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:

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:

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:

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:

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:

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:

Its closing lines are interesting:

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.

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

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

—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:

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.

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:

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

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.

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

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.

CHAPTER XXXI

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: