memory of disputes follows me miserable to the altar’s sacraments,—all such are even as the vultures which Abraham drove away from the carcases (Gen. xv. 11).

“Nay more, what untold loss of virtue is entailed by these occupations of the captive mind! While under their power we do not even serve with Martha. She ministered, but to Christ; she bustled about, but for Christ. We truly, who like Martha bustle about, and, like Martha, minister, neither bustle about for Christ nor minister to Him. For if in such bustling ministry thou seekest to win thine own desire, art taken with the gossip of the mob, or with pandering to carnal pleasures, thou art neither the Martha whom thou dost counterfeit nor the Mary for whom thou dost sigh.

“In that case, dearest brother, you would have just cause for grief and tears. But if you do the part of Martha simply, you do well; if, like Jacob, you hasten to and fro between Leah and Rachel, you do better; if with Mary you sit and listen, you do best. For action is good, whose pressing instancy, though it kill contemplation, draws back the brother wandering from Christ. Yet it is better, sometimes seated, to lay aside administrative cares, and amid the irksome nights of Leah, draw fresh life from Rachel’s loved embrace. From this intermixture the course to the celestials becomes more inclusive, for thereby the same soul now strives for the blessedness of men and anon participates in that of the angels. But of the zeal single for Mary, why should I speak? Is not the Saviour’s word enough, ‘Mary hath chosen the best part, which shall not be taken from her.’”

And in closing, Hildebert shows his friend the abbot that for him the true course is to follow Jacob interchanging Leah and Rachel; and then in the watches of his pastoral duties the celestial vision shall be also his.[224]

Could any one adjust more fairly this contest, so insistent throughout the annals of mediaeval piety, between active duties and heavenly contemplation? The only solution for abbot and bishop was to join Leah with Rachel. And how clearly Hildebert sees the pervasive peril of the active life, that the prelate be drawn to serve his pleasures and not Christ. Many souls of prelates had that cast into hell!

In theory Hildebert is clear as day, and altogether Christian, so far as we have followed the counsels of these letters. But in fact the quiet life had for him a temptation, to which he yielded himself more generously than to any of the grosser lures of his high prelacy. This temptation, so alluring and insidious, so fairly masked under the proffer of learning leading to fuller Christian knowledge, was of course the all too beloved pagan literature, and the all too humanly convincing plausibilities of pagan philosophy. Hildebert’s writings evince that kind of classical scholarship which springs only from great study and great love. His soul does not appear to have been riven by a consciousness of sin in this behoof. Sometimes he passes so gently from Christian to pagan ethics, as to lead one to suspect that he did not deeply feel the inconsistency between them. Or again, he seems satisfied with the moral reasonings of paganism, and sets them forth without a qualm. For there was the antique pagan side of our good bishop; and how pagan thoughts and views of life had become a part of Hildebert’s nature, appears in a most interesting letter written to King Henry, consoling him upon the loss of his son and the noble company so gaily sailing from Normandy in that ill-starred White Ship in the year 1120.

Hildebert begins reminding the King how much more it is for a monarch to rule himself than others. Hitherto he has triumphed over fortune, if fortune be anything; now she has wounded him with her sharpest dart. Yet that cannot penetrate the well-guarded mind. It is wisdom not to vaunt oneself in prosperity, nor be overwhelmed with grief in adversity. Hildebert then reasons on the excellence of man’s nature and will; he speaks of the effect of Adam’s sin in loss of grace and entailment of misery on the human race. He quotes from the Old Testament and from Virgil. Then he proceeds more specifically with his fortifying arguments. Their sum is, let the breast of man abound in weapons of defence and contemn the thrusts of fortune; there is nothing over which the triumphant soul may not triumph.

“Unhappy he who lacks this armament; and most unhappy he who besides does not know it. Here Democritus found matter for laughter, Demosthenes (sic) matter for tears. Far be it from thee that the chance cast of things should affect thee so, and the loss of wisdom follow the loss of offspring. Thou hast suffered on dry land more grievous shipwreck than thy son in the brine, if fortune’s storm has wrested wisdom from the wise.”

After a while Hildebert passes on to consider what is man, and wherein consists his welfare:

“To any one carefully considering what man is, nothing will seem more probable than that he is a divine animal, distinguished by a certain share of divinity (numinis). By bone and flesh he smacks of the earth. By reason his affinity to God is shown. Moses, inspired, certifies that by this prerogative man was created in the image of God. Whence it also follows for man, that he should through reason recognize and love his true good. Now reason teaches that what pertains to virtue is the true good, and that it is within us. The things we temporally possess are good only by opinion (opinione, i.e. not ratione), and these are about us. What is about us is not within our jus but another’s (alterius juris sunt). Chance directs them; they neither come nor stand under our arbitrament. For us they are at the lender’s will (precaria), like a slave belonging to another.[225] Through such, true felicity is neither had nor lost. Indeed no one is happy, no one is wretched by reason of what is another’s. It is his own that makes a man’s good or ill, and whatever is not within him is not his own.”

Then Hildebert speaks of dignities, of wife and child, of the fruits of the earth and riches—bona vaga, bona sunt pennata haec omnia. Men quarrel and struggle about all these things—ecce vides quanta mundus laboret insania.[226]

No one need point out how much more natural this reasoning would have been from the lips of Seneca than from those of an archiepiscopal contemporary of St. Bernard. One may, however, comment on the patent fact that this reflection of the antique in Hildebert’s ethical consolation reflects a manner of reasoning rather than an emotional mood, and in this it is an instance of the general fact that mediaeval methods of reasoning consciously or unconsciously followed the antique; while the emotion, the love and yearning, of mediaeval religion was more largely the gift of Christianity.

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CHAPTER XXXI

EVOLUTION OF MEDIAEVAL LATIN PROSE

Classical antiquity lay far back of the mediaeval period, while in the nearer background pressed the centuries of transition, the time of the Church Fathers. The patristic material and a crude knowledge of the antique passed over to the early Middle Ages. Mediaeval progress was to consist, very largely, in the mastery and appropriation of the one and the other.

The varied illustration of these propositions has filled a large portion of this work. In this and the next chapter we are concerned with literature, properly speaking; and with the effect of the Classics, the pure literary antique, upon mediaeval literary productions. The latter are to be viewed as literature; not considering their substance, but their form, their composition, style, and temperamental shading, qualities which show the faculties and temper of their authors. We are to discover, if we can, wherein the qualities of mediaeval literature reflect the Latin Classics, or in any way betray their influence.

It is an affair of dull diligence to learn what Classics were read by the various mediaeval writers; and likewise is it a dull affair to note in mediaeval writings the direct borrowing from the Classics of fact, opinion, sentiment, or phrase. Such borrowing was incessant, resorted to as of course wherever opportunity offered and the knowledge was at hand. It would not commonly occur to a mediaeval writer to state in his own way what he could take from an ancient author, save in so far as change of medium—from prose to verse, or from Latin to the vernacular—compelled him. So the church builders in Rome never thought of hewing new blocks of stone, or making new columns, when some ancient palace or temple afforded a quarry. The details of such spoliations offer little interest in comparison with the effect of antique architecture upon later styles. So we should like to discover the effect of the ancient compositions upon the mediaeval, and observe how far the faculties and mental processes of classic authors, incorporate in their writings, were transmitted to mediaeval men, to become incorporate in theirs.

Unless you are Virgil or Cicero, you cannot write like Virgil or Cicero. Writing, real writing, that is to say, creative self-expressive composition, is the personal product and closely mirrored reflex of the writer’s temperament and mentality. It gives forth indirectly the influences which have blended in him, education and environment, his past and present. His personality makes his style, his untransmittable style. Yet a group of men affected by the same past, and living at the same time and place, or under like spiritual influences, may show a like faculty and taste. Having more in common with one another than with men of other time, their mental processes, and therefore their ways of writing, will present more common qualities. Around and above them, as well as through their natal and acquired faculties, sweeps the genius of the language, itself the age-long product of a like-minded race. In harmony with it, not in opposition and repugnancy, each writer must, if he will write that language, shape his more personal diction.

Obviously the personal elements in classic writings were no more capable of transmission than the personal qualities of the writers. Likewise, the genius of the Latin language, though one might think it fixed in approved compositions, changed with the spiritual fortune of the Roman people, and constantly transmitted an altered self and novel tenets of construction to control the linguistic usages of succeeding men. None but himself could have written Cicero’s letters. No man of Juvenal’s time could have written the Aeneid, nor any man of the time of Diocletian the histories of Tacitus. There were, however, common elements in these compositions, all of them possessing certain qualities which are associated with classical writing. These may be difficult to formulate, but they become clear enough in contrast with the qualities of mediaeval Latin literature. The mediaeval man did not feel and reason like a contemporary of Virgil or Cicero; he had not the same training in Greek literature; he did not have the same definitude of conception, did not care so much that a composition should have limit and the unity springing from adherence to a single topic; he did not, in fine, stand on the same level of attainment and faculty and taste with men of the Augustan time. He had his own heights and depths, his own temperament and predilections, his own capacities. Reading the Classics had not transformed him into Cicero or Seneca, or set his feet in the Roman Forum. His feet wandered in the ways of the Middle Ages, and whatever he wrote in prose or verse, in Latin or in his own vernacular, was himself and of himself, and but indirectly due to the antecedent influences which had been transmuted even in entering his nature and becoming part of his temper and faculty.

Any consideration of the knowledge and appreciation of the Classics in the Middle Ages would be followed naturally by a consideration of their effect upon mediaeval composition; which in turn forms part of any discussion of the literary qualities of mediaeval Latin literature. But inasmuch as mediaeval form and diction tend to remove further and further from classical standards, the whole discussion may seem a lucus a non lucendo for all the light it throws upon the effect of the Classics on mediaeval literature. Our best plan will be to note the beginnings of mediaeval Latinity in that post-Augustan and largely patristic diction which had been enriched and reinvigorated with many phrases from daily speech; and then to follow the living if sluggish river as it moves on, receiving increment along its course, its currents mottled with the silt of mediaeval Italy, France, Germany. We shall suppose this flood to divide in rivers of Latin prose and verse; and we may follow them, and see where they overflow their channels, carrying antique flotsam into the ample marshes of vernacular poetry.There has always been a difference in diction between speech and literature. At Rome, Cicero and Caesar, and of course the poets, did not, in writing, use quite the language of the people. All the words of daily speech were not taken into the literary or classical vocabulary, which had often quite other words of its own. Moreover the writers, in forming their prose and verse and constructing their compositions, were affected deeply by their study of Greek literature.[227] If Caesar, Cicero, Virgil, and their friends spoke differently from the Roman shopkeepers, there was a still greater difference between their writings and the parlance of the town.

No one need be told that it was the spoken, and not the classical Latin, which in Italy, Spain, Provence, and Northern France developed into Italian, Spanish, ProvenÇal, and French. On the other hand, the descent of written mediaeval Latin from the classical diction or the popular speech, or both, is not so clear, or at least not so simple. It cannot be said that mediaeval Latin came straight from the classical; and manifestly it cannot have sprung from the popular spoken Latin, like the Romance tongues, without other influence or admixture; because then, instead of remaining Latin, it would have become Romance; which it did not. Evidently mediaeval Latin, the literary and to some extent the spoken medium of educated men in the Middle Ages, must have carried classic strains, or have kept itself Latin by the study of Latin grammar and a conscious adherence to a veritable, if not classical, Latin diction. The mediaeval reading of the Classics, and the earnest and constant study of Latin grammar spoken of in the previous chapter, were the chief means by which mediaeval Latin maintained its Latinity. Nevertheless, while it kept the word forms and inflections of classical Latin, with most of the classical vocabulary, it also took up an indefinite supplement of words from the spoken Latin of the late imperial or patristic period.

In order to understand the genesis and qualities of mediaeval Latin, one must bear in mind (as with most things mediaeval) that its immediate antecedents lie in the transitional fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries, and not in the classical period.[228] Those centuries went far toward declassicizing Latin prose, by departing from the balanced structure of the classic sentences and introducing words from the spoken tongue. The style became less correct, freer, and better suited to the expression of the novel thoughts and interests coming with Christianity. The change is seen in the works of the men to whom it was largely due, Tertullian, Jerome, and other great patristic writers.[229] Such men knew the Classics well, and regarded them as literary models, and yet wrote differently. For a new spirit was upon them and new necessities of expression, and they lived when, even outside of Christian circles, the classic forms of style were loosening with the falling away of the strenuous intellectual temper, the poise, the self-reliance and the self-control distinguishing the classical epoch.

The stylistic genius of Augustine and Jerome was not the genius of the formative beginnings of the Romance tongues, with, for instance, its inability to rely on the close logic of the case ending, and its need to help the meaning by the more explicit preposition. Yet the spirit of these two great men was turning that way. They were not classic writers, but students of the Classics, who assisted their own genius by the study of what no longer was themselves. So in the following centuries the most careful Latin writers are students of the Classics, and do not study Jerome and Augustine for style. Yet their writings carry out the tendencies beginning (or rather not beginning) with these two.

It was not in diction alone that the Fathers were the forerunners of mediaeval writers. Classic Latin authors, both from themselves and through their study of Greek literature, had the sense and faculty of form. Their works maintain a clear sequence of thought, along with strict pertinency to the main topic, or adherence to the central current of the narrative, avoiding digression and refraining from excessive amplification. The classic writer did not lose himself in his subject, or wander with it wherever it might lead him. But in patristic writings the subject is apt to dominate the man, draw him after its own necessities, or by its casual suggestions cause him to digress. The Fathers in their polemic or expository works became prolix and circumstantial, intent, like a lawyer with a brief, on proving every point and leaving no loophole to the adversary. In their works literary unity and strict sequence of argument may be cast to the winds. Above all, as it seems to us, and as it would have seemed to Caesar or Cicero or Tacitus, allegorical interpretation carries them at its own errant and fantastic will into footless mazes.

Yet whoever will understand and appreciate the writings of the Fathers and of the mediaeval generations after them, should beware of inelastic notions. The question of unity hangs on what the writer deems the veritable topic of his work, and that may be the universal course of the providence of God, which was the subject of Augustine’s Civitas Dei. Indeed, the infinite relationship of any Christian topic was like enough to break through academic limits of literary unity. Likewise, the proper sequence of thought depends on what constitutes the true connection between one matter and another; it must follow what with the writer are the veritable relationships of his topics. If the visible facts of a man’s environment and the narratives of history are to him primarily neither actual facts nor literal narratives, but symbols and allegories of spiritual things, then the true sequence of thought for him is from symbol to symbol and from allegory to allegory. He is justified in ignoring the apparent connection of visible facts and the logic of the literal story, and in surrendering himself to that sequence of thought which follows what is for him the veritable significance of the matter.

Yet here we must apply another standard besides that of the writer’s conception of his subject’s significance. He should be wise, and not foolish. Other men and later ages will judge him according to their own best wisdom. And with respect to the writings of the Fathers viewed as literature, the modern critic cannot fail to see them entering upon that course of prolixity which in mediaeval writings will develop into the endless; looking forward, he will see their errant habits resolving into the mediaeval lack of determined topic, and their symbolically driven sequences of thought turning into the most ridiculous topical transitions, as the less cogent faculties of later men permit themselves to be suggested anywhither.

The Fathers developed their distinguishing qualities of style and language under the demands of the topics absorbing them, and the influence of modes of feeling coming with Christianity. They were compelling an established language to express novel matter. In the centuries after them, further changes were to come through the linguistic tendencies moulding the evolution of the Romance tongues, through the counter influence of the study of grammar and rhetoric, and also through the ignorance and intellectual limitations of the writers. But as with the Latin of the Fathers, so with the Latin of the Middle Ages, the change of style and language was intimately and spiritually dependent upon the minds and temperaments of the writers and the qualities of the subjects for which they were seeking an expression. A profound influence in the evolution of mediaeval Latin was the continual endeavour of the mediaeval genius to express the thoughts and feelings through which it was becoming itself. With impressive adequacy and power the Christian writers of the Middle Ages moulded their inherited and acquired Latin tongue to utter the varied matters which moved their minds and lifted up their hearts. We marvel to see a language which once had told the stately tale of Rome here lowered to fantastic incident and dull stupidity, then with almost gospel simplicity telling the moving story of some saintly life; again sonorously uttering thoughts to lift men from the earth and denunciations crushing them to hell; quivering with hope and fear and love, and chanting the last verities of the human soul.As to the evolution of various styles of written Latin from the close of the patristic period on through the following centuries, one may premise the remark that there would commonly be two opposite influences upon the writer; that of the genius of his native tongue, and that of his education in Latinity. If he lived in a land where Teutonic speech had never given way to the spoken Latin of the Empire, his native tongue would be so different from the Latin which he learned at school, that while it might impede, it could hardly draw to its own genius the learned language. But in Romance countries there was no such absolute difference between the vernacular and the Latin, and the analytic genius of the growing Romance dialects did not fail to affect the latter. Accordingly in France, for example, the spoken Latin dialect, or one may say the genius that was forming the old French dialects to what they were to be, tends to break up the ancient periods, to introduce the auxiliary verb in the place of elaborate inflections, and rely on prepositions instead of case endings, which were disappearing and whose force was ceasing to be felt. One result was to simplify the order of words in a sentence; for it was not possible to move a noun with its accompanying preposition wherever it had been feasible to place a noun whose relation to the rest of the sentence was felt from its case ending. Gregory of Tours is the famous example of these tendencies, with his Historia francorum, an ideal forerunner of Froissart. He became Bishop of Tours in the year 573. In his writings he followed the instincts of the inchoate Romance tongues. He acknowledges and perhaps overstates his ignorance of Latin grammar and the rules of composition. Such ignorance was destined to become still blanker; and ignorance in itself was a disintegrating influence upon written Latin, and also gave freer play to the gathering tendencies of Romance speech.

Evidently, had all these influences worked unchecked, they would have obliterated Latinity from mediaeval Latin. Grammatical and rhetorical education countered them effectively, and the mighty genius of the ancient language endured in the extant masterpieces. Nevertheless the spirit of classical Latinity was never again to be a spontaneous creative power. The most that men thenceforth could do was to study, and endeavour to imitate, the forms in which it had embodied its living self.

In brief, some of the chief influences upon the writing of Latin in the Middle Ages were: the classical genius dead, leaving only its works for imitation; the school education in Latin grammar and rhetoric; endeavour to follow classic models and write correctly; inability to do so from lack of capacity and knowledge; conscious disregard of classicism; the spirit of the Teutonic tongues clogging Latinity, and that of the Romance tongues deflecting it from classical constructions; and finally, the plastic faculties of advancing Christian mediaeval civilization educing power from confusion, and creating modes of language suited to express the thoughts and feelings of mediaeval men.

The life, that is to say the living development, of mediaeval Latin prose, was to lie in the capacity of successive generations of educated men to maintain a sufficient grammatical correctness, while at the same time writing Latin, not classically, but in accordance with the necessities and spirit of their times. There resulted an enormous literature which was not dead, nor altogether living, and lacked throughout the spontaneity of writings in a mother tongue; for Latin was not the speech of hearth and home, nor everywhere the tongue of the market-place and camp. But it was the language of mediaeval education and acquired culture; it was the language also of the universal church, and, above all other tongues, expressed the thoughts by which men were saved or damned. More profoundly than any vernacular mediaeval literature, the Latin literature of the Middle Ages expresses the mediaeval mind. It thundered with the authority that held the keys of heaven; it was resonant with feeling, and through long centuries gave voice to emotions, shattering, terror-stricken, convulsively loving. When, say with the close of the eleventh century, the mediaeval peoples had absorbed with power the teachings of patristic Christianity, and had undergone some centuries of Latin schooling, and when under these two chief influences certain distinctive and homogeneous ways of thinking, feeling, and looking upon life, had been reached; when, in fine, the Middle Ages had become themselves and had evolved a genius that could create,—then and from that time appears the adaptability and power of mediaeval Latin to serve the ends of intellectual effort and the expression of emotion.

To estimate the literary qualities of classical Latin is a simpler task than to judge the Latinity and style of the Latin literature of the Middle Ages. Classic Latin prose has a common likeness. In general one feels that what Cicero and Caesar would have rejected, Tacitus and Quintilian would not have admitted. The syntax of these writers shows still greater uniformity. No such common likeness, or avoidance of stylistic aberration and grammatical solecism, obtains in mediaeval prose or verse. The one and the other include many kinds of Latin, and vary from century to century, diversified in idiom and deflected from linguistic uniformity by influences of race and native speech, of ignorance and knowledge. He who would appreciate mediaeval Latin will be diffident of academic standards, and mistrust his classical predilections lest he see aberration and barbarism where he might discover the evolution of new constructions and novel styles; lest he bestow encomium upon clever imitations of classical models, and withhold it from more living creations of the mediaeval spirit. He will realize that to appreciate mediaeval Latin literature, he must shelve his Virgil and his Cicero.[230]

The following pages do not offer themselves even as a slight sketch of mediaeval Latin literature. Their purpose is to indicate the stages of development of the prose and the phases of evolution of the verse; and to illustrate the way in which antique themes and antique knowledge passed into vernacular poetry. Classical standards will supply us less with a point of view than with a point of departure. Nothing more need be said of the Latin of the Church Fathers and Gregory of Tours. But one must refer to the Carolingian period, in order to appreciate the Latin styles of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

The revival of education and classical scholarship under the strong rule and fostering care of the greatest of mediaeval monarchs has not always been rightly judged. The vision of that prodigious personality ruling, christianizing, striving to civilize masses of barbarians and barbarized descendants of Romans and provincials; at the same time with eager interest endeavouring to revive the culture of the past, and press it into the service of the Christian faith; the striking success of his endeavours, men of learning coming from Ireland, England, Spain, and Italy, creating a peripatetic centre of knowledge at the imperial court, and establishing schools in many a monastery and episcopal residence—all this has never failed to arouse enthusiasm for the great achievement, and has veiled the creative deadness of it all, a deadness which in some provinces of intellectual endeavour was quite veritably moribund, while in others it betokened the necessary preparation for creative epochs to come.[231]

Carolingian scholarship was directed to the mastery of Latin. Grammar was taught, and the rules of composition. Then the scholars were bidden, or bade themselves, do likewise. So they wrote verse or prose according to their school lessons. They might write correctly; but they had no style of their own. This was hopelessly true as to their metrical verses;[232] it was only somewhat less tangibly true of their prose. The “classic” of the period, in the eyes of modern classical scholars and also in the opinion of the mediaeval centuries, is Einhard’s Life of Charlemagne. Numberless encomiums have been passed on it, and justly too. It was an excellent imitation of Suetonius’s Life of Augustus; and the writer had made a careful study of Caesar and Livy.[233] There is no need to quote from a writing so accessible and well known. Yet one remark may be added to what others have said: if Einhard’s composition was an excellent copy of classical Latin it was nothing else; it has no stylistic individuality.[234]

Turning from this famous biography, we will illustrate our point by quoting from the letters of him who stands as the type of the Carolingian revival, the Anglo-Saxon Alcuin. All praise to this noble educational coadjutor of Charlemagne; his learning was conscientious; his work was important, his character was lovable. His affectionate nature speaks in a letter to his former brethren at York, where his home had been before he entered Charlemagne’s service. Here is a sentence:

“O omnium dilectissimi patres et fratres, memores mei estote; ego vester ero, sive in vita, sive in morte. Et forte miserebitur mei Deus, ut cujus infantiam aluistis, ejus senectutem sepeliatis.”[235]

It were invidious to find fault with this Latin, in which the homesick man expresses his hope of sepulture in his old home. Note also the balance of the following, written to a sick friend:

This too is excellent, in language as in sentiment. So is another, and last, sentence from our author, in a letter congratulating Charlemagne on his final subjugation of the Huns, through which the survivors were brought to a knowledge of the truth:

Again, the only trouble is stylelessness. In fine, an absence of quality characterizes Carolingian prose, of which a last example may be taken from the Spaniard Theodulphus, Bishop of Orleans, “an accomplished Latin poet,” and an educator yielding in importance to Alcuin alone. The sentence is from an official admonition to the clergy, warning them to attach more value to salvation than to lucre:

Evidently there was a good knowledge of Latin among these Carolingians, who laboured for the revival of education and the preservation of the Classics. The nadir of classical learning falls in the succeeding period of break-up, confusion, and dawning re-adjustment. In the century or two following the year 850, the writers were too unskilled in Latin and often too cumbered by it, to manifest in their writings that unhampered and distinctive reflex of a personality which we term style. A rare exception would appear in such a potent scholar as Gerbert, who mastered whatever he learned, and made it part of his own faculties and temperament. His letters, consequently, have an individual style, however good or bad we may be disposed to deem it.[239]

Accordingly, until after the millennial year Latin prose shows little beyond a clumsy heaviness resulting from the writer’s insufficient mastery of his medium; and there are many instances of barbarism and corruption of the tongue without any compensating positive qualities. A dreadful example is afforded by the Chronicon of Benedictus, a monk of St. Andrews in Monte Soracte, who lived in the latter part of the tenth century. He relates, as history, the fable of Charlemagne’s journey to the Holy Land; and his own eyes may have witnessed the atrocious times of John XII., of whom he speaks as follows:

No need to draw further from this writing, which is characterized throughout by crass ignorance of grammar and all else pertaining to Latin. It has no individual qualities; it has no style. Leaving this example of illiteracy, let us turn to a man of more knowledge, Odo, one of the greatest of the abbots of Cluny, who died in the year 943. He left lengthy writings, one of them a bulky epitome of the famous Moralia of Gregory the Great.[241] More original were his three dull books of Collationes, or moral comments upon the Scriptures. They open with a heavy note which their author might have drawn from the dark temperament of that great pope whom he so deeply admired; but the language has a leaden quality which is not Gregory’s, but Odo’s.

And, again, a little further on:

One feels the dull heaviness of this. Odo, like many of his contemporaries, knew enough of Latin grammar, and had read some of the Classics. But he had not mastered what he knew, and his knowledge was not converted into power. The tenth century was still painfully learning the lessons of its Christian and classical heritage. A similar lack of personal facility may be observed in Ruotger’s biography of Bruno, the worthy brother of the great emperor Otto I., and Archbishop of Cologne. Bruno died in 965, and Ruotger, who had been his companion, wrote his Life without delay. It has not the didactic ponderousness of Odo’s writing, but its language is clumsy. The following passage is of interest as showing Bruno’s education and the kind of learned man it made him.

The gradual improvement in the writing of Latin in the Middle Ages, and the evolution of distinctive mediaeval styles, did not result from a larger acquaintance with the Classics, or a better knowledge of grammar and school rhetoric. The range of classical reading might extend, or from time to time contract, and Donatus and Priscian were used in the ninth century as well as in the twelfth. It is true that the study of grammar became more intelligent in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and its teachers deferred less absolutely to the old rules and illustrations. They recognized Christian standards of diction: first of all the Vulgate; next, early Christian poets like Prudentius; and then gradually the mediaeval versifiers who wrote and won approval in the twelfth century. Thus grammar sought to follow current usage.[244] This endeavour culminated at the close of the twelfth century in the Doctrinale of Alexander of Villa Dei.[245] Before this, much of the best mediaeval Latin prose and verse had been written, and the period most devoted to the Classics had come and was already waning. That period was this same twelfth century. During its earlier half, Latinity gained doubtless from such improvement in the courses of the Trivium as took place at Chartres, for example, an improvement connected with the intellectual growth of the time. But the increase in the knowledge of Latin was mainly such as a mature man may realize within himself, if he has kept up his Latin reading, however little he seem to have added to his knowledge since leaving his Alma Mater.

So the development of mediaeval Latin prose (and also verse) advanced with the maturing of mediaeval civilization. That which was at the same time a living factor in this growth and a result of it, was the more organic appropriation of the classical and Christian heritages of culture and religion. As intellectual faculties strengthened, and men drew power from the past, they gained facility in moulding their Latin to their purposes. Writings begin to reflect the personalities of the writers; the diction ceases to be that of clumsy or clever school compositions, and presents an evolution of tangible mediaeval styles. Henceforth, although a man be an eager student of the Classics, like John of Salisbury for example, and try to imitate their excellences, he will still write mediaeval Latin, and with a personal style if he be a strong personality. The classical models no longer trammel, but assist him to be more effectively himself on a higher plane.

If mediaeval civilization is to be regarded as that which the peoples of western Europe attained under the two universal influences of Christianity and antique culture, then nothing more mediaeval will be seen than mediaeval Latin. To make it, the antique Latin had been modified and reinspired and loosed by the Christian energies of the Fathers; and had then passed on to peoples who never had been, or no longer were, antique. They barbarized the language down to the rudeness of their faculties. As they themselves advanced, they brought up Latin with them, as it were, from the depths of the ninth and tenth centuries, but a Latin which in the crude natures of these men had been stripped of classical quality; a Latin barbarous and naked, and ready to be clothed upon with novel qualities which should make it a new creature. Throughout all this process, while Latin was sinking and re-emerging, it was worked upon and inspired by the spirit of the uses to which it was predominantly applied, which were those of the Roman Catholic Church and of the intimacies of the Christian soul, pressing to expression in the learned tongue which they were transforming.

In considering the Latin writings of the Middle Ages one should bear in mind the differences between Italy and the North with respect to the ancient language. These were important through the earlier Middle Ages, when modes of diction sufficiently characteristic to be called styles, were forming. The men of Latin-sodden Italy might have a fluent Latin when those of the North still had theirs to learn. Thus there were Italians in the eleventh century who wrote quite a distinctive Latin prose.[246] Among them were St. Peter Damiani, and St. Anselm of Aosta, Bec, and Canterbury.

The former died full of virtue in the year 1072. We have elsewhere observed his character and followed his career.[247] He was, to his great anxiety, a classical scholar, who had earned large sums as a teacher of rhetoric before natural inclination and fears for his soul drove him to an ascetic life. He was a master of the Latin which he used. His style is intense, eloquent, personal to himself as well as suited to his matter, and reflects his ardent character and keen perceptions. The following is a rhetorical yet beautiful description of a “last leaf,” taken from one of his compositions in praise of the hermit way of salvation.

Anselm’s diction, in spite of its frequent cloister rhetoric, has a simple and modern word-order. An account has already been given of his life and of his thoughts, so beautifully sky-blue, unpurpled with the crimson of human passion, which made the words of Augustine more veritably incandescent.[249] The great African was the strongest individual influence upon Anselm’s thought and language. But the latter’s style has departed further from the classical sentence, and of itself indicates that the writer belongs neither to the patristic period nor to the Carolingian time, busied with its rearrangement of patristic thought. The following is from his Proslogion upon the existence of God. Through this discourse, Deity and the Soul are addressed in the second person after the manner of Augustine’s Confessions.

In a more emotional passage Anselm arouses in his soul the terror of the Judgment. It is from a “Meditatio”:

Damiani wrote in the middle of the eleventh century, Anselm in the latter part. The northern lands could as yet show no such characteristic styles,[252] although the classically educated German, Lambert of Hersfeld, wrote as correctly and perspicuously as either. His Annals have won admiration for their clear and correct Latinity, modelled upon the styles of Sallust and Livy. He died in 1077, the year of Canossa, his Annals covering the conflict between Henry IV. and Hildebrand up to that event. The narrative moves with spirit, as one may see by reading his description of King Henry and his consort struggling through Alpine ice and snow to reach that castle never to be forgotten, and gain absolution from the Pope before the ban should have completed Henry’s ruin.[253]

For the North, the best period of mediaeval Latin, prose as well as verse, opens with the twelfth century. It was indeed the great literary period of the Middle Ages. For the vernacular literatures flourished as well as the Latin. ProvenÇal literature began as the eleventh century closed, and was stifled in the thirteenth by the Albigensian Crusade. So the twelfth was its great period. Likewise with the Old French literature: except the Roland which is earlier, the chief chansons de geste belong to the twelfth century; also the romances of antiquity, to be spoken of hereafter; also the romances of the Round Table, and a great mass of chansons and fabliaux. The Old German—or rather, Mittel Hochdeutsch—literature touches its height as the century closes and the next begins, in the works of Heinrich von Veldeke, Gottfried von Strassburg, Wolfram von Eschenbach, and Walther von der Vogelweide.

The best Latin writers of the century lived, or sojourned, or were educated, for the most part in the France north of the Loire. Not that all of them were natives of that territory; for some were German born, some saw the light in England, and the birthplace of many is unknown. Yet they seem to belong to France. Nearly all were ecclesiastics, secular or regular. Many of them were notables in theology, like Hugo of St. Victor, Abaelard, Alanus de Insulis (Lille); many were poets as well, like Alanus and Hildebert and John of Salisbury too; one was a thunderer on the earth, and a most deft politician, Bernard of Clairvaux. Some again are known only as poets, sacred or profane, like Adam of St. Victor, and Walter of Chatillon—but of these hereafter. The best Latin prose writing of this, or any other, mediaeval period, had its definite purpose, metaphysical, theological, or pietistic; and the writers have been or will be spoken of in connection with their specific fields of intellectual achievement or religious fervour. Here, without discussing the men or their works, some favourable examples of their writing will be given.

In the last passage quoted from Anselm, the reader must have felt the working of cloister rhetoric, and have noticed the antitheses and rhymes, to which mediaeval Latin lent itself so readily. Yet it is a slight affair compared with the confounding sonorousness, the flaring pictures, and terrifying climaxes of St. Bernard when preaching upon the same topic—the Judgment Day. In one of his famous sermons on Canticles, the saint has been suggesting to his audience, the monks of Clara Vallis, that although the Father might ignore faults, not so the Dominus and Creator: “et qui parcit filio, non parcet figmento, non parcet servo nequam.” Listen to the carrying out and pointing of this thought:

As one recovers from the sound and power of this high-wrought passage, he notices how readily it might be turned into the form of a Latin hymn; and also how very modern is its sequence of words. Bernard’s Latin could whisper intimate love, as well as thunder terror. He says, preaching on the medicina, the healing power, of Jesu’s name:

With the music of this prose one may compare the sweet personal plaint of the following:

Extracts can give no idea of Bernard’s literary powers, any more than a small volume could tell the story of that life which, so to speak, was magna pars of all contemporary history. But since he was one of the best of Latin letter-writers, one should not omit an example of his varied epistolary style, which can be known in its compass only from a large reading of his letters. The following is a short letter, written to win back to the cloister a delicately nurtured youth whose parents had lured him out into the world.

The argument of this letter is, from the standpoint of Bernard’s time, as resistless as the style. Did it win back the little monk? Many wonderful examples of loving expression could be drawn from Bernard’s letters;[258] but instead an instance may be given of his none too subtle way of uttering his hate: “Arnaldus de Brixia, cujus conversatio mel et doctrina venenum, cui caput columbae, cauda scorpionis est, quem Brixia evomuit, Roma exhorruit, Francia repulit, Germania abominatur, Italia non vult recipere, fertur esse vobiscum.”[259] And then he proceeds to warn his correspondent of the danger of intercourse with this arch-enemy of the Church.

Considering that Latin was a tongue which youths learned at school rather than at their mothers’ knees, such writing as Bernard’s is a triumphant recasting of an ancient language. One notices in him, as generally with mediaeval religious writers, the influence of the Vulgate, which was mainly in the language of St. Jerome—of Jerome when not writing as a literary virtuoso, but as a scholar occupied with rendering the meaning, and willing to accept such linguistic innovations as served his purpose.[260] But beyond this influence, one sees how masterful is Bernard’s diction, quite freed from observance of classical principles, quite of the writer and his time, adapting itself with ease and power to the topic and character of the composition, and always expressive of the personality of the mighty saint.Hildebert of Le Mans was a few years older than St. Bernard. As an example of his prose a letter may be cited, of which the translation has been given. It was written in 1128, when he was Archbishop of Tours, in protest against the encroachments of the royal power of the French king, Louis the Fat, upon the rights of the Archiepiscopacy of Tours in the matter of ecclesiastical appointments within that diocese:

John of Salisbury (1110-1180), much younger than Hildebert and a little younger than Bernard, seems to have been the best scholar of his time. With the Classics he is as one in the company of friends; he cites them as readily as Scripture; their sententiae have become part of his views of life. John was an eager humanist, who followed his studies to whatever town and to the feet of whatsoever teacher they might lead him. So he listened to Abaelard and many others. His writing is always lively and often forcible, especially when vituperating the set who despised classic reading. His most vivacious work, the Metalogicus, was directed against their unnamed prophet, whom he dubs “Cornificus.”[262] Its opening passage is of interest as John’s exordium, and because a somewhat consciously intending stylist like our John is likely to exhibit his utmost virtuosity in the opening sentences of an important work:

One perceives the effect of classical studies; yet the passage is good twelfth-century Latin, quite different from the compositions of the Carolingian epoch, those, for example, from the pen of Alcuin, who had studied the Classics like John, but unlike him had no personal style. One gains similar impressions from the diction of the Polycraticus, a lengthy, discursive work in which John surprises us with his classical equipment. Although containing many quoted passages, it is not made of extracts strung together; but reflects the sentiments or tells the opinions of ancient philosophers in the writer’s own way. The following shows John’s knowledge of early Greek philosophers, and is a fair example of his ordinary style:

These extracts from the writings of saints and scholars may be supplemented by two extracts from compositions of another class. The mediaeval chronicle has not a good reputation. Its credulity and uncritical spirit varied with the time and man. Little can be said in favour of its general form, which usually is stupidly chronological, or annalistic. The example of classical historical composition was lost on mediaeval annalists. Yet their work is not always dull; and, by the twelfth century, their diction had become as mediaeval as that of the theologian rhetoricians, although it rarely crystallizes to personal style by reason of the insignificance of the writers. A well-known work of this kind is the Gesta Dei per Francos, by Guibert of Nogent, who wrote his account of the First Crusade a few years after its turmoil had passed by. The following passage tells of proceedings upon the conclusion of Urban’s great crusading oration at the Council of Clermont in 1099:

This Frenchman Guibert is almost vivacious. A certain younger contemporary of his, of English birth, could construct his narrative quite as well. Ordericus Vitalis (d. 1142) is said to have been born at Wroxeter, though he spent most of his life as monk of St. Evroult in Normandy. There he wrote his Historia Ecclesiastica of Normandy and England. His account of the loss of the White Ship in 1120 tells the story:

Our examples thus far belong to the twelfth century. As touching its successor, it will be interesting to observe the qualities of two opposite kinds of writing, the one springing from the intellectual activities, and the other from the religious awakening, of the time. In the thirteenth century, scientific and scholastic writing was of representative importance, and deeply affected the development of Latin prose. Very different in style were the Latin stories and vitae of the blessed Francis of Assisi and other saints, composed in Italy.

Roger Bacon, of whom there will be much to say, composed most of his extant works about the year 1267.[267] His language is often rough and involved, from his impetuosity and eagerness to utter what was in him. But it is always vigorous. He took pains to say just what he meant, and what was worth saying; and frequently rewrote his sentences. His writings show little rhetoric; yet they are stamped with a Baconian style, which has a cumulative force. The word-order is modern with scarcely a trace of the antique. Perhaps we may say that he wrote Latin like an Englishman of vehement temper and great intellect. He is powerful in continuous exposition; yet instances of his general, and very striking statements, will illustrate his diction at its best. In the following sentence he recognizes the progressiveness of knowledge, a rare idea in the Middle Ages:

Again, he animadverts upon the duty of thirteenth-century Christians to supply the defects of the old philosophers:

Speaking of language, he says:

In the first of these sentences Bacon shows his linguistic insight; in the second he reflects an uncritical view entertained since the time of the Church Fathers; in both, he writes with an order of words requiring no change in an English translation.

In his time, Bacon had but a sorry fame, and his works no influence. The writings of his younger contemporary Thomas Aquinas exerted greater influence than those of any man after Augustine. They represent the culmination of scholasticism. He was Italian born, and his language, however difficult the matter, is lucidity itself. It is never rhetorical; but measured, temperate, and balanced; properly proceeding from the mind which weighed every proposition in the scales of universal consideration. Sometimes it gains a certain fervour from the clarity and import of the statement which it so lucidly conveys. In article eighth, of the first Questio, of Pars Prima of the Summa theologiae, Thomas thus decides that Theology is a rational (argumentativa) science:

“Respondeo dicendum quod, sicut aliae scientiae non argumentantur ad sua principia probanda, sed ex principiis argumentantur ad ostendendum alia in ipsis scientiis; ita haec doctrina non argumentatur ad sua principia probanda, quae sunt articuli fidei; sed ex eis procedit ad aliquid aliud ostendendum; sicut Apostolus I ad Cor. xv., ex resurrectione Christi argumentatur ad resurrectionem communem probandam.

