Latin literature, despite its decline after the classical period, is marked by a number of names which merit eminence in their several domains. The era succeeding the silver age hardly deserves to be called leaden. Literature does, indeed, both descend from the Virgilian and Ciceronian style of language, and also adopt a less classic attitude in its themes and sentiment, but it is not without a life and value of its own. Some of the writers are pagan, some are Christian, but their religious professions are not to be determined by their dates. Apuleius, the African writer, a professional rhetorician and man of letters, who wrote his prose Metamorphoses or Golden Ass in the second century, is, of course, a pagan, and by no means a model one. The work just mentioned, probably based on current folk-tales, is entirely fiction, narrating the story of a man turned by sorcery into an ass, and describing his adventures, scandalous, distressful, or amusing, in the hands of robbers and other low types of a society which, we may trust, was not really so bad as it is here painted. Yet into this otherwise not very edifying work there comes the exquisite story of Cupid and Psyche, which has been so frequently translated or recast in literature—best of all by William Morris in the Earthly Paradise—and so frequently utilized as the subject of pictorial or plastic art.
From the beginning of the third century until the fifth, Christian views find their exponents in Tertullian, Lactantius, Ambrose, Prudentius, Jerome, and Augustine. To Jerome is due in particular that Latin version of the Bible of which the present Vulgate represents successive partial revisions, to Augustine the City of God, to Ambrose the initiation of the Christian hymn, and to Prudentius its development. Christian also is the Gallo-Roman poet Ausonius, of the later fourth century, but his verse is by no means dedicated to Christian teaching. In him appears what might seem to be a modern, if not fully “romantic,” partiality for affectionate observation of natural scenery, best illustrated by his well-known description of the stream and banks of the Moselle.
Meanwhile among pagan writers must be reckoned Ammianus, a picturesque and interesting historian, who undertook to bring the work of Tacitus up to the year 378; Macrobius, whose Saturnalia discourses in a desultory fashion on a variety of literary and social topics; and Claudian, the composer of polished poems on contemporary history, in which extremely skilful polish of verse is united to brilliant gifts of description. The religion of Boethius, the last man of letters who can be said to linger on the border of the classical world, but who in style and thought stands nearer to it than many an earlier writer, is doubtful. In all probability he was a pagan, but he concerned himself, not with religion, but with philosophy as reflected from Plato. His De Consolatione, or Consolations of Philosophy, is a prose work interspersed with verses, and in virtue of this production, which often rises to great excellence, Boethius stood to the Dark Ages for the exemplar of the philosopher. His place in mediaeval reading was a very high one, and may be gauged from the fact that in England Alfred the Great translated his Consolations into Anglo-Saxon, though with insertions and comments of his own. To Chaucer, as to all the mediaeval world, “Boece” was part of the staple library.
During the centuries from the decay of the literature of Rome till the emergence of the modern literatures of western Europe there occur the great migrations of conquering peoples and the forming of the new nations. The Gothic conquests of Italy and Spain, the movements of the Franks, Burgundians, and Lombards, the story of Alaric or Theodoric, of Pharamond or Clovis, belong to history, as do the settlement of the Anglo-Saxon and Danish tribes in Britain and the occupation of Normandy by the men from whom it is named. Against these Teutonic triumphs and their influence to the north must be set the Moslem triumphs and influence to the south. Not only did the Moors conquer and hold for centuries the greater part of the Spanish peninsula, but Sicily also passed for five generations into the hands of the Saracens. In England a national history commences with Alfred at the close of the ninth century, but its development, both from a literary and social point of view, was deeply modified at the Norman Conquest. In France and Germany the empire of Charlemagne, the great fact of the eighth century, had done much towards consolidating culture and reviving learning. At the end of the eleventh century began the Crusades, which helped to bring the western nations into closer touch with each other and also into contact with the Greek world and with legends of the east. Meanwhile, the Christians of north-west Spain were gradually winning back their country from the Moors, but, in the process, absorbing no little of their Arabic culture.
By the twelfth century the modern Romance tongues, Italian, French, Provençal, and Castilian, are sufficiently formed for literary purposes, and the speakers of those languages have attained to the position of steady and settled communities. Though the English language is temporarily in abeyance for literary uses, the English nation is free from further disturbance, while nevertheless it is now happily placed in direct communication with continental tendencies and ideas. In the meantime it must not be forgotten that Europe had now become Christian, and that in the west the teaching of one great Church was common to all the nations.
This long period of disintegration and reconstruction is for the most part so little studied, and is, in fact, comparatively so studiously ignored, that we are apt to forget how long it actually was. The literary productions of nearly seven hundred years are regarded as of so little moment that we forget there were any at all. Yet for a proper comprehension of the inter-relations of literature as affecting the development of our own, it is necessary to form some conception of the various literary currents of these “Dark Ages.”
As might perhaps be anticipated after a survey of the historical movements and situations, we have to reckon with:
(1) Such Latin literature, of classical or later date, as survived after the wreck of the empire and still formed part of, at least, the higher reading.
(2) Such new productions in Latin as appeared before the new tongues were formed.
(3) The matter and influence of the literature of the Church, comprising the Hebrew Scriptures, chiefly in the shape of the Vulgate, commentaries, moral works, and also religious legends, lives of saints, and the like.
(4) The material and spirit brought in by the Teutons in the shape of their own old epics and sagas, with the myths which formed their basis.
(5) The Celtic feeling, traditions, and compositions which made their way into the répertoire of such countries as contained a Celtic population.
(6) The learning, literary matter, and literary art of the Saracens, whether introduced by way of Spain or by that of Sicily, and whether derived from Oriental or from Greek sources.
(7) Literary influences from the Greek world, including remnants of classical and post-classical compositions, mediaeval productions of Byzantium, and tales of the East which had been rendered into a Greek form.
It is difficult to disentangle these various threads, which interlace each other in complex ways, but on the whole the most satisfactory procedure will be to make a note or two upon each. Such notes will necessarily be brief to the point of mere hinting.
(1) It was, perhaps, to be expected that, with the decline of Latin culture, the “fittest” part of Latin literature to survive in the knowledge of the semi-barbarized west should be that which lacked the highest artistic qualities. It is only with the dawn of the first Renaissance, which led up to and was assisted by the great Tuscan trio, that the true classics began to reappear among the common reading of men of superior learning. Virgil, indeed, was not wholly forgotten, nor was Cicero, and in the age of Charlemagne there was promise of a much wider scope. But, unless with the piously inclined—and often even with them—the Dark Ages were more interested in scraps of miscellaneous information containing a spice of the wonderful, derived and garbled from Pliny, in stories with a similar spice of the marvellous and, by preference, of the licentious, such as are to be found in the Satyricon of Petronius and the Golden Ass of Apuleius, or in traditions of the art of love culled from Ovid and crudely transmitted. For those of a more serious turn there were the mild philosophizing of Boethius, the history of the Spaniard Orosius, and the encyclopaedic educational medley of Martianus Capella; and, for the religious, the hymns of Prudentius served as a model. Yet, though sparingly met, the reading of literary Latin never quite failed, and verses, for example, continued to be written as much in the style of Claudian as writers could command. Latin comedy was not unknown to the monasteries, since the German nun Hrotswith is found in the tenth century composing prose imitations of Terence. It is impossible, in the defect of our material, to tell with any precision the extent to which Latin reading was directly kept in vogue. Capella and Orosius, at least, were accepted as standard works, but in respect of the legends, stories, mythologies, and pseudo-marvels of natural history, such matter as shows itself at the birth of the new literatures had in a large measure come back in roundabout ways and through other channels.
