Produced by Delphine Lettau, Charles Franks
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
[Illustration: Philosophers on Mount Olympus.]
It is not long since the Middle Ages, of the literature of which thisbook gives us such curious examples, were supposed to be anunaccountable phenomenon accidentally thrust in betwixt the twoperiods of civilisation, the classical and the modern, and forming aperiod without growth or meaning—a period which began about the timeof the decay of the Roman Empire, and ended suddenly, and more or lessunaccountably, at the time of the Reformation. The society of thisperiod was supposed to be lawless and chaotic; its ethics a mereconscious hypocrisy; its art gloomy and barbarous fanaticism only; itsliterature the formless jargon of savages; and as to its science, thatside of human intelligence was supposed to be an invention of the timewhen the Middle Ages had been dead two hundred years.
The light which the researches of modern historians, archaeologists,bibliographers, and others, have let in on our view of the Middle Ageshas dispersed the cloud of ignorance on this subject which was one ofthe natural defects of the qualities of the learned men and keencritics of the eighteenth and early part of the nineteenth centuries.The Middle-class or Whig theory of life is failing us in all branchesof human intelligence. Ethics, Politics, Art, and Literature are morethan beginning to be regarded from a wider point of view than thatfrom which our fathers and grandfathers could see them.
For many years there has been a growing reaction against the dull"grey" narrowness of the eighteenth century, which looked on Europeduring the last thousand years as but a riotous, hopeless, and stupidprison. It is true that it was on the side of Art alone that thisenlightenment began, and that even on that side it progressed slowlyenough at first—e.g. Sir Walter Scott feels himself obliged,as in the Antiquary, to apologize to pedantry for hisinstinctive love of Gothic architecture. And no less true is it thatfollies enough were mingled with the really useful and healthful birthof romanticism in Art and Literature. But at last the study of factsby men who were neither artistic nor sentimental came to the help ofthat first glimmer of instinct, and gradually something like a trueinsight into the life of the Middle Ages was gained; and we see thatthe world of Europe was no more running round in a circle then thannow, but was developing, sometimes with stupendous speed, intosomething as different from itself as the age which succeeds this willbe different from that wherein we live. The men of those times are nolonger puzzles to us; we can understand their aspirations, andsympathise with their lives, while at the same time we have no wish(not to say hope) to put back the clock, and start from the positionwhich they held. For, indeed, it is characteristic of the times inwhich we live, that whereas in the beginning of the romantic reaction,its supporters were for the most part mere laudatores temporisacti, at the present time those who take pleasure in studying thelife of the Middle Ages are more commonly to be found in the ranks ofthose who are pledged to the forward movement of modern life; whilethose who are vainly striving to stem the progres