“Sed tamen considerandum est in scientiis philosophicis, quod inferiores scientiae nec probant sua principia, nec contra negantem principia disputant, sed hoc relinquunt superiori scientiae: suprema vero inter eas, scilicet metaphysica, disputat contra negantem sua principia, si adversarius aliquid concedit: si autem nihil concedit, non potest cum eo disputare, potest tamen solvere rationes ipsius. Unde sacra scriptura (i.e. Theology), cum non habeat superiorem, disputat cum negante sua principia: argumentando quidem, si adversarius aliquid concedat eorum quae per divinam revelationem habentur; sicut per auctoritates sacrae doctrinae disputamus contra hereticos, et per unum articulum contra negantes alium. Si vero adversarius nihil credat eorum quae divinitus revelantur, non remanet amplius via ad probandum articulos fidei per rationes, sed ad solvendum rationes, si quas inducit, contra fidem. Cum enim fides infallibili veritati innitatur, impossibile autem sit de vero demonstrari contrarium, manifestum est probationes quae contra fidem inducuntur, non esse demonstrationes, sed solubilia argumenta.”[272]

Of a different intellectual temperament was John of Fidanza, known as St. Bonaventura.[273] He also was born and passed his youth in Italy. This sainted General of the Franciscan Order was a few years older than the great Dominican, who was his friend. Both doctors died in the year 1274. Bonaventura’s powers of constructive reasoning were excellent. His diction is clear and beautiful, and eloquent with a spiritual fervour whenever the matter is such as to evoke it. His account of how he came to write his famous little Itinerarium mentis in Deum is full of temperament.

And Bonaventura at the end of his Itinerarium speaks of the perfect passing of Francis into God through the very mystic climax of contemplation, concluding thus:

Bonaventura’s fervent diction will serve to carry us over from the more unmitigated intellectuality of Bacon and Thomas to the simpler matter of those personal and pious narratives from which may be drawn concluding illustrations of mediaeval Latin prose. Some of the authors will show the skill which comes from training; others are quite innocent of grammar, and their Latin has made a happy surrender to the genius of their vernacular speech, which was the lingua vulgaris of northern Italy.

One of the earliest biographers of St. Francis of Assisi was Thomas of Celano, a skilled Latinist, who was enraptured with the loveliness of Francis’s life. His diction is limpid and rhythmical. A well-known passage in his Vita prima (for he wrote two Lives) tells of Francis’s joyous assurance of the great work which God would accomplish through the simple band who formed the beginnings of the Order. This assurance crystallized in a vision of multitudes hurrying to join. Francis speaks to the brethren:

We feel the flow and rhythm, and note the agreeable balancing of clauses. Francis died in 1226. The Vita prima by Celano was approved by Gregory IX. in 1229. Already other matter touching the saint was gathering in anecdote and narrative. Much of it was brought together in the so-called Speculum perfectionis, which has been confidently but very questionably ascribed to Francis’s personal disciple, Brother Leo. Brother Leo, or whoever may have been the narrator or compiler, was no scholar; his Latin is naively incorrect, and has also the simplicity of Gospel narrative. Indeed this Latin is as effectively “vulgarized” as the Greek of Matthew’s Gospel. An interesting passage tells with what loving wisdom Francis interpreted a text of Scripture:

Another passage has Francis breaking out in song from the joy of his love of Christ:

This Latin is as childlike as the Old Italian of the Fioretti of St. Francis; it has a like word-order, and one might almost add, a like vocabulary. The simple, ignorant writer seems as if held by a direct and personal inspiration from the familiar life of the sweet saint. His language reflects that inspiration, and mirrors his own childlike character. Hence he has a style, direct, effective, moving to tears and joy, like his impression of the blessed Francis.

A not dissimilar kind of childlike Latin could attain to a remarkable symmetry and balance. The Legenda aurea is before us, written by the Dominican Jacobus À Voragine, by race a Genoese, and living toward the close of the thirteenth century. This book was the most popular compend of saints’ lives in use in the later Middle Ages. Its stories are told with fascinating naÏvetÉ. We cite the opening sentences from its chapter on the Annunciation, just to show the harmony and balance of its periods. The passage is exceptional and almost formal in these qualities:

These extracts bring us far into the thirteenth century. Two hundred years later, mediaeval Latin prose, if one may say so, sang its swan song in that little book which is a last, sweet, and composite echo of all mellifluous mediaeval piety. Yet perhaps this De imitatione Christi of Thomas À Kempis can scarcely be classed as prose, so full is it of assonances and rhythms fit for chanting.

CHAPTER XXXII

EVOLUTION OF MEDIAEVAL LATIN VERSE

In mediaeval Latin poetry the endeavour to preserve a classical style and the irresistible tendency to evolve new forms are more palpably distinguishable than in the prose. For there is a visible parting of the ways between the retention of the antique metres and their fruitful abandonment in verses built of accentual rhyme. Moreover, this formal divergence corresponds to a substantial difference, inasmuch as there was usually a larger survival of antique feeling and allusion in the mediaeval metrical attempts than in the rhyming poems.

As in the prose, so in the poetry, the lines of development may be followed from the Carolingian time. But a difference will be found between Italy and the North; for in Italy the course was quicker, but a less organic evolution resulted in verse less excellent and less distinctly mediaeval. By the end of the eleventh century Latin poetry in Italy, rhyming or metrical, seems to have drawn itself along as far as it was destined to progress; but in the North a richer growth culminates a century later. Indeed the most originative line of evolution of mediaeval Latin verse would seem to have been confined to the North, in the main if not exclusively.

The following pages offer no history of mediaeval Latin poetry, even as the previous chapter made no attempt to sketch the history of the prose. Their object is to point out the general lines along which the verse-forms were developed, or were perhaps retarded. Three may be distinguished. The first is marked by the retention of quantity and the endeavour to preserve the ancient measures. In the second, accent and rhyme gradually take the place of metre within the old verse-forms. The third is that of the Sequence, wherein the accentual rhyming hymn springs from the chanted prose, which had superseded the chanting of the final a of the Alleluia.[280]

I

The lover of classical Greek and Latin poetry knows the beautiful fitness of the ancient measures for the thought and feeling which they enframed. If his eyes chance to fall on some twelfth-century Latin hymn, he will be struck by its different quality. He will quickly perceive that classic forms would have been unsuited to the Christian and romantic sentiment of the mediaeval period,[281] and will realize that some vehicle besides metrical verse would have been needed for this thoroughly declassicized feeling, even had metrical quantity remained a vital element of language, instead of passing away some centuries before. Metre was but resuscitation and convention in the time of Charlemagne. Yet it kept its sway with scholars, and could not lack votaries so long as classical poetry made part of the Ars grammatica or was read for delectation. Metrical composition did not cease throughout the Middle Ages. But it was not the true mediaeval style, and became obviously academic as accentual verse was perfected and made fit to carry spiritual emotion. Nevertheless the simpler metres were cultivated successfully by the best scholars of the twelfth century.

Most of the Latin poetry of the Carolingian period was metrical, if we are to judge from the mass that remains. Reminiscence of the antique enveloped educated men, with whom the mediaeval spirit had not reached distinctness of thought and feeling. So the poetry resembled the contemporary sculpture and painting, in which the antique was still unsuperseded by any new style. Following the antique metres, using antique phrase and commonplace, often copying antique sentiment, this poetry was as dull as might be expected from men who were amused by calling each other Homer, Virgil, Horace, or David. Usually the poets were ecclesiastics, and interested in theology;[282] but many of the pieces are conventionally profane in topic, and as humanistic as the Latin poetry of Petrarch.[283] Moreover, just as Petrarch’s Latin poetry was still-born, while his Italian sonnets live, so the Carolingian poetry, when it forgets itself and falls away from metre to accentual verse, gains some degree of life. At this early period the Romance tongues were not a fit poetic vehicle, and consequently living thoughts, which with Dante and Petrarch found voice in Italian, in the ninth century began to stammer in Latin verses that were freed from the dead rules of quantity, and were already vibrant with a vital feeling for accent and rhyme.[284]

Through the tenth century metrical composition became rougher, yet sometimes drew a certain force from its rudeness. A good example is the famous Waltarius, or Waltharilied, of Ekkehart of St. Gall, composed in the year 960 as a school exercise.[285] The theme was a German story found in vernacular poetry. Ekkehart’s hexameters have a strong Teuton flavour, and doubtless some of the vigour of his paraphrase was due to the German original.The metrical poems of the eleventh century have been spoken of already, especially the more interesting ones written in Italy.[286] Most of the Latin poetry emanating from that classic land was metrical, or so intended. Frequently it tells the story of wars, or gives the Gesta of notable lives, making a kind of versified biography. One feels as if verse was employed as a refuge from the dead annalistic form. This poetry was a semi-barbarizing of the antique, without new formal or substantial elements. Italy, one may say, never became essentially and creatively mediaeval: the pressure of antique survival seems to have barred original development; Italians took little part in the great mediaeval military religious movements, the Crusades; no strikingly new architecture arose with them; their first vernacular poetry was an imitation or a borrowing from Provence and France; and by far the greater part of their Latin poetry presents an uncreative barbarizing of the antique metres.

These remarks find illustration in the principal Latin poems composed in Italy in the twelfth century. Among them one observes differences in skill, knowledge, and tendency. Some of the writers made use of leonine hexameters, others avoided the rhyme. But they were all akin in lack of excellence and originality both in composition and verse-form. There was the monk Donizo of Canossa, who wrote the Vita of the great Countess Matilda;[287] there was William of Apulia, Norman in spirit if not in blood, who wrote of the Norman conquests in Apulia and Sicily;[288] also the anonymous and barbarous De bello et excidio urbis Comensis, in which is told the destruction of Como by Milan between 1118 and 1127;[289] then the metrically jingling Pisan chronicle narrating the conquest of the island of Majorca, and beginning (like the Aeneid!) with

We also note Peter of Ebulo, with his narrative in laudation of the emperor Henry VI., written about 1194; Henry of Septimella and his elegies upon the checkered fortunes of divers great men;[291] and lastly the more famous Godfrey of Viterbo, of probable German blood, and notary or scribe to three successive emperors, with his cantafable Pantheon or Memoria saecularum.[292] Godfrey’s poetry is rhymed after a manner of his own.

In the North, or more specifically speaking in the land of France north of the Loire, the twelfth century brought better metrical poetry than in Italy. Yet it had something of the deadness of imitation, since the vis vivida of song had passed over into rhyming verse. Still from the academic point of view, metre was the proper vehicle of poetry; as one sees, for instance, in the Ars versificatoria of Matthew of Vendome,[293] written toward the close of the twelfth century. “Versus est metrica descriptio,” says he, and then elaborates his, for the most part borrowed, definition: “Verse is metrical description proceeding concisely and line by line through the comely marriage of words to flowers of thought, and containing nothing trivial or irrelevant.” A neat conception this of poetry; and the same writer denounces leonine rhyming as unseemly, but praises the favourite metre of the Middle Ages, the elegiac; for he regards the hexameter and pentameter as together forming the perfect verse. It was in this metre that Hildebert wrote his almost classic elegy over the ruins of Rome. A few lines have been quoted from it;[294] but the whole poem, which is not long, is of interest as one of the very best examples of a mediaeval Latin elegy:

The elegiac metre was used by Abaelard in his didactic poem to his son Astralabius,[296] and by John of Salisbury in his Entheticus. The hexameter also was a favourite measure, used, for instance, by Alanus of Lille in the Anticlaudianus, perhaps the noblest of mediaeval narrative or allegorical poems in Latin.[297] Another excellent composition in hexameter was the Alexandreis of Walter, born, like Alanus, apparently at Lille, but commonly called of Chatillon. As poets and as classical scholars, these two men were worthy contemporaries. Walter’s poem follows, or rather enlarges upon the Life of Alexander by Quintus Curtius.[298] He is said to have written it on the challenge of Matthew of Vendome, him of the Ars versificatoria. The Ligurinus of a certain Cistercian Gunther is still another good example of a long narrative poem in hexameters. It sets forth the career of Frederick Barbarossa, and was written shortly after the opening of the thirteenth century. Its author, like Walter and Alanus, shows himself widely read in the Classics.[299]

The sapphic was a third not infrequently attempted metre, of which the De planctu naturae of Alanus contains examples. This work was composed in the form of the De consolatione philosophiae of BoËthius, where lyrics alternate with prose. The general topic was Nature’s complaint over man’s disobedience to her laws. The author apostrophizes her in the following sapphics:

Practically all of our examples have been taken from works composed in the twelfth century, and in the land comprised under the name of France. The pre-excellence of this period will likewise appear in accentual rhyming Latin poetry, which was more spontaneous and living than its loftily descended relative.

II

The academic vogue of metre in the early Middle Ages did not prevent the growth of more natural poetry. The Irish had their Gaelic poems; people of Teutonic speech had their rough verse based on alliteration and the count of the strong syllables. The Romance tongues emerging from the common Latin were as yet poetically untried. But in the proper Latin, which had become as unquantitative and accentual as any of its vulgar forms, there was a tonic poetry that was no longer unequipped with rhyme.

Three rhythmic elements made up this natural mode of Latin versification: the succession of accented and unaccented syllables; the number of syllables in a line; and that regularly recurring sameness of sound which is called rhyme. The source of the first of these seems obvious. Accent having driven quantity from speech, came to supersede it in verse, with the accented syllable taking the place of the long syllable and the unaccented the place of the short. In the Carolingian period accentual verse followed the old metrical forms, with this exception: the metrical principle that one long is equivalent to two shorts was not adopted. Consequently the number of syllables in the successive lines of an accentual strophe would remain the same, where in the metrical antecedent they might have varied. This is also sufficient to account for the second element, the observance of regularity in the number of syllables. For this regularity seems to follow upon the acceptance of the principle that in rhythmic verse an accented syllable is not equal to two unaccented ones. The query might perhaps be made why this Latin accentual verse did not take up the principle of regularity in the number of strong syllables in a line, like Old High German poetry for example, where the number of unaccented syllables, within reasonable limits, is indifferent. A ready answer is that these Latin verses were made by people of Latin speech who had been acquainted with metrical forms of poetry, in which the number of syllables might vary, but was never indifferent; for the metrical rule was rigid that one long was equivalent to two short; and to no more and no less. Hence the short syllables were as fixed in number as the long.[301]The origin of the third element, rhyme, is in dispute. In some instances it may have passed into Greek and Latin verses from Syrian hymns.[302] But on the other hand it had long been an occasional element in Greek and Latin rhetorical prose. Probably rhyme in Latin accentual verse had no specific origin. It gradually became the sharpening, defining element of such verse. Accentual Latin lent itself so naturally to rhyme, that had not rhyme become a fixed part of this verse, there indeed would have been a fact to explain.

These, then, were the elements: accent, number of syllables, and rhyme. Most interesting is the development of verse-forms. Rhythmic Latin poetry came through the substitution of accent for quantity, and probably had many prototypes in the old jingles of Roman soldiers and provincials, which so far as known were accentual, rather than metrical. Christian accentual poetry retained those simple forms of iambic and trochaic verse which most readily submitted to the change from metre to accent, or perhaps one should say, had for centuries offered themselves as natural forms of accentual verse. Apparently the change from metre to accent within the old forms gradually took place between the sixth and the tenth centuries. During this period there was slight advance in the evolution of new verses; nor was the period creative in other respects, as we have seen. But thereafter, as the mediaeval centuries advanced from the basis of a mastered patristic and antique heritage, and began to create, there followed an admirable evolution of verse-forms: in some instances apparently issuing from the old metrico-accentual forms, and in others developing independently by virtue of the faculty of song meeting the need of singing.

This factor wrought with power—the human need and cognate faculty of song, a need and faculty stimulated in the Middle Ages by religious sentiment and emotion. In the fusing of melody and words into an utterance of song—at last into a strophe—music worked potently, shaping the composition of the lines, moulding them to rhythm, insisting upon sonorousness in the words, promoting their assonance and at last compelling them to rhyme so as to meet the stress, or mark the ending, of the musical periods. Thus the exigencies of melody helped to evoke the finished verse, while the words reciprocating through their vocal capabilities and through the inspiration of their meaning, aided the evolution of the melodies. In fine, words and melody, each quickened by the other, and each moulding the other to itself, attained a perfected strophic unison; and mediaeval musician-poets achieved at last the finished verses of hymns or Sequences and student-songs.

There were two distinct lines of evolution of accentual Latin verse in the Middle Ages; and although the faculty of song was a moving energy in both, it worked in one of them more visibly than in the other. Along the one line accentual verse developed pursuant to the ancient forms, displacing quantity with accent, and evolving rhyme. The other line of evolution had no connection with the antique. It began with phrases of sonorous prose, replacing inarticulate chant. These, under the influence of music, through the creative power of song, were by degrees transformed to verse. The evolution of the Sequence-hymn will be the chief illustration. With the finished accentual Latin poetry of the twelfth century it may become impossible to tell which line of rhythmic evolution holds the antecedent of a given poem. In truth, this final and perfected verse may often have a double ancestry, descending from the rhythms which had superseded metre, and being also the child of mediaeval melody. Yet there is no difficulty in tracing by examples the two lines of evolution.

To illustrate the strain of verse which took its origin in the displacement of metre by accent and rhyme, we must look back as far as Fortunatus. He was born about the year 530 in northern Italy, but he passed his eventful life among Franks and Thuringians. A scholar and also a poet, he had a fair mastery of metre; yet some of his poems evince the spirit of the coming mediaeval time both in sentiment and form. He wrote two famous hymns, one of them in the popular trochaic tetrameter, the other in the equally simple iambic dimeter. The first, a hymn to the Cross, begins with the never-to-be-forgotten

and has such lines as

In these the mediaeval feeling for the Cross shows itself, and while the metre is correct, it is so facile that one may read or sing the lines accentually. In the other hymn, also to the Cross, assonance and rhyme foretell the coming transformation of metre to accentual verse. Here are the first two stanzas:

Passing to the Carolingian epoch, some lines from a poem celebrating the victory of Charlemagne’s son Pippin over the Avars in 796, will illustrate the popular trochaic tetrameter which had become accentual, and already tended to rhyme:

Next we turn to a piece by the persecuted and interesting Gottschalk, written in the latter part of the ninth century. A young lad has asked for a poem. But how can he sing, the exiled and imprisoned monk who might rather weep as the Jews by the waters of Babylon?[304] yet he will sing a hymn to the Trinity, and bewail his piteous lot before the highest pitying Godhead. The verses have a lyric unity of mood, and are touching with their sad refrain. Their rhyme, if not quite pure, is abundant and catching, and their nearest metrical affinity would be a trochaic dimeter.

Gottschalk (and for this it is hard to love him) was one of the initiators of the leonine hexameter, in which a syllable in the middle of the line rhymes with the last syllable.

is the opening hexameter in his Epistle to his friend Ratramnus.[306] To what horrid jingle such verses could attain may be seen from some leonine hexameter-pentameters of two or three hundred years later, on the Fall of Troy, beginning:

Hector and Troy, and the dire wiles of the Greeks never left the mediaeval imagination. A poem of the early tenth century, which bade the watchers on Modena’s walls be vigilant, draws its inspiration from that unfading memory, and for us illustrates what iambics might become when accent had replaced quantity. The lines throughout end in a final rhyming a.

And from a scarcely later time, for it also is of the tenth century, rise those verses to Roma, that old “Roma aurea et eterna,” and forever “caput mundi,” sung by pilgrim bands as their eyes caught the first gleam of tower, church, and ruin:

“O Roma nobilis, orbis et domina,
Cunctarum urbium excellentissima,
Roseo martyrum sanguine rubea,
Albis et virginum liliis candida:
Salutem dicimus tibi per omnia,
Te benedicimus: salve per secula.”[309]

This verse, which still lifts the heart of whosoever hears or reads it, may close our examples of mediaeval verses descended from metrical forms. It will be noticed that all of them are from the early mediaeval centuries; a circumstance which may be taken as a suggestion of the fact that by far the greater part of the earlier accentual Latin poetry was composed in forms in which accent simply had displaced the antique quantity.

III

We turn to that other genesis of mediaeval Latin verse, arising not out of antique forms, but rather from the mediaeval need and faculty of song. In the chief instance selected for illustration, this line of evolution took its inception in the exigencies and inspiration of the Alleluia chant or jubilation. During the celebration of the Mass, as the Gradual ended in its last Alleluia, the choir continued chanting the final syllable of that word in cadences of musical exultings. The melody or cadence to which this final a of the Alleluia was chanted, was called the sequentia. The words which came to be substituted for its cadenced reiteration were called the prosa. By the twelfth century the two terms seem to have been used interchangeably. Thus arose the prose Sequence, so plastic in its capability of being moulded by melody to verse. Its songful qualities lay in the sonorousness of the words and in their syllabic correspondence with the notes of the melody to which they were sung.[310]

In the year 860, Norsemen sacked the cloister of JumiÈges in Normandy, and a fleeing brother carried his precious Antiphonary far away to the safe retreat of St. Gall. There a young monk named Notker, poring over its contents, perceived that words had been written in the place of the repetitions of the final a of the Alleluia. Taking the cue, he set to work to compose more fitting words to correspond with the notes to which this final a was sung. So these lines of euphonious and fitting words appear to have had their beginning in Notker’s scanning of that fugitive Antiphonary, and his devising labour. Their primary purpose was a musical one; for they were a device—mnemotechnic, if one will—to facilitate the chanting of cadences previously vocalized with difficulty through the singing of one simple vowel sound. Notker showed his work to his master, Iso, who rejoiced at what his gifted pupil had accomplished, and spurred him on by pointing out that in his composition one syllable was still sometimes repeated or drawn out through several successive notes. One syllable to each note was the principle which Notker now set himself to realize; and he succeeded.He composed some fifty Sequences. In his work, as well as in that of others after him, the device of words began to modify and develop the melodies themselves. Sometimes Notker adapted his verbal compositions to those cadences or melodies to which the Alleluia had long been sung; sometimes he composed both melody and words; or, again, he took a current melody, sacred or secular, to which the Alleluia never had been sung, and composed words for it, to be chanted as a Sequence. In these borrowed melodies, as well as in those composed by Notker, the musical periods were more developed than in the Alleluia cadences. Thus the musical growth of the Sequences was promoted by the use of sonorous words, while the improved melodies in turn drew the words on to a more perfect rhythmic ordering.

Notker died in 912. His Sequences were prose, yet with a certain parallelism in their construction; and, even with Notker in his later years, the words began to take on assonances, chiefly in the vowel sound of a. Thereafter the melodies, seizing upon the words, as it were, by the principle of their syllabic correspondence to the notation, moulded them to rhythm of movement and regularity of line; while conversely with the better ordering of the words for singing, the melodies in turn made gain and progress, and then again reacted on the words, until after two centuries there emerged the finished verses of an Adam of St. Victor.

Thus these Sequences have become verse before our eyes, and we realize that it is the very central current of the evolution of mediaeval Latin poetry that we have been following. How free and how spontaneous was this evolution of the Sequence. It was the child of the Christian Middle Ages, seeing the light in the closing years of the ninth century, but requiring a long period of growth before it reached the glory of its climacteric. It was born of musical chanting, and it grew as song, never unsung or conceived of as severable from its melody. Only as it attained its perfected strophic forms, it necessarily made use of trochaic and other rhythms which long before had changed from quantity to accent and so had passed on into the verse-making habitudes of the Middle Ages.[311] If there be any Latin composition in virtue of origin and growth absolutely un-antique, it is the mediaeval Sequence, which in its final forms is so glorious a representative of the mediaeval Hymn. And we shall also see that much popular Latin poetry, “Carmina Burana” and student-songs, were composed in verses and often sung to tunes taken—or parodied—from the Sequence-hymns of the Liturgy.

There were many ways of chanting Sequences. The musical phrases of the melodies usually were repeated once, except at the beginning and the close; and the Sequence would be rendered by a double choir singing antiphonally. Ordinarily the words responded to the repetition of the musical phrases with a parallelism of their own. The lines (after the first) varied in length by pairs, the second and third lines having the same number of syllables, the fourth and fifth likewise equal to each other, but differing in length from the second and third; and so on through the Sequence, until the last line, which commonly stood alone and differed in length from the preceding pairs. The Sequence called “Nostra tuba” is a good example. Probably it was composed by Notker, and in his later years; for it is filled with assonances, and exhibits a regular parallelism of structure.

Here, after the opening, the first pair has seventeen syllables, and the next pair twenty-six. The last pair quoted has twenty; and the final line of seventeen syllables has no fellow. A further rhythmical advance seems reached by the following Sequence from the abbey of St. Martial at Limoges. It may have been written in the eleventh century. It is given here with the first and second line of the couplets opposite to each other, as strophe and antistrophe; and the lines themselves are divided to show the assonances (or rhymes) which appear to have corresponded with pauses in the melody:

A Sequence of the eleventh century will afford a final illustration of approach to a regular strophic structure, and of the use of the final one-syllable rhyme in a, throughout the Sequence:

As the eleventh century closed and the great twelfth century dawned, the forces of mediaeval growth quickened to a mightier vitality, and distinctively mediaeval creations appeared. Our eyes, of course, are fixed upon the northern lands, where the Sequence grew from prose to verse, and where derivative or analogous forms of popular poetry developed also. Up to this time, throughout mediaeval life and thought, progress had been somewhat uncrowned with palpable achievement. Yet the first brilliant creations of a master-workman are the fruit of his apprentice years, during which his progress has been as real as when his works begin to make it visible. So it was no sudden birth of power, but rather faculties ripening through apprentice centuries, which illumine the period opening about the year 1100. This period would carry no human teaching if its accomplishment in institutions, in philosophy, in art and poetry, had been a heaven-blown accident, and not the fruit of antecedent discipline.

The poetic advance represented by the Sequences of Adam of St. Victor may rouse our admiration for the poet’s genius, but should not blind our eyes to the continuity of development leading to it. Adam is the final artist and his work a veritable creation; yet his antecedents made part of his creative faculty. The elements of his verses and the general idea and form of the sequence were given him;—all honour to the man’s holy genius which made these into poems. The elements referred to consisted in accentual measures and in the two-syllabled Latin rhyme which appears to have been finally achieved by the close of the eleventh century.[315] In using them Adam was no borrower, but an artist who perforce worked in the medium of his art. Trochaic and iambic rhythms then constituted the chief measures for accentual verse, as they had for centuries, and do still. For, although accentual rhythms admit dactyls and anapaests, these have not proved generally serviceable. Likewise the inevitable progress of Latin verse had developed assonances into rhymes; and indeed into rhymes of two syllables, for Latin words lend themselves as readily to rhymes of two syllables as English words to rhymes of one.

There existed also the idea and form of the Sequence, consisting of pairs of lines which had reached assonance and some degree of rhythm, and varied in length, pair by pair, following the music of the melodies to which they were sung. For the Sequence-melody did not keep to the same recurring tune throughout, but varied from couplet to couplet. In consequence, a Sequence by Adam of St. Victor may contain a variety of verse-forms. Moreover, a number of the Sequences of which he may have been the author show survivals of the old rhythmical irregularities, and of assonance as yet unsuperseded by pure rhyme.Before giving examples of Adam’s poems, a tribute should be paid to his great forerunner in the art of Latin verse. Adam doubtless was familiar with the hymns[316] of the most brilliant intellectual luminary of the departing generation, one Peter Abaelard, whom he may have seen in the flesh. Those once famous love-songs, written for HeloÏse, perished (so far as we know) with the love they sang. Another fate—and perhaps Abaelard wished it so—was in store for the many hymns which he wrote for his sisters in Christ, the abbess and her nuns. They still exist,[317] and display a richness of verse-forms scarcely equalled even by the Sequences of Adam. In the development of Latin verse, Abaelard is Adam’s immediate predecessor; his verses being, as it were, just one stage inferior to Adam’s in sonorousness of line, in certainty of rhythm, and in purity of rhyme.

The “prose” Sequences were not the direct antecedents of Abaelard’s hymns. Yet both sprang from the freely devising spirit of melody and song; and therefore those hymns are of this free-born lineage more truly than they are descendants of antique forms. To be sure, every possible accentual rhythm, built as it must be of trochees, iambics, anapaests, or dactyls, has unavoidably some antique quantitative antecedent; because the antique measures exhausted the possibilities of syllabic combination. Yet antecedence is not source, and most of Abaelard’s verses by their form and spirit proclaim their genesis in the creative exigencies of song as loudly as they disavow any antique parentage.

For example, there may be some far echo of metrical asclepiads in the following accentual and rhyme-harnessed twelve-syllable verse:

But the echo if audible is faint, and surely no antique whisper is heard in

Nor in

The variety of Abaelard’s verse seems endless. One or two further examples may or may not suggest any antecedents in those older forms of accentual verse which followed the former metres:

In this verse the first two lines are accentual iambic dimeters; while the last two begin each with two trochees, and close apparently with two dactyls. The last form of line is kept throughout in the following:

Next come some simple five-syllable lines, with a catching rhyme:

In the following lines of ten syllables a dactyl appears to follow a trochee twice in each line:

These examples of Abaelard’s rhythms may close with the following curiously complicated verse:

In general, one observes in these verses that Abaelard does not use a pure two-syllable rhyme. The rhyme is always pure in the last syllable, and in the penult may either exist as a pure rhyme or simply as an assonance, or not at all.[318]

Probably Abaelard wrote his hymns in 1130, perhaps the very year when Adam as a youth entered the convent of St. Victor, lying across the Seine from Paris. The latter appears to have lived until 1192. Many Sequences have been improperly ascribed to him, and among the doubtful ones are a number having affinities with the older types. These may be anterior to Adam; for the greater part of his unquestionable Sequences are perfected throughout in their versification. Yet, on the other hand, one would expect some progression in works composed in the course of a long life devoted to such composition—a life covering a period when progressive changes were taking place in the world of thought beyond St. Victor’s walls. We take three examples of these Sequences. The first contains occasional assonance in place of rhyme, and uses many rhymes of one syllable. It appears to be an older composition improperly ascribed to Adam. The second is unquestionably his, in his most perfect form; the third may or may not be Adam’s; but is given for its own sake as a lovely lyric.[319]

The first example, probably written not much later than the year 1100, was designed for the Mass at the dedication of a church. The variety in the succession of couplets and strophes indicates a corresponding variation in the melody.

The second example is Adam’s famous Sequence for St. Stephen’s Day, which falls on the day after Christmas. It is throughout sustained and perfect in versification, and in substance a splendid hymn of praise.

The last example, in honour of St. Nicholas’s Day, is a lovely poem by whomsoever written. Its verses are extremely diversified. It begins with somewhat formal chanting of the saint’s virtues, in dignified couplets. Suddenly it changes to a joyful lyric, and sings of a certain sweet sea-miracle wrought by Nicholas. Then it spiritualizes the conception of his saintly aid to meet the call of the sin-tossed soul. It closes in stately manner in harmony with its liturgical function.

The foregoing examples of religious poetry may be supplemented by illustrations of the parallel evolution of more profane if not more popular verse. Any priority in time, as between the two, should lie with the former; though it may be the truer view to find a general synchronism in the secular and religious phases of lyric growth. But priority of originality and creativeness certainly belongs to that line of lyric evolution which sprang from religious sentiments and emotions. For the vagrant clerkly poet of the Court, the roadside, and the inn, used the forms of verse fashioned by the religious muse in the cloister and the school. Thus the development of secular Latin verse presents a derivative parallel to the essentially primary evolution of the Sequence or the hymn.

It was in Germany that the composition of Sequences was most zealously cultivated during the century following Notker’s death; and it was in Germany that the Sequence, in its earlier forms, exerted most palpable influence upon popular songs.[323] In these so-called Modi (Modus == song), as in the Sequence, rhythmical compositions may be seen progressing in the direction of regular rhythm, rhyme, and strophic form. As in the Sequences, the tune moulded the words, which in turn influenced the melody. The following is from the Modus Ottinc, a popular song composed about the year 1000 in honour of a victory of Otto III. over the Hungarians:

Another example is the Modus florum of approximately the same period, a song about a king who promised his daughter to whoever could tell such a lie as to force the king to call him a liar. It opens as follows:

Here the rhyme still is rude and the rhythm irregular. The following dirge, written thirty or forty years later on the death of the German emperor, Henry II., shows improvement:

We may pass on into the twelfth century, still following the traces of that development of popular verse which paralleled the evolution of the Sequence. We first note some catchy rhymes of a German student setting out for Paris in quest of learning and intellectual novelty:

This Suabian, singing his uncouth Latin rhymes, and footing his way to Paris, suggests the common, delocalized influences which were developing a mass of student-songs, “Carmina Burana,” or “Goliardic” poetry. The authors belonged to that large and broad class of clerks made up of any and all persons who knew Latin. The songs circulated through western Europe, and their home was everywhere, if not their origin. Some of them betray, as more of them do not, the author’s land and race. Frequently of diabolic cleverness, gibing, amorous, convivial, they show the virtuosity in rhyme of their many makers. Like the hymns and later Sequences, they employed of necessity those accentual measures which once had their quantitative prototypes in antique metres. But, again like the hymns and Sequences, they neither imitate nor borrow, but make use of trochaic, iambic, or other rhythms as the natural and unavoidable material of verse. Their strophes are new strophes, and not imitations of anything in quantitative poetry. So these songs were free-born, and their development was as independent of antique influence as the melodies which ever moulded them to more perfect music. Many and divers were their measures. But as that great strophe of Adam’s Heri mundus exultavit (the strophe of the Stabat Mater) was of mightiest dominance among the hymns, so for these student-songs there was also one measure that was chief. This was the thirteen-syllable trochaic line, with its lilting change of stress after the seventh syllable, and its pure two-syllable rhyme. It is the line of the Confessio poetae, or Confessio Goliae, where nests that one mediaeval Latin verse which everybody still knows by heart:

It is also the line of the quite charming Phyllis and Flora of the Carmina Burana:

Another common measure is the twelve-syllable dactylic line of the famous Apocalypsis Goliae Episcopi:

An example of the not infrequent eight-syllable line is afforded by that tremendous satire against papal Rome, beginning:

Here the last line of the verse has but seven syllables, as is the case in the following verse of four lines:

But the eight-syllable lines may be kept throughout, as in the following lament over life’s lovely, pernicious charm, so touching in its expression of the mortal heartbreak of mediaeval monasticism:

IV

Our consideration of the different styles of mediaeval Latin prose and the many novel forms of mediaeval Latin verse has shown how radical was the departure of the one and the other from Cicero and Virgil. Through such changes Latin continued to prove itself a living language. Yet its vitality was doomed to wane before the rivalry of the vernacular tongues. The vivida vis, the capability of growth, had well-nigh passed from Latin when Petrarch was born. In endeavouring to maintain its supremacy as a literary vehicle he was to hold a losing brief, nor did he strengthen his cause by attempting to resuscitate a classic style of prose and metre. The victory of the vernacular was announced in Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia and demonstrated beyond dispute in his Divina Commedia.

A long and for the most part peaceful and unconscious conflict had led up to the victory of what might have been deemed the baser side. For Latin was the sole mediaeval literature that was born in the purple, with its stately lineage of the patristic and the classical back of it. Latin was the language of the Roman world and the vehicle of Latin Christianity. It was the language of the Church and its clergy, and the language of all educated people. Naturally the entire contents of existing and progressive Christian and antique culture were contained in the mediaeval Latin literature, the literature of religion and of law and government, of education and of all serious knowledge. It was to be the primary literature of mediaeval thought; from which passed over the chief part of whatever thought and knowledge the vernacular literatures were to receive. For scholars who follow, as we have tried to, the intellectual and the deeper emotional life of the Middle Ages, the Latin literature yields the incomparably greater part of the material of our study. It has been our home country, from which we have made casual excursions into the vernacular literatures.

These existed, however, from the earliest mediaeval periods, beginning, if one may say so, in oral rather than written documents. We read that Charlemagne caused a book to be made of Germanic poems, which till then presumably had been carried in men’s memories. The Hildebrandslied is supposed to have been one of them.[329] In the Norse lands, the Eddas and the matter of the Sagas were repeated from generation to generation, long before they were written down. The habit, if not the art, of writing came with Christianity and the Latin education accompanying it. Gradually a written literature in the Teutonic languages was accumulated. Of this there was the heathen side, well represented in Anglo-Saxon and the Norse; while in Old High German the Hildebrandslied remains, heathen and savage. Thereafter, a popular and even national or rather racial poetry continued, developed, and grew large, notwithstanding the spread of Latin Christianity through Teutonic lands. Of this the Niebelungenlied and the Gudrun are great examples. But individual still famous poets, who felt and thought as Germans, were also composing sturdily in their vernacular—a lack of education possibly causing them to dictate (dictieren, dichten) rather than to write. Of these the greatest were Wolfram von Eschenbach and Walther von der Vogelweide. With them and after them, or following upon the Niebelungenlied, came a mass of secular poetry, some of which was popular and national, reflecting Germanic story, while some of it was courtly, transcribing the courtly poetry which by the twelfth century flourished in Old French.

Thus bourgeoned the secular branches of German literature. On the other hand, from the time of Christianity’s introduction, the Germans felt the need to have the new religion presented to them in their own tongues. The labour of translation begins with Ulfilas, and is continued with conscientious renderings of Scripture and Latin educational treatises, and also with such epic paraphrase as the Heliand and the more elegiac poems of the Anglo-Saxon Cynewulf.[330] Also, at least in Germany, there comes into existence a full religious literature, not stoled or mitred, but popular, non-academic, and non-liturgical; of which quantities remain in the Middle High German of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.[331]

Obviously the Romance vernacular literatures had a different commencement. The languages were Latin, simply Latin, in their inception, and never ceased to be legitimate continuations and developments of the popular or Vulgar Latin of the Roman Empire. But as the speech of children, women, and unlettered people, they were not thought of as literary media. All who could write understood perfectly the better Latin from which these popular dialects were slowly differentiating themselves. And as they progressed to languages, still their life and progress lay among peoples whose ancestral tongue was the proper Latin, which all educated men and women still understood and used in the serious business of life.

But sooner or later men will talk and sing and think and compose in the speech which is closest to them. The Romance tongues became literary through this human need of natural expression. There always had been songs in the old Vulgar Latin; and such did not cease as it gradually became what one may call Romance. Moreover, the clergy might be impelled to use the popular speech in preaching to the laity, or some unlearned person might compose religious verses. Almost the oldest monument of Old French is the hymn in honour of Ste. Eulalie. Then as civilization advanced from the tenth to the twelfth century, in southern and northern France for example, and the langue d’oc and the langue d’oil became independent and developed languages, unlearned men, or men with unlearned audiences, would unavoidably set themselves to composing poetry in these tongues. In the North the chansons de geste came into existence; in the South the knightly Troubadours made love-lyrics. Somehow, these poems were written down, and there was literature for men’s eyes as well as for men’s ears.

In the twelfth century and the thirteenth, the audiences for Romance poetry, especially through the regions of southern and northern France, increased and became diversified. They were made up of all classes, save the brute serf, and of both sexes. The chansons de geste met the taste of the feudal barons; the Arthurian Cycle charmed the feudal dames; the coarse fabliaux pleased the bourgeoisie; and chansons of all kinds might be found diverting by various people. If the religious side was less strongly represented, it was because the closeness of the language to the clerkly and liturgical Latin left no such need of translations as was felt from the beginning among peoples of Germanic speech. Still the Gospels, especially the apocryphal, were put into Old French, and miracles de Notre Dame without number; also legends of the saints, and devout tales of many kinds.

The accentual verses of the Romance tongues had their source in the popular accentual Latin verse of the later Roman period. Their development was not unrelated to the Latin accentual verse which was superseding metrical composition in the centuries extending, one may say, from the fifth to the eleventh. Divergences between the Latin and Romance verse would be caused by the linguistic evolution through which the Romance tongues were becoming independent languages. Nor was this divergence uninfluenced by the fact that Romance poetry was popular and usually concerned with topics of this life, while Latin poetry in the most striking lines of its evolution was liturgical; and even when secular in topic tended to become learned, since it was the product of the academically educated classes. Much of the vernacular (Romance as well as Germanic) poetry in the Middle Ages was composed by unlearned men who had at most but a speaking acquaintance with Latin, and knew little of the antique literature. This was true, generally, of the Troubadours of Provence, of the authors of the Old French chansons de geste, and of such a courtly poet as ChrÉtien de Troies; true likewise of the great German Minnesingers, epic poets rather, Gottfried von Strassburg, Wolfram von Eschenbach, and Walther von der Vogelweide.

On the other hand, vernacular poetry might be written by highly learned men, of whom the towering though late example would be Dante Alighieri. An instance somewhat nearer to us at present is Jean Clopinel or de Meun, the author of the second part of the Roman de la rose. His extraordinary Voltairean production embodies all the learning of the time; and its scholar-author was a man of genius, who incorporated his learning and the fruit thereof very organically in his poem.

But here, at the close of our consideration of the mediaeval appreciation of the Classics, and the relations between the Classics and mediaeval Latin literature, we are not occupied with the very loose and general question of the amount of classical learning to be found in the vernacular literatures of western Europe. That was a casual matter depending on the education and learning, or lack thereof, of the author of the given piece. But it may be profitable to glance at the passing over of antique themes of story into mediaeval vernacular literature, and the manner of their refashioning. This is a huge subject, but we shall not go into it deeply, or pursue the various antique themes through their endless propagations.

Antique stories aroused and pointed the mediaeval imagination; they made part of the never-absent antique influence which helped to bring the mediaeval peoples on and evoke in them an articulate power to fashion and create all kinds of mediaeval things. But with antique story as with other antique material, the Middle Ages had to turn it over and absorb it, and also had to become themselves with power, before they could refashion the antique theme or create along its lines. All this had taken place by the middle of the twelfth century. As to choice of matter, twelfth-century refashioners would either select an antique theme suited to their handling, or extract what appealed to them from some classic story. In the one case as in the other they might recast, enlarge, or invent as their faculties permitted.

Mediaeval taste took naturally to the degenerate productions of the late antique or transition centuries. The Greek novels seem to have been unknown, except the Apollonius of Tyre.[332] But the congenially preposterous story of Alexander by the Pseudo-Callisthenes was available in a sixth-century Latin version, and was made much of. Equally popular was the debasement and intentional distortion of the Tale of Troy in the work of “Dares” and “Dictys”; other tales were aptly presented in Ovid’s Metamorphoses; and the stories of Hero and Leander, of Pyramus and Thisbe, of Narcissus, Orpheus, Cadmus, Daedalus, were widely known and often told in the Middle Ages.

The mediaeval writers made as if they believed these tales. At least they accepted them as they would have their own audiences accept their recasting, with little reflection as to whether truth or fable. But was the work of the refashioners conscious fiction? Scarcely, when it simply recast the old story in mediaevalizing paraphrase; but when the poet went on and wove out of ten lines a thousand, he must have known himself devising.

The mediaeval treatment of classic themes of history and epic poetry shows how the Middle Ages refashioned and reinspired after their own image whatever they took from the antique. If it was partly their fault, it was also their unavoidable misfortune that they received these great themes in the literary distortions of the transition centuries. Doubtless they preferred encyclopaedic dulness to epic unity; they loved fantasy rather than history, and of course delighted in the preposterous, as they found it in the Latin version of the Life and Deeds of Alexander. As for the Tale of Troy, the real Homer never reached them: and perhaps mediaeval peoples who were pleased, like Virgil’s Romans, to draw their origins from Trojan heroes, would have rejected Homer’s story just as “Dares” and “Dictys,” whoever they were, did.[333] The true mediaeval rifacimenti, to wit, the retellings of these tales in the vernacular, mirror the mediaeval mind, the mediaeval character, and the whole panorama of mediaeval life and fantasy.

The chief epic themes drawn from the antique were the Tales of Troy and Thebes and the story of Aeneas. In verse and prose they were retold in the vernacular literatures and also in mediaeval Latin.[334] We shall, however, limit our view to the primary Old French versions, which formed the basis of compositions in German, Italian, English, as well as French. They were composed between 1150 and 1170 by Norman-French trouvÈres. The names of the authors of the Roman de Thebes and the Eneas are unknown; the Roman de Troie was written by Benoit de St. More.

These poems present a universal substitution of mediaeval manners and sentiment. For instance, one observes that the epic participation of the pagan gods is minimized, and in the Roman de Troie even discarded; necromancy, on the other hand, abounds. A more interesting change is the transformation of the love episode. That had become an epic adjunct in Alexandrian Greek literature as early as the third century before Christ. It existed in the antique sources of all these mediaeval poems. Nevertheless the romantic narratives of courtly love in the latter are mediaeval creations.

The Eneas relates the love of Lavinia for the hero, most correctly reciprocated by him. The account of it fills fourteen hundred lines, and has no precedent in Virgil’s poem, which in other respects is followed closely. Lavinia sees Aeneas from her tower, and at once understands a previous discourse of her mother on the subject of love. She utters love’s plaints, and then faints because Aeneas does not seem to notice her. After which she passes a sleepless night. The next morning she tells her mother, who is furious, since she favours Turnus as a suitor. The girl falls senseless, but coming to herself when alone, she recalls love’s stratagems, and attaches a letter to an arrow which is shot so as to fall at Aeneas’s feet. Aeneas reads the letter, and turns and salutes the fair one furtively, that his followers may not see. Then he enters his tent and falls so sick with love that he takes to his bed. The next day Lavinia watches for him, and thinks him false, till at last, pale and feeble, he appears, and her heart acquits him; amorous glances now fly back and forth between them.[335]

To have this jaded jilt grow sick with love is a little too much for us, and Aeneas is absurd; but the universal human touches us quite otherwise in the sweet changing heart of Briseida in the Roman de Troie. There is no ground for denying to Benoit of St. More his meed of fame for creating this charming person and starting her upon her career. Following “Dares,” Benoit calls her Briseida; but she becomes the Griseis of Boccaccio’s Filostrato; and what good man does not sigh and love her under the name of Cressid in Chaucer’s poem, though he may deplore her somewhat brazen heartlessness in Shakespeare’s play.

It is not given to all men, or women, in presence or absence, in life and death, to love once and forever. One has the stable heart, another’s fancy is quickly turned. Sometimes, of course, our moral sledge-hammers should be brought to bear; but a little hopeless smile may be juster, as we sigh “she (it is more often “he”) couldn’t help it.” Such was Briseida, the sweet, loving, helpless—coquette? jilt? flirt? these words are all too belittling to tell her truly. Benoit knew better. He took her dry-as-dust characterization from “Dares”; he gave it life, and then let his fair creature do just the things she might, without ceasing to be she.

The abject “Dares” (Benoit may have had a better story under that name) in his catalogue of characters has this: “Briseidam formosam, alta statura, candidam, capillo flavo et molli, superciliis junctis, oculis venustis, corpore aequali, blandam, affabilem, verecundam, animo simplici [O ye gods!], piam.” He makes no other mention of this tall, graceful girl, with her lovely eyes and eyebrows meeting above, her modest, pleasant mien, and simple soul; for simple she was, and therein lies the direst bit of truth about her. For it is simple and uncomplex to take the colour of new scenes and faces, and of new proffered love when the old is far away.

Now see what Benoit does with this dust: Briseida is the daughter of Calchas, a Trojan seer who had passed over to the Greeks, warned by Apollo. He is in the Grecian host, but his daughter is in Troy. Benoit says, she was engaging, lovelier and fairer than the fleur de lis—though her eyebrows grew rather too close together. “Beaux yeux” she had, “de grande maniÈre,” and charming was her talk, and faultless her breeding as her dress. Much was she loved and much she loved, although her heart changed; and she was very loving, simple, and kind:

“Molt fu amÉe et molt ameit,
Mes sis corages li changeit;
Et si esteit molt amorose,
Simple et almosniere et pitose.”[336]

Calchas wants his daughter, and Priam decides to send her. There is truce between the armies. Troilus, Troy’s glorious young knight, matchless in beauty, in arms second only to his brother Hector, is beside himself. He loves Briseida, and she him. What tears and protestations, and what vows! But the girl must go to her father.

On the morrow the young dame has other cares—to see to the packing of her lovely dresses and put on the loveliest of them; over all she threw a mantle inwoven with the flowers of Paradise. The Trojan ladies add their tears to the damsel’s; for she is ready to die of grief at leaving her lover. Benoit assures us that she will not weep long; it is not woman’s way, he continues somewhat mediaevally.

The brilliant cortÈge is met by one still more distinguished from the Grecian host. Troilus must turn back, and the lady passes to the escort of Diomede. She was young; he was impetuous; he looks once, and then greets her with a torrential declaration of love. He never loved before!! He is hers, body and soul and high emprize. Briseida speaks him fair:

One need not tell the flash of joy that then was Diomede’s, nor the many troubles that were to be his before at last Briseida finds that her heart has indeed turned to this new lover, always at hand, courting danger for her sake, and at last wounded almost to death by Troilus’s spear. The end of the story is assured in her first discreetly halting words.

Enough has been said to show how far Benoit was from Omers qui fu clers merveillos, and what a story in some thirty thousand lines he has made of the dry data of “Dares” and “Dictys.” His Briseida, with her changing heart, was to rival steadier-minded but not more lovable women of mediaeval fiction—Iseult or Guinevere. And although the far-off echo of Briseid’s name comes from the ancient centuries, none the less she is as entirely a mediaeval creation as Lancelot’s or Tristram’s queen. Thus the Middle Ages took the antique narrative, and created for themselves within the altered lines of the old tale.[338]

The transformation of themes of epic story in vernacular mediaeval versions is paralleled by mediaeval refashionings of historical subjects which had been fictionized before the antique period closed. A chief example is the romance of Alexander the Great. The antique source was the conqueror’s Life and Deeds, written by one who took the name of Alexander’s physician, Callisthenes. The author was some Egyptian Greek of the first century after Christ. His work is preposterous from the beginning to the end, and presents a succession of impossible marvels performed by the somewhat indistinguishable heroes of the story. Its qualities were reflected in the Latin versions, which in turn were drawn upon by the Old French rhyming romancers. The latter mediaevalized and feudalized the tale. Nor were they halted by any absurdity, or conscious of the characterlessness of the puppets of the tale.[339]

Further to pursue the fortunes of antique themes in mediaeval literature would lead us beyond bounds. Yet mention should be made of the handling of minor narratives, as the Metamorphoses of Ovid. They were very popular, and from the twelfth century on, paraphrases or refashionings were made of many of them. These added to the old tale the interesting mediaeval element of the moral or didactic allegory. The most prodigious instance of this moralizing of Ovid was the work of ChrÉtien LÉgouais, a French Franciscan who wrote at the beginning of the fourteenth century. In some seventy thousand lines he presented the stories of the Metamorphoses, the allegories which he discovered in them, and the moral teaching of the same.[340]

Equally interesting was the application of allegory to Ovid’s Ars amatoria. The first translators treated this frivolous production as an authoritative treatise upon the art of winning love. So it was perhaps, only Ovid was amusing himself by making a parable of his youthful diversions. Mediaeval imitators changed the habits of the gilded youth of Rome to suit the society of their time. But they did more, being votaries of courtly love. Such love in the Middle Ages had its laws which were prone to deduce their lineage from Ovid’s verses. But its uplifted spirit revelled in symbolism; and tended to change to spiritual allegory whatever authority it imagined itself based upon, even though the authority were a book as dissolute, when seriously considered, as the Ars amatoria. It is strange to think of this poem as the very far off street-walking prototype of De Lorris’s Roman de la rose.

CHAPTER XXXIII

MEDIAEVAL APPROPRIATION OF THE ROMAN LAW

Classical studies, and the gradual development of mediaeval prose and verse, discussed in the preceding chapters, illustrate modes of mediaeval progress. But of all examples of mediaeval intellectual growth through the appropriation of the antique, none is more completely illuminating than the mediaeval use of Roman law. As with patristic theology and antique philosophy, the Roman law was crudely taken and then painfully learned, till in the end, vitally and broadly mastered, it became even a means and mode of mediaeval thinking. Its mediaeval appropriation illustrates the legal capacity of the Middle Ages and their concern with law both as a practical business and an intellectual interest.

I

Primitive law is practical; it develops through the adjustment of social exigencies. Gradually, however, in an intelligent community which is progressing under favouring influences, some definite consciousness of legal propriety, utility, or justice, makes itself articulate in statements of general principles of legal right and in a steady endeavour to adjust legal relationships and adjudicate actual controversies in accordance. This endeavour to formulate just and useful principles, and decide novel questions in accordance with them, and enunciate new rules in harmony with the body of the existing law, is jurisprudence, which thus works always for concord, co-ordination, and system.

There was a jurisprudential element in the early law of Rome. The Twelve Tables are trenchant announcements of rules of procedure and substantial law. They have the form of the general imperative: “Thus let it be; If one summons [another] to court, let him go; As a man shall have appointed by his Will, so let it be; When one makes a bond or purchase,[341] as the tongue shall have pronounced it, so let it be.” These statements of legal rules are far from primitive; they are elastic, inclusive, and suited to form the foundation of a large and free legal development. And the consistency with which the law of debt was carried out to its furthest cruel conclusion, the permitted division of the body of the defaulting debtor among several creditors,[342] gave earnest of the logic which was to shape the Roman law in its humaner periods. Moreover, there is jurisprudence in the arrangement of the Laws of the Twelve Tables. Nevertheless the jurisprudential element is still but inchoate.

The Romans were endowed with a genius for law. Under the later Republic and the Empire, the minds of their jurists were trained and broadened by Greek philosophy and the study of the laws of Mediterranean peoples; Rome was becoming the commercial as well as social and political centre of the world. From this happy combination of causes resulted the most comprehensive body of law and the noblest jurisprudence ever evolved by a people. The great jurisconsults of the Empire, working upon the prior labours of long lines of older praetors and jurists, perfected a body of law of well-nigh universal applicability, and throughout logically consistent with general principles of law and equity, recognized as fundamental. These were in part suggested by Greek philosophy, especially by Stoicism as adapted to the Roman temperament. They represented the best ethics, the best justice of the time. As principles of law, however, they would have hung in the air, had not the practical as well as theorizing genius of the jurisconsults been equal to the task of embodying them in legal propositions, and applying the latter to the decision of cases. Thus was evolved a body of practical rules of law, controlled, co-ordinated, and, as one may say, universalized through the constant logical employment of sound principles of legal justice.[343]

The Roman law, broadly taken, was heterogeneous in origin, and complex in its modes of growth. The great jurisconsults of the Empire recognized its diversity of source, and distinguished its various characteristics accordingly. They assumed (and this was a pure assumption) that every civilized people lived under two kinds of law, the one its own, springing from some recognized law-making source within the community; the other the jus gentium, or the law inculcated among all peoples by natural reason or common needs.

The supposed origin of the jus gentium was not simple. Back in the time of the Republic it had become necessary to recognize a law for the many strangers in Rome, who were not entitled to the protection of Rome’s jus civile. The edict of the praetor Peregrinus covered their substantial rights, and sanctioned simple modes of sale and lease which did not observe the forms prescribed by the jus civile. So this edict became the chief source of the jus gentium so-called, to wit, of those liberal rules of law which ignored the peculiar formalities of the stricter law of Rome. Probably foreign laws, that is to say, the commercial customs of the Mediterranean world, were in fact recognized; and their study led to a perception of elements common to the laws of many peoples. At all events, in course of time the jus gentium came to be regarded as consisting of universal rules of law which all peoples might naturally follow.The recognition of these simple modes of contracting obligations, and perhaps the knowledge that certain rules of law obtained among many peoples, fostered the conception of common or natural justice, which human reason was supposed to inculcate everywhere. Such a conception could not fail to spring up in the minds of Roman jurists who were educated in Stoical philosophy, the ethics of which had much to say of a common human nature. Indeed the idea naturalis ratio was in the air, and the thought of common elements of law and justice which naturalis ratio inter omnes homines constituit, lay so close at hand that it were perhaps a mistake to try to trace it to any single source. Practically the jus gentium became identical with jus naturale, which Ulpian imagined as taught by nature to all animals; the jus gentium, however, belonged to men alone.[344]

Thus rules which were conceived as those of the jus gentium came to represent the principles of rational law, and impressed themselves upon the development of the jus civile. They informed the whole growth and application of Roman law with a breadth of legal reason. And conceptions of a jus naturale and a jus gentium became cognate legal fictions, by the aid of which praetor and jurisconsult might justify the validity of informal modes of contract. In their application, judge and jurist learned how and when to disregard the formal requirements of the older and stricter Roman law, and found a way to the recognition of what was just and convenient. These fictions agreed with the supposed nature and demands of aequitas, which is the principle of progressive and discriminating legal justice. Law itself (jus) was identical with aequitas conceived (after Celsus’s famous phrase) as the ars boni et aequi.

The Roman law proper, the jus civile, had multifarious sources. First the leges, enacted by the people; then the plebiscita, sanctioned by the Plebs; the senatus consulta, passed by the Senate; the constitutiones and rescripta[345] principum, ordained by the Emperor. Excepting the rescripta, these (to cover them with a modern expression) were statutory. They were laws announced at a specific time to meet some definite exigency. Under the Empire, the constitutiones principum became the most important, and then practically the only kind of legal enactment.

Two or three other sources of Roman law remain for mention: first, the edicta of those judicial magistrates, especially the praetors, who had the authority to issue them. In his edict the praetor announced what he held to be the law and how he would apply it. The edict of each successive praetor was a renewal and expansion or modification of that of his predecessor. Papinian calls this source of law the “jus praetorium, which the praetors have introduced to aid, supplement, or correct the jus civile for the sake of public utility.”

Next, the responsa or auctoritas jurisprudentium, by which were intended the judicial decisions and the authority of the legal writings of the famous jurisconsults. Imperial rescripts recognized these responsa as authoritative for the Roman courts; and some of the emperors embodied portions of them in formally promulgated collections, thereby giving them the force of law. Justinian’s Digest is the great example of this method of codification.[346] One need scarcely add that the authoritative writings and responsa of the jurisconsults extended and applied the jus gentium, that is to say, the rules and principles of the best-considered jurisprudence, freed so far as might be from the formal peculiarities of the jus civile strictly speaking. And the same was true of the praetorian edict. The Roman law also gave legal effect to inveterata consuetudo, the law which is sanctioned by custom: “for since the laws bind us because established by the decision of the people, those unwritten customs which the people have approved are binding.”[347]

Simply naming the sources of Roman law indicates the ways in which it grew, and the part taken by the jurisconsults in its development as a universal and elastic system. It was due to their labours that legal principles were logically carried out through the mass of enactments and decisions; that is, it was due to their large consideration of the body of existing law, that each novel decision—each case of first impression—should be a true legal deduction, and not a solecism; and that even the new enactments should not create discordant law. And it was due to their labours that as rules of law were called forth, they were stated clearly and in terms of well-nigh universal applicability.

The Laws of the Twelve Tables showed the action of legal intelligence and the result of much experience. They sanctioned a large contractual freedom, if within strict forms; they stated broadly the right of testamentary disposition. Many of their provisions, which commonly were but authoritative recognitions, were expressions of basic legal principles, the application of which might be extended to meet the needs of advancing civic life. And through the enlargement of this fundamental collection of law, or deviating from it in accordance with principles which it implicitly embodied, the jurists of the Republic and the first centuries of the Empire formed and developed a body of private and public law from which the jurisprudence of Europe and America has never even sought to free itself.

Roman jurisprudence was finally incorporated in Justinian’s Digest, which opens with a statement of the most general principles, even those which would have hung in the air but for the Roman genius of logical and practical application to the concrete instance. “Jus est ars boni et aequi”—it is better to leave these words untranslated, such is the wealth of significance and connotation which they have acquired. “Justitia est constans et perpetua voluntas jus suum cuique tribuendi. Juris praecepta sunt haec: honeste vivere, alterum non laedere, suum cuique tribuere. Jurisprudentia est divinarum atque humanarum rerum notitia, justi atque injusti scientia.”

The first pregnant phrase is from the older jurist Celsus; the longer passage is by the later Ulpian, and may be taken as an expansion of the first. Both the one and the other expressed the most advanced and philosophic ethics of the ancient world. They are both in the first chapter of the Digest, wherein they become enactments. An extract from Paulus follows: “Jus has different meanings; that which is always aequum ac bonum is called jus, to wit, the jus naturale: jus also means the jus civile, that which is expedient (utile) for all or most in any state. And in our state we have also the praetorian jus.” This passage indicates the course of the development of the Roman law: the fundamental and ceaselessly growing core of specifically Roman law, the jus civile; its continual equitable application and enlargement, which was the praetor’s contribution; and the constant application of the aequum ac bonum, observed perhaps in legal rules common to many peoples, but more surely existing in the high reasoning of jurists instructed in the best ethics and philosophy of the ancient world, and learned and practised in the law.

Now notice some of the still general, but distinctly legal, rather than ethical, rules collected in the Digest: The laws cannot provide specifically for every case that may arise; but when their intent is plain, he who is adjudicating a cause should proceed ad similia, and thus declare the law in the case.[348] Here is stated the general and important formative principle, that new cases should be decided consistently and eleganter, which means logically and in accordance with established rules. Yet legal solecisms will exist, perhaps in a statute or in some rule of law evoked by a special exigency. Their application is not to be extended. For them the rule is: “What has been accepted contra rationem juris, is not to be drawn out (producendum) to its consequences,”[349] or again: “What was introduced not by principle, but at first through error, does not obtain in like cases.”[350]

These are true principles making for the consistent development of a body of law. Observe the scope and penetration of some other general rules: “Nuptias non concubitus, sed consensus facit.”[351] This goes to the legal root of the whole conception of matrimony, and is still the recognized starting-point of all law upon that subject. Again: “An agreement to perform what is impossible will not sustain a suit.”[352] This is still everywhere a fundamental principle of the law of contracts. Again: “No one can transfer to another a greater right than he would have himself,”[353] another principle of fundamental validity, but, of course, like all rules of law subject in its application to the qualifying operation of other legal rules.

Roman jurisprudence recognized the danger of definition: “Omnis definitio in jure civili periculosa est.”[354] Yet it could formulate admirable ones; for example: “Inheritance is succession to the sum total (universum jus) of the rights of the deceased.”[355] This definition excels in the completeness of its legal view of the matter, and is not injured by the obvious omission to exclude those personal privileges and rights of the deceased which terminate upon his death.

Thus we note the sources and constructive principles of the Roman law. We observe that while certain of the former might be called “statutory,” the chief means and method of development was the declarative edict of the praetor and the trained labour of the jurisconsults. In these appears the consummate genius of Roman jurisprudence, a jurisprudence matchless in its rational conception of principles of justice which were rooted in a philosophic consideration of human life; matchless also in its carrying through of such principles into the body of the law and the decision of every case.

II

The Roman law was the creation of the genius of Rome and also the product of the complex civilization of which Rome was the kinetic centre. As the Roman power crumbled, Teutonic invaders established kingdoms within territories formerly subject to Rome and to her law—a law, however, which commonly had been modified to suit the peoples of the provinces. Those territories retained their population of provincials. The invaders, Burgundians, Visigoths, and Franks, planting themselves in the different parts of Gaul, brought their own law, under which they continued to live, but which they did not force upon the provincial population. On the contrary, Burgundian and Visigothic kings promulgated codes of Roman law for the latter. And these represent the forms in which the Roman law first passed over into modes of acceptance and application no longer fully Roman, but partly Teutonic and incipiently mediaeval. They exemplify, moreover, the fact, so many aspects of which have been already noticed, of transitional and partly barbarized communities drawing from a greater past according to their simpler needs.

One may say that these codes carried on processes of decline from the full creative genius of Roman jurisprudence, which had irrevocably set in under the Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries. The decline lay in a weakening of the intellectual power devoted to the law and its development. The living growth of the praetorian edict had long since come to an end; and now a waning jurisprudential intelligence first ceased to advance the development of law, and then failed to save from desuetude the achieved jurisprudence of the past. So the jurisprudential and juridical elements (jus) fell away from the law, and the imperial constitutions (leges) remained the sole legal vehicle and means of amendment. The need of codification was felt, and that preserving and eliminating process was entered upon.

Roman codification never became a reformulation. The Roman Codex was a collection of existing constitutions. A certain jurist (“Gregorianus”) made an orderly and comprehensive collection of such as early as the close of Diocletian’s reign; it was supplemented by the work of another jurist (“Hermogenianus”) in the time of Constantine. Each compilation was the work of a private person, who, without authority to restate, could but compile the imperial constitutions. The same method was adopted by the later codifications, which were made and promulgated under imperial decree. There were two which were to be of supreme importance for the legal future of western Europe, the Theodosian Code and the legislation of Justinian. The former was promulgated in 438 by Theodosius II. and Valentinianus. The emperors formally announce that “in imitation (ad similitudinem) of the Code of Gregorianus and Hermogenianus we have decreed that all the Constitutions should be collected” which have been promulgated by Constantine and his successors, including ourselves.[356] So the Theodosian Code contains many laws of the emperors who decreed it.[357] It was thus a compilation of imperial constitutions already in existence, or decreed from year to year while the codification was in process (429-438). Every constitution is given in the words of its original announcement, and with the name of the emperor. Evidently this code was not a revision of the law.

The codification of Justinian began with the promulgation of the Codex in 529. That was intended to be a compilation of the constitutions contained in the previous codes and still in force, as well as those which had been decreed since the time of Theodosius. The compilers received authority to omit, abbreviate, and supplement. The Codex was revised and promulgated anew in 534. The constitutions which were decreed during the remainder of Justinian’s long reign were collected after his death and published as Novellae. So far there was nothing radically novel. But, under Justinian, life and art seemed to have revived in the East; and Tribonian, with the others who assisted in these labours, had larger views of legal reform and jurisprudential conservation than the men who worked for Theodosius. Justinian and his coadjutors had also serious plans for improving the teaching of the law, in the furtherance of which the famous little book of Institutes was composed after the model, and to some extent in the words, of the Institutes of Gaius. It was published in 533.

The great labour, however, which Justinian and his lawyers were as by Providence inspired to achieve was the encyclopaedic codification of the jurisprudential law. Part of the emperor’s high-sounding command runs thus:

The language of the ancient jurists was to be preserved even critically, that is to say, the compilers were directed to emend apparent errors and restore what seemed “verum et optimum et quasi ab initio scriptum.” It was not the least of the providential mercies connected with the compilation of this great body of jurisprudential law, that Justinian and his commission did not abandon the phrasing of the old jurisconsults, and restate their opinions in such language as we have a sample of in the constitution from which the above extract is taken. This jurisprudential part of Justinian’s Codification was named the Digest or Pandects.[359]

Inasmuch as Justinian’s brief reconquest of western portions of the Roman Empire did not extend north of the Alps, his codification was not promulgated in Gaul or Germany. Even in Italy his legislation did not maintain itself in general dominance, especially in the north where the Lombard law narrowed its application. Moreover, throughout the peninsula, the Pandects quickly became as if they were not, and fell into desuetude, if that can be said of a work which had not come into use. This body of jurisprudential law was beyond the legal sense of those monarchically-minded and barbarizing centuries, which knew law only as the command of a royal lawgiver. The Codex and the Novellae were of this nature. They, and not the Digest, represent the influence upon Italy of Justinian’s legislation until the renewed interest in jurisprudence brought the Pandects to the front at the close of the eleventh century. But Codex and Novellae were too bulky for a period that needed to have its intellectual labours made easy. From the first, the Novellae were chiefly known and used in the condensed form given them in the excellent Epitome of Julianus, apparently a Byzantine of the last part of Justinian’s reign.[360] The cutting down and epitomizing of the Codex is more obscure; probably it began at once; the incomplete or condensed forms were those in common use.[361]

It is, however, with the Theodosian Code and certain survivals of the works of the great jurists that we have immediately to do. For these were the sources of the codes enacted by Gothic and Burgundian kings for their Roman or Gallo-Roman subjects. Apparently the earliest of them was prepared soon after the year 502, at the command of Gondebaud, King of the Burgundians. This, which later was dubbed the Papianus,[362] was the work of a skilled Roman lawyer, and seems quite as much a text-book as a code. It set forth the law of the topics important for the Roman provincials living in the Burgundian kingdom, not merely making extracts from its sources, but stating their contents and referring to them as authorities. These sources were substantially the same as those used by the Visigothic Breviarium, which was soon to supersede the Papianus even in Burgundy.

Breviarium was the popular name of the code enacted by the Visigothic king Alaric II. about the year 506 for his provinciales in the south of Gaul.[363] It preserved the integrity of its sources, giving the texts in the same order, and with the same rubrics, as in the original. The principal source was the Theodosian Code; next in importance the collections of Novellae of Theodosius and succeeding emperors: a few texts were taken from the Codes of “Gregorianus” and “Hermogenianus.” These parts of the Breviarium consisted of leges, that is, of constitutions of the emperors. Two sources of quite a different character were also drawn upon. One was the Institutes of Gaius, or rather an old epitome which had been made from it. The other was the Sententiae of Paulus, the famous “Five Books of Sentences ad filium.” This work of elementary jurisprudence deserved its great repute; yet its use in the Breviarium may have been due to the special sanction which had been given it in one of the constitutions of the Theodosian Code, also taken over into the Breviarium: “Pauli quoque sententias semper valere praecipimus.”[364] The same constitution confirmed the Institutes of Gaius, among other great jurisconsults. Presumably these two works were the most commonly known as well as the clearest and best of elementary jurisprudential compositions.

An interesting feature of the Breviarium, and destined to be of great importance, was the Interpretatio accompanying all its texts, except those drawn from the epitome of Gaius. This was not the work of Alaric’s compilers, but probably represents the approved exposition of the leges, with the exposition of the already archaic Sentences of Paulus, current in the law schools of southern Gaul in the fifth century. The Interpretatio thus taken into the Breviarium had, like the texts, the force of royal law, and soon was to surpass them in practice by reason of its perspicuity and modernity. Many manuscripts contain only the Interpretatio and omit the texts.

The Breviarium became the source of Roman law, indeed the Roman law par excellence, for the Merovingian and then the Carolingian realm, outside of Italy. It was soon subjected to the epitomizing process, and its epitomes exist, dating from the eighth to the tenth century: they reduced it in bulk, and did away with the practical inconvenience of lex and interpretatio. Further, the Breviarium, and even the epitomes, were glossed with numerous marginal or interlinear notes made by transcribers or students. These range from definitions of words, sometimes taken from Isidore’s Etymologiae, to brief explanations of difficulties in the text.[365] In like manner in Italy, the Codex and Novellae of Justinian were, as has been said, reduced to epitomes, and also equipped with glosses.

These barbaric codes of Roman law mark the passage of Roman law into incipiently mediaeval stages. On the other hand, certain Latin codes of barbarian law present the laws of the Teutons touched with Roman conceptions, and likewise becoming inchoately mediaeval.

Freedom, the efficient freedom of the individual, belongs to civilization rather than to barbarism. The actual as well as imaginary perils surrounding the lives of men who do not dwell in a safe society, entail a state of close mutual dependence rather than of liberty. Law in a civilized community has the twofold purpose of preserving the freedom of the individual and of maintaining peace. With each advance in human progress, the latter purpose, at least in the field of private civil law, recedes a little farther, while the importance of private law, as compared with penal law, constantly increases.

The law of uncivilized peoples lacks the first of these purposes. Its sole conscious object is to maintain, or at least provide a method of maintaining peace; it is scarcely aware that in maintaining peace it is enhancing the freedom of every individual.

The distinct and conscious purpose of early Teutonic law was to promote peace within the tribe, or among the members of a warband. Thus was law regarded by the people—as a means of peace. Its communication or ordainment might be ascribed to a God or a divine King. But in reality its chief source lay in slowly growing regulative custom.[366] The force of law, or more technically speaking the legal sanction, lay in the power of the tribe to uphold its realized purpose as a tribe; for the power to maintain its solidarity and organization was the final test of its law-upholding strength.

Primarily the old Teutonic law looked to the tribe and its sub-units, and scarcely regarded the special claims of an individual, or noticed mitigating or aggravating elements in his culpability—answerability rather. It prescribed for his peace and protection as a member of a family, or as one included within the bands of Sippe (blood relationship); or as one of a warband or a chief’s close follower, one of his comitatus. On the other hand, the law was stiff, narrow, and ungeneralized in its recognized rules. The first Latin codifications of Teutonic law are not to be compared for breadth and elasticity of statement to the Law of the Twelve Tables. And their substance was more primitive.[367]

The earliest of these first codifications was the Lex Salica, codified under Clovis near the year 500. Unquestionably, contact with Roman institutions suggested the idea, even as the Latin language was the vehicle, of this code. Otherwise the Lex Salica is un-Christian and un-Roman, although probably it was put together after Clovis’s baptism. It was not a comprehensive codification, and omitted much that was common knowledge at the time; which now makes it somewhat enigmatical. One finds in it lists of thefts of every sort of object that might be stolen, and of the various injuries to the person that might be done, and the sum of money to be paid in each case as atonement or compensation. Such schedules did not set light store on life and property. On the contrary, they were earnestly intended as the most available protection of elemental human rights, and as the best method of peaceful redress. The sums awarded as Wergeld were large, and were reckoned according to the slain man’s rank. By committing a homicide, a man might ruin himself and even his blood relatives (Sippe) and of course on failure to atone might incur servitude or death or outlawry.

The Salic law is scarcely touched by the law of Rome. From this piece of intact Teutonism the codes of other Teuton peoples shade off into bodies of law partially Romanized, that is, affected by the provincialized Roman law current in the locality where the Teutonic tribe found a home. The codes of the Burgundians and the Visigoths in southern France are examples of this Teutonic-Romanesque commingling. On the other hand, the Lombard codes, though later in time, held themselves even harshly Teutonic, as opposed to any influence from the law of the conquered Italian population, for whom the Lombards had less regard than Burgundians and Visigoths had for their subject provincials. Moreover, as the Frankish realm extended its power over other Gallo-Teuton states, the various Teuton laws modified each other and tended toward uniformity. Naturally the law of the Franks, first the Salic and then the partly derivative Ribuarian code, exerted a dominating influence.[368]

These Teuton peoples regarded law as pertaining to the tribe. There was little conscious intention on their part of forcing their laws on the conquered. When the Visigoths established their kingdom in southern France they had no idea of changing the law of the Gallo-Roman provincials living within the Visigothic rule; and shortly afterwards, when the Franks extended their power over the still Roman parts of Gaul, and then over Alemanni, Burgundians, and Visigoths, they likewise had no thought of forcing their laws either upon Gallo-Romans or upon the Teuton people previously dominant within a given territory. This remained true even of the later Frankish period, when the Carolingians conquered the Lombard kingdom in upper Italy.

Indeed, to all these Teutons and to the Roman provincials as well, it seemed as a matter of course that tribal or local laws should be permitted to endure among the peoples they belonged to. These assumptions and the conditions of the growing Frankish Empire evoked, as it were, a more acute mobilization of the principle that to each people belonged its law. For provincials and Teuton peoples were mingling throughout the Frankish realm, and the first obvious solution of the legal problems arising was to hold that provincials and Teutons everywhere should remain amenable and entitled to their own law, which was assumed to attend them as a personal appurtenance. Of course this solution became intolerable as tribal blood and delimitations were obscured, and men moved about through the territories of one great realm. Archbishop Agobard of Lyons remarks that one might see five men sitting together, each amenable to a different law.[369] The escape from this legal confusion was to revert to the idea of law and custom as applying to every one within a given territory. The personal principle gradually gave way to this conception in the course of the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries.[370] In the meanwhile during the Merovingian, and more potently in the Carolingian period, king’s law, as distinguished from people’s law, had been an influence making for legal uniformity throughout that wide conglomerate empire which acknowledged the authority of the Frankish king or emperor. The king’s law might emanate from the delegated authority, and arise from the practices, of royal functionaries; it was most formally promulgated in Capitularies, which with Charlemagne reach such volume and importance. Some of these royal ordinances related to a town or district only. Others were for the realm, and the latter not only were instances of law applying universally, but also tended to promote, or suggest, the harmonizing of laws which they did not modify directly.

III

The Roman law always existed in the Middle Ages. Provincialized and changed, it was interwoven in the law and custom of the land of the langue d’oc and even in the customary law of the lands where the langue d’oil was spoken. Through the same territory it existed also in the Breviarium and its epitomes. There was very little of it in England, and scarcely a trace in the Germany east of the Rhine. In Italy it was applied when not superseded by the Lombard codes, and was drawn from works based on the Codex and Novels of Justinian. But the jurisprudential law contained in Justinian’s Digest was as well forgotten in Italy as in any land north of the Alps, where the Codification of Justinian had never been promulgated. The extent to which the classic forms of Roman law were known or unknown, unforgotten or forgotten, was no accident as of codices or other writings lost accidentally. It hung upon larger conditions—whether society had reached that stage of civilized exigency demanding the application of an advanced commercial law, and whether there were men capable of understanding and applying it. This need and the capacity to understand would be closely joined.[371]

The history of the knowledge and understanding of Roman law in the Middle Ages might be resolved into a consideration of the sources drawn upon, and the extent and manner of their use, from century to century. In the fifth century, when the Theodosian Code was promulgated, law was thought of chiefly as the mandate of a ruler. The Theodosian Code was composed of constitutiones principum. Likewise the Breviarium, based upon it, and other barbarian codes of Roman law, were ordained by kings; and so were the codes of Teutonic law. For law, men looked directly to the visible ruler. The jus, reasoned out by the wisdom of trained jurists, had lost authority and interest. To be sure, a hundred years later Justinian’s Commission put together in the Digest the body of jurisprudential law; but even in Italy where his codification was promulgated, the Digest fell still-born. Never was an official compilation of less effect upon its own time, or of such mighty import for times to come.

The Breviarium became par excellence the code of Roman law for the countries included in the present France. With its accompanying Interpretatio it was a work indicating intelligence on the part of its compilers, whose chief care was as to arrangement and explanation. But the time was not progressive, and a gathering mental decadence was shown by the manner in which the Breviarium was treated and used, to wit, epitomized in many epitomes, and practically superseded by them. Here was double evidence of decay; for the supersession of such a work by such epitomes indicates a diminishing legal knowledge in the epitomizers, and also a narrowing of social and commercial needs in the community, for which the original work contained much that was no longer useful.

There were, of course, epitomes and epitomes. Such a work as the Epitome Juliani, in which a good Byzantine lawyer of Justinian’s time presented the substance of the Novellae, was an excellent compendium, and deserved the fame it won. Of a lower order were the later manipulations of Justinian’s Codex, by which apparently the Codex was superseded in Italy. One of these was the Summa Perusina of the ninth or tenth century, a wretched work, and one of the blindest.[372]

Justinian’s Codex and Julian’s Epitome were equipped with glosses, some of which are as early as Justinian’s time; but the greater part are later. The glosses to Justinian’s legislation resemble those of the Breviarium before referred to. That is to say, as the centuries pass downward toward the tenth, the glosses answer to cruder needs: they become largely translations of words, often taken from Isidore’s Etymologiae.[373] Indeed many of them appear to have had merely a grammatical interest, as if the text was used as an aid in the study of the Latin language.

The last remark indicates a way in which a very superficial acquaintance with the Roman law was kept up through the centuries prior to the twelfth: it was commonly taught in the schools devoted to elementary instruction, that is to say, to the Seven Liberal Arts. In many instances the instructors had only such knowledge as they derived from Isidore, that friend of every man. That is, they had no special knowledge of law, but imparted various definitions to their pupils, just as they might teach them the names of diseases and remedies, a list of which (and nothing more) they would also find in Isidore. It was all just as one might have expected. Elementary mediaeval education was encyclopaedic in its childish way; and, in accordance with the methods and traditions of the transition centuries, all branches of instruction were apt to be turned to grammar and rhetoric, and made linguistic, so to speak—mere subjects for curious definition. Thus it happened to law as well as medicine. Yet some of the teachers may have had a practical acquaintance with legal matters, with an understanding for legal documents and skill to draw them up.

The assertion also is warranted that at certain centres of learning substantial legal instruction was given; one may even speak of schools of law. Scattered information touching all the early mediaeval periods shows that there was no time when instruction in Roman law could not be obtained somewhere in western Europe. To refer to France, the Roman law was very early taught at Narbonne; at Orleans it was taught from the time of Bishop Theodulphus, Charlemagne’s contemporary, and probably the teaching of it long continued. One may speak in the same way of Lyons; and in the eleventh century Angers was famed for the study of law.

Our information is less broken as to an Italy where through the early Middle Ages more general opportunities offered for elementary education, and where the Roman law, with Justinian’s Codification as a base, made in general the law of the land. There is no reason to suppose that it was not taught. Contemporary allusions bear witness to the existence of a school of law in Rome in the time of Cassiodorus and afterwards, which is confirmed by a statement of the jurist Odofredus in the thirteenth century. At Pavia there was a school of law in the time of Rothari, the legislating Lombard king; this reached the zenith of its repute in the eleventh century. Legal studies also flourished at Ravenna, and succumbed before the rising star of the Bologna school at the beginning of the twelfth century.[374] In these and doubtless many other cities[375] students were instructed in legal practices and formulae, and some substance of the Roman law was taught. Extant legal documents of various kinds afford, especially for Italy, ample evidence of the continuous application of the Roman law.[376]

As for the merits and deficiencies of legal instruction in Italy and in France, an idea may be gained from the various manuals that were prepared either for use in the schools of law or for the practitioner. Because of the uncertainty, however, of their age and provenance, it is difficult to connect them with a definite foyer of instruction.

Until the opening of the twelfth century, or at all events until the last quarter of the eleventh, the legal literature evinces scarcely any originality or critical capacity. There are glosses, epitomes, and collections of extracts, more or less condensed or confused from whatever text the compiler had before him. Little jurisprudential intelligence appears in any writings which are known to precede the close of the eleventh century; none, for instance, in the epitomes of the Breviarium and the glosses relating to that code; none in those works of Italian origin the material for which was drawn directly or indirectly from the Codex or Novels of Justinian, for instance the Summa Perusina and the Lex Romana canonice compta, both of which probably belong to the ninth century. Such compilations were put together for practical use, or perhaps as aids to teaching.

Thus, so far as inference may be drawn from the extant writings, the legal teaching in any school during this long period hardly rose above an uncritical and unenlightened explanation of Roman law somewhat mediaevalized and deflected from its classic form and substance. There was also practical instruction in current legal forms and customs. Interest in the law had not risen above practical needs, nor was capacity shown for anything above a mechanical handling of the matter. Legal study was on a level with the other intellectual phenomena of the period.

