WINE, WOMEN, AND SONG.

—Martin Luther.

MEDIÆVAL LATIN STUDENTS' SONGS

Now First Translated into English Verse

WITH AN ESSAY

BY

JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

London

CHATTO AND WINDUS, PICCADILLY

1884

TO

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

Dear Louis,

To you, in memory of past symposia, when wit (your wit) flowed freerthan our old Forzato, I dedicate this little book, my pastime throughthree anxious months.

Yours,

JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

Villa Emily, San Remo,

May 1884.

Wine, Women, and Song.

[1]

I.

When we try to picture to ourselves the intellectual and moral stateof Europe in the Middle Ages, some fixed and almost stereotyped ideasimmediately suggest themselves. We think of the nations immersed in agross mental lethargy; passively witnessing the gradual extinction ofarts and sciences which Greece and Rome had splendidly inaugurated;allowing libraries and monuments of antique civilisation to crumbleinto dust; while they trembled under a dull and brooding terror ofcoming judgment, shrank from natural enjoyment as from deadly sin, oryielded themselves with brutal eagerness to the satisfaction of vulgarappetites. Preoccupation with the other world in this long periodweakens man's hold upon the things that make his life desirable.Philosophy is sunk in the slough of ignorant, perversely subtledisputation[2] upon subjects destitute of actuality. Theologicalfanaticism has extinguished liberal studies and the gropings of thereason after truth in positive experience. Society lies prostrateunder the heel of tyrannous orthodoxy. We discern men in masses,aggregations, classes, guilds—everywhere the genus and the species ofhumanity, rarely and by luminous exception individuals and persons.Universal ideals of Church and Empire clog and confuse the nascentnationalities. Prolonged habits, of extra-mundane contemplation,combined with the decay of real knowledge, volatilise the thoughts andaspirations of the best and wisest into dreamy unrealities, giving afalse air of mysticism to love, shrouding art in allegory, reducingthe interpretation of texts to an exercise of idle ingenuity, and thestudy of Nature (in Bestiaries, Lapidaries, and the like) to an insanesystem of grotesque and pious quibbling. The conception of man's falland of the incurable badness of this world bears poisonous fruit ofcynicism and asceticism, that twofold bitter almond, hidden in theharsh monastic shell. The devil has become God upon this earth, andGod's eternal jailer in the next world. Nature is regarded withsuspicion and aversion; the flesh, with shame and loathing, broken byspasmodic outbursts of lawless self-indulgence. For human life thereis one formula:—

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