In an opusculum[377] written shortly after the middle of the eleventh century, Peter Damiani bears unequivocal, if somewhat hostile, witness to the study of law at Ravenna; and it is clear that in his time legal studies were progressing in both France and Italy. It is unsafe to speak more definitely, because of the difficulty in fixing the time and place of certain rather famous pieces of legal literature, which show a marked advance upon the productions to be ascribed with certainty to an earlier time. The reference is to the Petri exceptiones and the Brachylogus. The critical questions relating to the former are too complex even to outline here. Both its time and place are in dispute. The ascribed dates range from the third quarter of the eleventh century to the first quarter of the twelfth, a matter of importance, since the opening of the twelfth century is marked by the rise of the Bologna school. As for the place, some scholars still adhere to the south of France, while others look to Pavia or Ravenna. On the whole, the weight of argument seems to favour Italy and a date not far from 1075.[378]

The Petrus, as it is familiarly called, is drawn from immediately prior and still extant compilations. The compiler wished to give a compendious if not systematic presentation of law as accepted and approved in his time, that is to say, of Roman law somewhat mediaevalized in tone, and with certain extraneous elements from the Lombard codes. The ultimate Roman sources were the Codification of Justinian, and indeed all of it, Digest, Codex, and Novels, the last in the form to which they had been brought in Julian’s Epitome. The purpose of the compilation is given in the Prologue,[379] which in substance is as follows:

“Since for many divers reasons, on account of the great and manifold difficulties in the laws, even the Doctors of the laws cannot without pains reach a certain opinion, we, taking account of both laws, to wit, the jus civile and the jus naturale, unfold the solution of controversies under plain and patent heads. Whatever is found in the laws that is useless, void, or contrary to equity, we trample under our feet. Whatever has been added and surely held to, we set forth in its integral meaning so that nothing may appear unjust or provocative of appeal from thy judgments, Odilo;[380] but all may make for the vigour of justice and the praise of God.”

The arrangement of topics in the Petrus hardly evinces any clear design. The substance, however, is well presented. If there be a question to be solved, it is plainly stated, and the solution arrived at may be interesting. For example, a case seems to have arisen where the son of one who died intestate had seized the whole property to the exclusion of the children of two deceased daughters. The sons of one daughter acquiesced. The sons of the other per placitum et guerram forced their uncle to give up their share. Thereupon the supine cousins demanded to share in what had so been won. The former contestants resisted on the plea that the latter had borne no aid in the contest and that they had obtained only their own portion. The decision was that the supine cousins might claim their heritage from whoever held it, and should receive their share in what the successful contestants had won; but that the latter could by counter-actions compel them to pay their share of the necessary expenses of the prior contest.[381]

Sometimes the Petrus seems to draw a general rule of law from the apparent instances of its application in Justinian’s Codification. Therein certain formalities were prescribed in making a testament, in adopting a son, or emancipating a slave. The Petrus draws from them the general principle that where the law prescribes formalities, the transaction is not valid if they are omitted.[382] In fine, unsystematized as is the arrangement of topics, the work presents an advance in legal intelligence over mediaeval law-writings earlier than the middle of the eleventh century.

If the Petrus was adapted for use in practice, the Brachylogus, on the other hand, was plainly a book of elementary instruction, formed on the model of Justinian’s Institutes. But it made use of his entire codification, the Novels, however, only as condensed in Julian’s Epitome. The influence of the Breviarium is also noticeable; which might lead one to think that the treatise was written in Orleans or the neighbourhood, since the Breviarium was not in use in Italy, while the Codification of Justinian was known in France by the end of the eleventh century. The beginning of the twelfth is the date usually given to the Brachylogus. It does not belong to the Bologna school of glossators, but rather immediately precedes them, wherever it was composed.[383]

The Brachylogus, as a book of Institutes, compares favourably with its model, from the language of which it departed at will. Both works are divided into four libri; but the libri of the Brachylogus correspond better to the logical divisions of the law. Again, frequently the author of the Brachylogus breaks up the chapters of Justinian’s Institutes and gives the subject-matter under more pertinent headings. Sometimes the statements of the older work are improved by rearrangement. The definitions of the Brachylogus are pithy and concise, even to a fault. Often the exposition is well adapted to the purposes of an elementary text-book,[384] which was meant to be supplemented by oral instruction. On the whole, the work shows that the author is no longer encumbered by the mass or by the advanced character of his sources. He restates their substance intelligently, and thinks for himself. He is no compiler, and his work has reached the rank of a treatise.

The merits of the Brachylogus as an elementary text-book are surpassed by those of the so-called Summa Codicis Irnerii, a book which may mark the beginning of the Bologna school of law, and may even be the composition of its founder. Many arguments are adduced for this authorship.[385] The book has otherwise been deemed a production of the last days of the school of law at Rome just before the school was broken up by some catastrophe as to which there is little information. In that case the work would belong to the closing years of the eleventh century, whereas the authorship of Irnerius would bring it to the beginning of the twelfth. At all events, its lucid jurisprudential reasoning precludes the likelihood of an earlier origin.

This Summa is an exposition of Roman law, following the arrangement and titles of Justinian’s Codex, but making extensive use of the Digest. It thus contains Roman jurisprudential law, and may be regarded as a compendious text-book for law students, forming apparently the basis of a course of lectures which treated the topics more at length.[386] The author’s command of his material is admirable, and his presentation masterly. Whether he was Irnerius or some one else, he was a great teacher. His work may be also called academic, in that his standpoint is always that of the Justinianean law, although he limits his exposition to those topics which had living interest for the twelfth century. Private substantial law forms the chief matter, but procedure is set forth and penal law touched upon. The author appreciates the historical development of the Roman law and the character of its various sources—praetorian law, constitutiones principum, and responsa prudentium. He also shows independence, and a regard for legal reasoning and the demands of justice. While he sets forth the jus civile, his exposition and approval follow the dictates of the jus naturale.

One must suppose that such concise statements were explained and qualified in the author’s lectures. But even as they stand, they afford an exposition of Roman principles of interpretation. Not only under the Roman Empire, but subsequently in mediaeval times, the Roman lawyer or the canonist did not pay the deference to adjudicated precedent which is felt by the English or American judge. The passage in the Codex which “Irnerius” was expounding commands that the judge, in deciding a case, shall follow the laws and the reasoning of the great jurists, rather than the decision of a like controversy.

Since the author of this Summa weighs the justice, the reason, and the convenience of the laws, and compares them with each other, his book is a work of jurisprudence. Its qualities may be observed in its discussion of possession and the rights arising therefrom. The writer has just been expounding the usucapio, an institution of the jus civile strictly speaking, whereby the law of Rome in certain instances protected and, after three years, perfected, the title to property which one had in good faith acquired from a vendor who was not the owner:

Then follows a discussion of the persons through whom another may have possession, and of the various modes of possessing longa manu without actual touch:

voluntarily or otherwise. He now discusses the various modes in which possession is acquired by transfer, then the nature of the justa or injusta causa with which possession may begin, and the effect on the rights of the possessor, and then some matters more peculiar to the time of Justinian. After which he passes to the loss of possession, and concludes with saying that he has endeavoured to go over the whole subject, and whatever is omitted or insufficiently treated, he begs that it be laid to the fault of humanae imbecillitatis. The discussion reads like a carefully drawn outline which his lecture should expand.[388]

The knowledge and understanding of the Roman law in the mediaeval centuries should be viewed in conjunction with the general progress of intellectual aptitude during the same periods. The growth of legal knowledge will then show itself as a part of mediaeval development, as one phase of the flowering of the mediaeval intellect. For the treatment of Roman law presents stages essentially analogous to those by which the Middle Ages reached their understanding and appropriation of other portions of their great inheritance from classical antiquity and the Christianity of the Fathers. Let us recapitulate: the Roman law, adapted, or corrupted if one will, epitomized and known chiefly in its later enacted forms, was never unapplied nor the study of it quite abandoned. It constituted a great part of the law of Italy and southern France; in these two regions likewise was its study least neglected. We have observed the superficial and mainly linguistic nature of the glosses which this early mediaeval period interlined or wrote on the margins of the source-books drawn upon, also the rude and barbarous nature of the earlier summaries and compilations. They were helps to a crude practical knowledge of the law. Gradually the treatment seems to become more intelligent, a little nearer the level of the matter excerpted or made use of. Through the eleventh century it is evident that social conditions were demanding and also facilitating an increase in legal knowledge; and at that century’s close a by no means stupid compilation appears, the Petri exceptiones, and perhaps such a fairly intelligent manual for elementary instruction as the Brachylogus. These works indicate that the instruction in the law was improving. We have also the sparse references to schools of law, at Rome, at Ravenna, at Orleans. Then we come upon the Summa Codicis called of Irnerius, of uncertain provenance, like the Petrus and Brachylogus. But there is no need to be informed specifically of its place and date in order to recognize its advance in legal intelligence, in veritable jurisprudence. The writer was a master of the law, an adept in its exposition, and his oral teaching must have been of a high order. With this book we have unquestionably touched the level of the strong beginnings of the greatest of mediaeval schools of Roman law.

Its seat was Bologna, one of the chief centres of the civic and commercial life of Lombardy. The Lombards themselves had shown a persistent legal genius: their own Teutonic codes, enacted in Italy, had maintained themselves in that land of Roman law and custom. Lombard codification had almost reached a jurisprudence of its own, at Pavia, the juridical centre of Lombardy. The provisions of various codes had been compared and put together in a sort of Concordia, as early as the ninth century.[389] Possibly the rivalry of Lombard law might stimulate those learned in the law of Rome to sharper efforts to expound it and prove its superiority. Moreover, all sides of civic life and culture were flourishing in that region where novel commercial relations were calling for a corresponding progress in the law, and especially for a better knowledge of the Roman law which alone afforded provision for their regulation.

As some long course of human development approaches its climax, the advance apparently becomes so rapid as to give the impression of something suddenly happening, a sudden leap upward of the human spirit. The velocity of the movement seems to quicken as the summit is neared. One easily finds examples, for instance the fifth century before Christ in Greek art, or the fourth century in Greek philosophy, or again the excellence so quickly reached apparently by the Middle High German poetry just about the year 1200. But may not the seeming suddenness of the phenomenon be due to lack of information as to antecedents? and the flare of the final achievement even darken what went before? Yet, in fact, as a movement nears its climax, it may become more rapid. For, as the promoting energies and favouring conditions meet in conjunction, their joint action becomes more effective. Forces free themselves from cumbrances and draw aid from one another. Thus when the gradual growth of intellectual faculty effects a conjunction with circumstances which offer a fair field, and the prizes of life as a reward, a rapid increase of power may evince itself in novel and timely productivity.

This may suggest the manner of the apparently sudden rise of the Bologna school of Roman law, which, be it noted, took place but a little before the time of Gratian’s achievement in the Canon law, itself contemporaneous with the appearance of Peter Lombard’s novel Books of Sentences.[390] The preparation, although obscure, existed; and the school after its commencement passed onward through stages of development, to its best accomplishment, and then into a condition of stasis, if not decline. Irnerius apparently was its first master; and of his life little is known. He was a native of Bologna. His name as causidicus is attached to a State paper of the year 1113. Thereafter he appears in the service of the German emperor Henry V. We have no sure trace of him after 1118, though there is no reason to suppose that he did not live and labour for some further years. He had taught the Arts at Ravenna and Bologna before teaching, or perhaps seriously studying, the law. But his career as a teacher of the law doubtless began before the year 1113, when he is first met with as a man of affairs. Accounts agree in ascribing to him the foundation of the school.

Unless the Summa Codicis already mentioned, and a book of Quaestiones, be really his, his glosses upon Justinian’s Digest, Codex, and Novels, are all we have of him;[391] of the rest we know by report. The glosses themselves indicate that this jurist had been a grammarian, and used the learning of his former profession in his exposition of the law. His interlinear glosses are explanations of words, and would seem to represent his earlier, more tentative, work when he was himself learning the meaning of the law. But the marginal glosses are short expositions of the passages to which they are attached, and perhaps belong to the time of his fuller command over the legal material. They indicate, besides, a critical consideration of the text, and even of the original connection which the passage in the Digest held in the work of the jurisconsult from which it had been taken. Some of them show an understanding of the chronological sequence of the sources of the Roman law, e.g. that the law-making power had existed in the people and then passed to the emperors. These glosses of Irnerius represent a clear advance in jurisprudence over any previous legal comment subsequent to the Interpretatio attached to the Breviarium. It was also part of his plan to equip his manuscripts of the Codex with extracts taken from the text of the Novels, and not from the Epitome of Julian. He appears also as a lawyer versed in the practice of the law. For he wrote a book of forms for notaries and a treatise on procedure, neither of which is extant.[392]

The accomplishment of the Bologna school may be judged more fully from the works, still extant, of some of its chief representatives in the generations following Irnerius. A worthy one was Placentinus, a native of Piacenza. The year of his birth is unknown, but he died in 1192, after a presumably full span of life, passed chiefly as a student and teacher of the law. He taught in Mantua and Montpellier, as well as in Bologna. He was an accomplished jurist and a lover of the classic literature. His work entitled De varietate actionum was apparently the first attempt to set forth the Roman law in an arrangement and form that did not follow the sources.[393] He opens his treatise with an allegory of a noble dame, hight Jurisprudentia, within the circle of whose sweet and honied utterances many eager youths were thronging. Placentinus drew near, and received from her the book which he now gives to others.[394] This little allegory savours of the De consolatione of BoËthius, or, if one will, of Capella’s De nuptiis Philologiae.

The most admirable surviving work of Placentinus is his Summa of the Codex of Justinian. His autobiographical proemium shows him not lacking in self-esteem, and tells why he undertook the work. He had thought at first to complete the Summa of Rogerius, an older glossator, but then decided to put that book to sleep, and compose a full Summa of the Codex himself, from the beginning to the end. This by the favour of God he has done; it is the work of his own hands, from head to heel, and all the matter is his own—not borrowed. Next he wrote for beginners a Summa of the Institutes. After which he returned to his own town, and shortly proceeded thence to Bologna, whither he had been called. “There in the citadel (in castello) for two years I expounded the laws to students; I brought the other teachers to the threshold of envy; I emptied their benches of students. The hidden places of the law I laid open, I reconciled the conflicts of enactments, I unlocked the secrets most potently.” His success was great, and he was besought to continue his course of lectures. He complied, and remained two years more, and then returned to Montpellier, in order to compose a Summa of the Digest.[395] If indeed Placentinus speaks bombastically of his work, its excellence excuses him. His well-earned reputation as a jurist and scholar long endured.

Quaestiones, Distinctiones, Libri disputationum, Summae of the Codex or the Institutions, and other legal writings, are extant in goodly bulk and number from the Bologna school. The names of the men are almost legion, and many were of great repute in their day both as jurists and as men of affairs. We may mention Azo and Accursius, of a little later time. Azo’s name appears in public documents from the year 1190 to 1220—and he may have survived the latter date by some years. His works were of such compass and excellence as to supersede those of his predecessors. His glosses still survive, and his Lectura on the Codex, his Summae of the Codex and the Institutes, and his Quaestiones, and Brocarda, the last a sort of work stating general legal propositions and those contradicting them. Azo’s glosses were so complete as to constitute a continuous exposition of the entire legislation of Justinian. His Summae of the Codex and Institutes drove those of Placentinus out of use, which we note with a smile.[396]

None of the glossators is better known than Accursius. He comes before us as a Florentine, and apparently a peasant’s son. He died an old man rich and famous, about the year 1260. Azo was his teacher. In 1252 he was Podesta of Bologna, which indicates the respect in which men held him. Villani, the Florentine historian, describes him as of martial form, grave, thoughtful, even melancholy in aspect, as if always meditating; a man of brilliant talents and extraordinary memory, sober and chaste in life, but delighting in noble vesture. His hearers drank in the laws of living from his mien and manners no less than from the dissertations of his mouth.[397] Late in life he retired to his villa, and there in quiet worked on his great Glossa till he died.

This famous, perhaps all too famous, Glossa ordinaria was a digest and, as it proved, a final one, of the glosses of his predecessors and contemporaries. He drew not only from their glosses, but also on their Summae and other writings. He added a good deal of his own. Great as was the feat, the somewhat deadened talent of a compiler shows in the result, which flattened out the individual labours of so many jurists. It came at once into general use in the courts and outside of them; for it was a complete commentary on the Justinianean law, so compendious and convenient that there was no further need of the glosses of earlier men. This book marked the turning-point of the Bologna school, after which its productivity lessened. Its work was done: Codex, Novels, and above all the Pandects were rescued from oblivion, and fully expounded, so far as the matter in them was still of interest. When the labours of the school had been conveniently heaped together in one huge Glossa, there was no vital inducement to do this work again. The school of the glossators was functus officio. Naturally with the lessening of the call, productivity diminished. Little was left to do save to gloss the glosses, an epigonic labour which would not attract men of talent. Moreover, treating the older glosses, instead of the original text, as the matter to be interpreted was unfavourable to progress in the understanding of the latter.

Yet, for a little, the breath of life was still to stir in the school of the glossators. There was a man of fame, a humanist indeed, named Cino, whose beautiful tomb still draws the lover of things lovely to Pistoia. Cino was also a jurist, and it came to him to be the teacher of one whose name is second to none among the legists of the Middle Ages. This was Bartolus, born probably in the year 1314 at Sassoferrato in the duchy of Urbino. He was a scholar, learned in geometry and Hebrew, also a man of affairs. He taught the law at Pisa and Perugia, and in the last-named town he died in 1357, not yet forty-four years old. Bartolus wrote and compiled full commentaries on the entire Corpus juris civilis; and yet he produced no work differing in kind from works of his predecessors. Moreover, between him and the body of the law rose the great mass of gloss and comment already in existence, through which he did not always penetrate to the veritable Corpus. Yet his labours were inspired with the energy of a vigorous nature, and he put fresh thoughts into his commentaries.[398]

The school of glossators presented the full Roman law to Europe. The careful and critical interpretation of the text of Justinian’s Codification, of the Digest above all, was their great service. In performing it, these jurists also had educated themselves and developed their own intelligence. They had also put together in Summae the results of their own education in the law. These works facilitated legal study and sharpened the faculties of students and professors. Books of Quaestiones, legal disputations, works upon legal process and formulae, served the same ends.[399] These men were deficient in historical knowledge. Yet they compared Digest, Codex, and Novels; they tried to re-establish the purity of the text; they weighed and they expounded. Theirs was an intellectual effort to master the jurisprudence of Rome: their labours constituted a renaissance of jurisprudence; and the fact that they were often men of affairs as well as professors, kept them from ignoring the practical bearings of the matters which they taught.

The work of the glossators may be compared with that of the theologian philosophers of the thirteenth century—Alexander of Hales, Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas—who were winning for the world a new and comprehensive knowledge of Aristotle. Both jurists and philosophers, in their different spheres, carried through a more profound study, and reached a more comprehensive knowledge, of a great store of antique thought, than previous mediaeval centuries conceived of. Moreover, the interpretation of the Corpus juris was quite as successful as the interpretation of Aristotle. It was in fact surer, because freer from the deflections of religious motive. No consideration of agreement or disagreement with Scripture troubled the glossators’ interpretation of the Digest, though indeed they may have been interested in finding support for whatever political views they held upon the claims of emperor and pope. But this did not disturb them as much as Aristotle’s opinion that the universe was eternal, worried Albertus and Aquinas.

IV

The Church, from the time of its first recognition by the Roman Empire, lived under the Roman law;[400] and the constitutions safeguarding its authority were large and ample before the Empire fell. Constantine, to be sure, never dreamed of the famous “Donation of Constantine” forged by a later time, yet his enactments fairly launched the great mediaeval Catholic Church upon the career which was to bring it more domination than was granted in this pseudo-charter of its power. A number of Constantine’s enactments were preserved by the Theodosian Code, in which the powers and privileges of Church and clergy were portentously set forth.

The Theodosian Code freed the property of the Church from most fiscal burdens, and the clergy from taxes, from public and military service, and from many other obligations which sometimes the Code groups under the head of sordida munera. The Church might receive all manner of bequests, and it inherited the property of such of its clergy as did not leave near relatives surviving them. Its property generally was inalienable; and the clergy were accorded many special safeguards. Slaves might be manumitted in a church. The church edifices were declared asylums of refuge from pursuers, a privilege which had passed to the churches from the heathen fanes and the statues of the emperors. Constitution after constitution was hurled against the Church’s enemies. The Theodosian Code has one chapter containing sixty-six constitutions directed against heretics, the combined result of which was to deprive them, if not of life and property, at least of protected legal existence.

Of enormous import was the sweeping recognition on the Empire’s part of the validity of episcopal jurisdiction. No bishop might be summoned before a secular court as a defendant, or compelled to give testimony. Falsely to accuse one of the clergy rendered the accuser infamous. All matters pertaining to religion and church discipline might be brought only before the bishop’s court, which likewise had plenary jurisdiction over controversies among the clergy. It was also open to the laity for the settlement of civil disputes. The command not to go to law before the heathen came down from Paul (1 Cor. vi.), and together with the severed and persecuted condition of the early Christian communities, may be regarded as the far source of the episcopal jurisdiction, which thus divinely sanctioned tended to extend its arbitrament to all manner of legal controversies.[401] To be sure, under the Christian Roman Empire the authority of the Church as well as its privileges rested upon imperial law. Yet the emperors recognized, rather than actually created, the ecclesiastical authority. And when the Empire was shattered, there stood the Church erect amid the downfall of the imperial government, and capable of supporting itself in the new Teutonic kingdoms.

The constitutions of Christian emperors did not from their own force and validity become Ecclesiastical or Canon law—the law relating to Christians as such, and especially to the Church and its functions. The source of that law was God; the Church was its declarative organ. Acceptance on the Church’s part was requisite before any secular law could become a law of the Church.

Canon law may be taken to include theology, or may be limited to the law of the organization and functions of the Church taken in a large sense as inclusive of the laity in their relations to the religion of Christ.[402] Obviously part comes from Christ directly, through the Old Testament as well as New. The other part, and in bulk far greater, emanates from His foundation, the Church, under the guidance of His Spirit, and may be added to and modified by the Church from age to age. It is expressed in custom, universal and established, and it is found in written form in the works of the Fathers, in the decrees of Councils, in the decretals of the popes, and in the concordats and conventions with secular sovereignties. From the beginning, canon law tacitly or expressly adopted the constitutions of the Christian emperors relating to the Church, as well as the Roman law generally, under which the Church lived in its civil relations.

The Church arose within the Roman Empire, and who shall say that its wonderfully efficient and complete organization at the close of the patristic period was not the final creation of the legal and constructive genius of Rome, newly inspired by the spirit of Christianity? But the centre of interest had been transferred from earth to heaven, and human aims had been recast by the Gospel and the understanding of it reached by Christian doctors. Evidently since the ideals of the Church were to be other than those of the Roman Empire, the law which it accepted or evolved would have ideals different from those of the Roman law. If the great Roman jurists created a legal formulation and rendering of justice adequate for the highly developed social and commercial needs of Roman citizens, the law of the Church, while it might borrow phrases, rules, and even general principles, from that system, could not fail to put new meaning in them. For example, the constant will to render each his due, which was justitia in the Roman law, might involve different considerations where the soul’s salvation, and not the just allotment of the goods of this world, was the law’s chief aim. Again, what new meaning might attach to the honeste vivere and the alterum non laedere of pagan legal ethics. Honeste vivere might mean to do no sin imperilling the soul; alterum non laedere would acquire the meaning of doing nothing to another which might impede his progress toward salvation. Injuries to a man in his temporalities were less important.

Further, Christianity although conceived as a religion for all mankind, was founded on a definite code and revelation. The primary statement was contained in the canonical books of the Old and New Testaments. These were for all men, universal in application and of irrefragable validity and truth. Here was some correspondence to the conception of the jus gentium as representative of universal principles of justice and expediency, and therefore as equivalent to the jus naturale. There was something of logical necessity in the transference of this conception to the law of Christ. Says Gratian at the beginning of his Decretum: “It is jus naturae which is contained in the Law and the Gospel, by which every one is commanded to do to another as he would be done by, and forbidden to inflict on him what he does not wish to happen to himself.” Since the Law and the Gospel represent the final law of life for all men, they are par excellence the jus naturae, as well as lex divina. Gratian quotes from Augustine: “Divinum jus in scripturis divinis habemus, humanum in legibus regum.”[403] And then adds: “By its authority the jus naturale prevails over custom and constitution. Whatever in customs or writings is contrary to the jus naturale is to be held vain and invalid.” Again he says more explicitly: “Since therefore nothing is commanded by natural law other than what God wills to be, and nothing is forbidden except what God prohibits, and since nothing may be found in the canonical Scripture except what is in the divine laws, the laws will rest divinely in nature (divine leges natura consistent). It is evident, that whatever is proved to be contrary to the divine will or canonical Scripture, is likewise opposed to natural law. Wherefore whatever should give way before divine will or Scripture or the divine laws, over that ought the jus naturale to prevail. Therefore whatever ecclesiastical or secular constitutions are contrary to natural law are to be shut out.”[404]

The canon law is a vast sea. Its growth, its age-long agglomerate accretion, the systematization of its huge contents, have long been subjects for controversialists and scholars. Its sources were as multifarious as those of the Roman law. First the Scriptures and the early quasi-apostolic and pseudo-apostolic writings; then the traditions of primitive Christianity and also the writings of the Fathers; likewise ecclesiastical customs, long accepted and legitimate, and finally the two great written sources, the decretals or decisions of the popes and the decrees of councils. From patristic times collections were made of the last. These collections from a chronological gradually acquired a topical and more systemic arrangement, which the compilers followed more completely after the opening of the tenth century. The decisions of the popes also had been collected, and then were joined to conciliar compilations and arranged after the same topical plan.

In all of them there was unauthentic matter, accepted as if its pseudo-authorship or pseudo-source were genuine. But in the stormy times of the ninth century following the death of Charlemagne, the method of argument through forged authority was exceptionally creative. It produced two masterpieces which won universal acceptance. The first was a collection of false Capitularies ascribed to Charlemagne and Louis the Pious, and ostensibly the work of a certain Benedictus Levita, deacon of the Church of Mainz, who worked in the middle of the century. Far more famous and important was the book of False Decretals, put together and largely written, that is forged, about the same time, probably in the diocese of Rheims, and appearing as the work of Saint Isidore of Seville. This contained many forged letters of the early popes and other forged matter, including the Epistle or “Donation” of Constantine; also genuine papal letters and conciliar decrees. These false collections were accepted by councils and popes, and formed part of subsequent compilations.

From the tenth century onward many such compilations were made, all of them uncritical as to the genuineness of the matter taken, and frequently ill-arranged and discordant. They were destined to be superseded by the great work in which appears the better methods and more highly trained intelligence developing at the Bologna School in the first part of the twelfth century. Its author was Gratianus, a monk of the monastery of St. Felix at Bologna. He was a younger contemporary of Irnerius and of Peter Lombard. Legend made him the latter’s brother, with some propriety; for the compiler of those epoch-making Sentences represents the same stage in the appropriation of the patristic theological heritage of the Middle Ages, that Gratian represents in the handling of the canon law. The Lombard’s Sentences made a systematic and even harmonizing presentation of the theology of the Fathers in their own language; and the equally immortal Decretum of Gratian accomplished a like work for the canon law. This is the name by which his work is known, but not the name he gave it. That appears to have been Concordia discordantium canonum, which indicates his methodical presentation of his matter and his endeavour to reconcile conflicting propositions.

The first part of the Decretum was entitled “De jure naturae et constitutionis.” It presents the sources of the law, the Church’s organization and administration, the ordination and ranking of the clergy, the election and consecration of bishops, the authority of legates and primates. The second part treats of the procedure of ecclesiastical courts, also the law regulating the property of the Church, the law of monks and the contract of marriage. The third part is devoted to the Sacraments and the Liturgy.

Gratian’s usual method is as follows: He will open with an authoritative proposition. If he finds it universally accepted, it stands as valid. But if there are opposing statements, he tries to reconcile them, either pointing out the difference in date (for the law of the Church may be progressive), or showing that one of the discordant rules had but local or otherwise limited application, or that the first proposition is the rule, while the others make the exceptions. If he still fails to establish concord, he searches to find which rule had been followed in the Roman Church, and accepts that as authoritative. A rule being thus made certain, he proceeds with subdivisions and distinctions, treating them as deductions from the main rule and adjusting the supporting texts. Or he will suppose a controversy (causa) and discuss its main and secondary issues. Throughout he accompanies his authoritative matter with his own commentary—commonly cited as the Dicta Gratiani.[405] The Decretum was characterized by sagacity of interpretation and reconcilement, by vast learning, and clear ordering of the matter. Only it was uncritical as to the genuineness of its materials; and a number of Gratian’s own statements were subsequently disapproved in papal decretals. The Dicta Gratiani never received such formal sanction by pope or council as the writings of Roman jurists received by being taken into Justinian’s Digest.

The papal decretals had become the great source of canonical law. Gratian’s work was soon supplemented by various compilations known as Appendices ad Decretum or Decretales extravagantes, to wit, those which the Decretum did not contain. These, however, were superseded by the collection, or rather codification, made at the command of the great canonist Gregory IX. and completed in the year 1234. This authoritative work preserved Gratian’s Decretum intact, but suppressed, or abridged and reordered, the decretals contained in subsequent collections. Arranged in five books, it forms the second part of the Corpus juris canonici. In 1298 Boniface VIII. promulgated a supplementary book known as the Sextus of Boniface. This with a new collection promulgated under the authority of Clement V. in 1313, called the Clementinae, and the Extravagantes of his successor John XXII. and certain other popes, constitute the last portions of the Corpus juris canonici.[406]

According to the law of the Empire the emperor’s authority extended over the Church, its doctrine, its discipline, and its property. Such authority was exercised by the emperors from Constantine to Justinian. But the Church had always stood upon the principle that it was better to obey God rather than man. This had been maintained against the power of the pagan Empire, and was not to be sunned out of existence by imperial favour. It was still better to obey God rather than the emperor. The Church still should say who were its members and entitled to participate in the salvation which it mediated. Ecclesiastical authorities could excommunicate; that was their engine of coercion. These principles were incarnate in Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, withstanding and prohibiting Theodosius from Christian fellowship until he had done penance for the massacre at Thessalonica. Of necessity they inhered in the Church; they were of the essence of its strength to fulfil its purpose; they stood for the duly constituted power of Christian resolution to uphold and advance the peremptory truth of Christ.So such principles persisted through the time of the hostile and then the favouring Roman Empire. And when the Empire in fact crumbled and fell, what de facto and de jure authority was best fitted to take the place of the imperial supremacy? The Empire represented a universal secular dominion; the Church was also universal, and with a universality now reaching out beyond the Empire’s shrinking boundaries. In the midst of political fragments otherwise disjoined, the Church endured as the universal unity. The power of each Teutonic king was great in fact and law within his realm. Yet he was but a local potency, while the Church existed through his and other realms. And when the power of one Teutonic line (the Carolingian) reached something like universal sway, the Church was also there within and without. It held the learning of the time, and the culture which large-minded seculars respected; and quite as much as the empire of Charlemagne, it held the prestige of Rome. Witness the attitude of Charles Martel and Pippin toward Boniface the great apostle, and the attitude of Boniface toward the Gregories whose legate he proclaimed himself, and upon whose central authority he based his claims to be obeyed. Through the reforms of the Frankish Church, carried out by him with the support of Charles Martel and Pippin, the ecclesiastical supremacy of Rome was established. Charlemagne, indeed, from the nature and necessities of his own transcendent power, possessed in fact the ecclesiastical authority of the Roman emperors, whom men deemed his predecessors. But after him the secular power fell again into fragments scarcely locally efficient, while the Church’s universality of authority endured.

In the unstable fragmentation of secular rule in the ninth century, the Isidorean Decretals presented the truth of the situation as it was to be, although not as it had been in the times of the Church dignitaries whose names were forged for that collection. And thereafter, as the Church recovered from its tenth-century disintegration, it advanced to the pragmatic demonstration of the validity of those false Decretals, on through the tempests of the age of Hildebrand to the final triumph of Innocent III. at the opening of the thirteenth century. Evidently the canon law, whatever might be its immediate or remote source, drew its authority from the sanction of the Roman Catholic Church, which enunciated it and made it into a body corresponding to the Church’s functions. It was what the Church promulgated as the law of the ecclesiastical hierarchy and the kingdom of God on earth. It should be the temporal and legal counterpart of the Church’s spiritual purposes. Its general tendency and purpose was the promotion of the Church’s saving aim, which regarded all things in the light of their relationship to life eternal. Therefore the Church’s law could not but define and consider all worldly interests, all personal and property rights and secular authority, with constant regard to men’s need of salvation. The advancement of that must be the final appellate standard of legal right.

Such was the event. The entire canon law might be lodged within those propositions which Hildebrand enunciated and Innocent III. realized. For the salvation of souls, all authority on earth had been entrusted by Christ to Peter and his successors. Theirs was the spiritual sword; secular power, the sword material, was to be exercised under the pope’s mandate and permission. No king or emperor, no layman whatsoever, was exempt from the supreme authority of the pope, who also was the absolute head of the Church, which had become a monarchy. “The Lord entrusted to Peter not only the universal Church, but the government of the whole world,” writes Innocent III., whose pontificate almost made this principle a fact. In private matters no member of the clergy could be brought before a secular court; and the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts over the laity threatened to reduce the secular jurisdiction to narrow functions.[407] The property of the Church might not be taxed or levied on by any temporal ruler or government; nor could the Church’s functions and authority be controlled or limited by any secular decree. Universally throughout every kingdom the Church was a sovereignty, not only in matters spiritual, but with respect to all the personal and material relationships that might be connected in any way with the welfare of souls.[408]

V

The exposition of the Corpus juris civilis in the school of the glossators was of great moment in the evolution of mediaeval political theory, which in its turn yields one more example of the mediaeval application of thoughts derived from antique and patristic sources. Political thinking in the Middle Ages sought its surest foundation in theology; then it built itself up with concepts drawn from the philosophy and social theory of the antique world; and lastly it laid hold on jurisprudence, using the substance and reasoning of the Roman and the Canon law.

Mediaeval ideas upon government and the relations between the individual and his earthly sovereign, started from theological premises, of patristic origin: e.g. that the universe and man were made by God, a miraculous creation, springing from no other cause, and subject to no other fundamental law, than God’s unsearchable will, which never ceases to direct the whole creation to the Creator’s ends. A further premise was the Scriptural revelation of God’s purpose as to man, with all the contents of that revelation touching the overweening importance of man’s deathless soul.

Unity—the unity of the creation—springs from these premises, or is one of them. The principle of this unity is God’s will. Within the universal whole, mankind also constitutes a unit, a community, specially ordained and ordered. The Middle Ages, following the example of the patristic time, were delivered over to allegory, and to an unbridled recognition of the deductions of allegorical reasoning. Mankind was a community. Mankind was also an organism, the mystical body whereof the head was Christ. Here was an allegory potent for foolishness or wisdom. It was used to symbolize the mystery of the oneness of all mankind in God, and the organic co-ordination of all sorts and conditions of men with one another in the divine commonwealth on earth; it was also drawn out into every detail of banal anthropomorphic comparison. From John of Salisbury to Nicholas Cusanus, Occam and Dante, no point of fancied analogy between the parts and members of the body and the various functions of Church and State was left unexploited.[409]

Mankind then is one community; also an organism. But within the human organism abides the duality of soul and body; and the Community of Mankind on earth is constituted of two orders, the spiritual and temporal, Church and State.[410] There must be either co-ordination between State and Church, body and soul, or subordination of the temporal and material to the eternal and spiritual. To evoke an adjustment of what was felt to be an actually universal opposition, was the chief problem of mediaeval polity, and forms the warp and woof of conflicting theories. The Church asserted a full spiritual supremacy even in things temporal, and, to support the claim, brought sound arguments as well as foolish allegory—allegory pretending to be horror-stricken at the vision of an animal with two heads, a bicephalic monstrosity. But does not the Church comprise all mankind? Did not God found it? Is not Christ its head, and under Him his vicegerent Peter and all the popes? Then shall not the pope who commands the greater, which is the spiritual, much more command the less, the temporal? And all the argumentation of the two swords, delivered to Peter, comes into play. That there are two swords is but a propriety of administration. Secular rulers wield the secular sword at the pope’s command. They are instruments of the Church. Fundamentally the State is an ecclesiastical institution, and the bounds of secular law are set by the law spiritual: the canon law overrides the laws of every State. True, in this division, the State also is ordained of God, but only as subordinate. And divinely ordained though it be, the origin of the State lies in sin; for sin alone made government and law needful for man.[411]

On the other hand, the partisans of the State upheld co-ordination as the true principle.[412] The two swords represent distinct powers, Sacerdotium and Imperium. The latter as well as the former is from God; and the two are co-ordinates, although of course the Church which wields the spiritual sword is the higher. This theory creates no bicephalic monster. God is the universal head. And even as man is body as well as soul, the human community is State as well as Church; and the State needs the emperor for its head, as the Church has the pope. The Roman Dominion, imperium mundi, was legitimate, and by divine appointment has passed over to the Roman-German emperor. Other views sustaining the scheme of co-ordination upheld a plurality of states, rather than one universal Imperium. Of course these opposing views of subordination or co-ordination of State and Church took on every shade of diversity.

As to both Church and State, mediaeval political theory was predominantly monarchical. Ideally this flowed from the thought of God as the true monarch of the universe. Practically it comported with mediaeval social conditions. Under Innocent III., if not under Gregory VII., the Church had become a monarchy well-nigh absolute.[413] The pope’s power continued plenary until the great schism and the age of councils evoked by it. For the secular state, the common voice likewise favoured monarchy. The unity of the social organism is best effected by the singleness of its head. Thomas Aquinas authoritatively reasons thus, and Dante maintains that as the unifying principle is Will, the will of one man is the best means to realize it.[414] But monarchy is no absolute right existing for the ruler’s benefit, rather it is an office to be righteously exercised for the good of the community. The monarch’s power is limited, and if his command outrages law or right, it is a nullity; his subjects need not obey, and the principle applies, that it is better to obey God than man. Even when, as in the days of the Hohenstaufen, the civil jurists claimed for the emperor the plenitudo potestatis of a Roman Caesar, the opposite doctrine held strong, which gave him only a limited power, in its nature conditioned on its rightful exercise.

Moreover, rights of the community were not unrecognized, and indeed were supported by elaborate theories as the Middle Ages advanced to their climacteric. The thought of a contract between ruler and people frequently appears, and reference to the contract made at Hebron between David and the people of Israel (2 Sam. v. 3). The civil jurist also looked back to the principle of the jus gentium giving to every free people the right to choose a ruler; also to that famous text of the Digest, where, through the lex regia, the people were said to have conferred their powers upon the princeps.[415] With such thoughts of the people’s rights came theories of representation and of the monarch as the people’s representative; and Roman corporation law supplied the rules for mediaeval representative assemblies, lay and clerical.[416]

The old Germanic state was a conglomerate of positive law and specific custom, having no existence beyond the laws, which were its formative constituents. Such a conception did not satisfy mediaeval publicists, imbued with antique views of the State’s further aims and potency. Nor were all men satisfied with the State’s divinely ordered origin in human sinfulness. An ultimate ground for its existence was sought, commensurate with its broadest aims. Such was found, not in positive, but in natural law—again an antique conception. That a veritable natural law existed, all men agreed; also that its source lay back of human conventions, somehow in the nature of God. All admitted its absolute supremacy, binding alike upon popes and secular monarchs, and rendering void all acts and positive laws contravening it. It must be the State’s ultimate constituent ground.

God was the source of natural law. Some argued that it proceeded from His will, as a command, others that its source was eternal Reason announcing her necessary and unalterable dictates; again its source was held to lie more definitely in the Reason that was identical with God the summa ratio in Deo existens, as Aquinas puts it. From that springs the Lex naturalis, ordained to rest on the participation of man, as a rational creature, in the moral order which he perceives by the light of natural reason. This lex naturalis (or jus naturale) is a true promulgated law, since God implants it for recognition in the minds of men.[417] Absolute unconditional supremacy was ascribed to it, and also to the jus divinum, which God revealed supernaturally for a supramundane end. A cognate supremacy was ascribed to the jus commune gentium, which was composed of rules of the jus naturale adapted to the conditions of fallen human nature.

Such law was above the State, to which, on the other hand, positive law was subject. Whenever the ruler was conceived as sovereign or absolute, he likewise was deemed above positive law, but bound by these higher laws. They were the source and sanction of the innate and indestructible rights of the individual, to property and liberty and life as they were formulated at a later period. It is evident how the recognition of such rights fell in with the Christian revelation of the absolute value of every individual in and for himself and his immortal life. On the other hand, certain rights of the State, or the community, were also indestructible and inalienable by virtue of the nature of their source in natural law.[418]

This abstract of political theory has been stated in terms generalized to vagueness, and with no attempt to follow the details or trace the historical development. The purpose has been to give the general flavour of mediaeval thought concerning Church and State, and the Individual as a member of them both. One observes how the patristic and mediaeval Christian thought mingles with the antique; and one may assume the intellectual acumen applied by legist, canonist, and scholastic theologian to the discussion and formulation of these high arguments. The mediaeval genius for abstractions is evident, and the mediaeval faculty of linking them to the affairs of life; clear also is the baneful effect of mediaeval allegory. Even as men now-a-days are disposed to rest in the apparent reality of the tangible phenomenon, so the mediaeval man just as commonly sought for his reality in what the phenomenon might be conceived to symbolize. Therefore in the higher political controversies, even as in other interests of the human spirit, argument through allegory was accepted as legitimate, if not convincing; and a proper sequence of thought was deemed to lie from one symbolical meaning to another, with even a deeper validity than from one palpable fact to that which followed from it.