(2) It is more easy to name the chief Latin productions of the Dark Ages themselves. If we regard Boethius as the last figure in Roman literature proper, the series consists mainly—for the sixth century—of the voluminous writings of Cassiodorus, historical and educational; the informal History of the Franks by Gregory of Tours; and the work of the Goth Jordanes concerning his own people. To the seventh century belong the Christian and didactic Moralia of Gregory the Great, and the encyclopaedic Origines of Isidore of Seville. To these we must add two writers of Great Britain; the one, Gildas, who wrote in Wales, in the middle of the sixth century, his dolorous account of the conquest of Britain by the Saxons; the other, the Englishman Bede, whose Ecclesiastical History and biographical works belong to the eighth. The age of Charlemagne, with its vigorous encouragement of education, consolidated all the promiscuous learning of the time, in which style plays a part altogether subordinate to the multifarious contents. From a literary point of view the creations above-named are of little moment to our subject, except in so far as information and misinformation from this uncritical mass of material found its way into all the work of our pre-Renaissance writers. Their chief merit is that they kept the channels of classical influence from being completely blocked. We must, however, note one important innovation in literary form. This was the introduction of rhyme into Latin hymns. The exact source of the novelty is unknown, but it began as early as the fourth century, and, together with Arabic influence, it helps to account for the use of rhyme which became current in the neo-Latin countries before their modern languages produced a real literature.
(3) The Hebraic influence which came through Christianity is as obvious as it was far-reaching. Every step in the Christianizing of Europe meant the conveying, not only of new sentiment and new ways of regarding things, but also of new materials in the way of Biblical history, however distorted in perspective. From the new doctrines of self-mortification there grew legends of the saints; from the traditions of their sanctity, legends of miracles; from the persecutions, legends of the martyrs. Both the Old and the New Testament already existed in a Latin form even before the more competent and authoritative version of Jerome (about A.D. 400). It should also be observed that the Bible which was thus rendered accessible was then read, far more than in later times, as a book containing matter interesting in itself, and therefore to be utilized and recast in story, apart from its uses in theology. Meanwhile round the original Scriptures both the earlier and later “Fathers” built up large masses of comment. When we remember that in the Dark Ages it was the churchmen who kept alive literary cultivation and production, and that the Bible narrative, the legends, martyrologies, and Christian doctrines were conveyed to every mind by sermons and other agencies, it is manifest how extensive must have been the effect upon thought and matter before the newly forming literatures emerged. On actual literary art and style it is true that there could be but little palpable influence, until, or unless, the Bible came to exist and to be widely read, as it eventually did in England, in the vernacular. But of this something more will be said in a later section of this book.
(4) With the Teutonic invaders of France there came in the spirit of feudal relationship. For centuries this spirit survived. Combined with the Celtic exaltation which is so pronounced in the Arthurian legends, and also with the sentiments of Christianity, it became embellished into the well-known mediaeval conception of knighthood with its vows of utter loyalty and self-devotion. The way was thus prepared for the knightly, or chivalrous, romances which are to be described in the chapter on the literature of France.
But, besides this feudal spirit shown in the Franks, there had already existed among the Germanic tribes before their settlement in France or Britain an orally transmitted literature. Its form was epic, and its themes the superhuman exploits of heroes among scenes of slaughter and carousal, in contest with huge monsters, and under the dispensation of rude pagan deities, Woden, Thor, and the rest of the Teutonic pantheon. Between the fourth and sixth centuries this heroic poetry of Germany grows into appreciable form, and both the Franks of the Continent and the Anglo-Saxons of England bring with them their several portions. In Germany itself it is much later that the Nibelungen Lied is edited into a connected shape; but to England there came in the sixth century the epic legend of Beowulf, of which the source is to be found in events of southern Sweden and the Western Baltic dimly recorded. This poem was edited in Christian times, and with some Christian additions, during the literary flourishing of northern England in the early part of the eighth century. Another poem carried from the mainland by the Englecyn was the Song of Widsith (the Far-Traveller), a wandering gleeman who has much to say of the deeds and generosity of the Gothic and other German chiefs among whom he roamed “as his fate willed,” and to whom he “unlocked his word-hoard.”
In point of matter this Germanic contribution to Dark Age literature is perhaps of little account. But its vigour of action and strenuous temper did no little towards determining the virility of the French chansons de geste, which formed so large a portion of English reading in the pre-Chaucerian period. In point of form it is necessary to note that the Anglo-Saxon method of versification, based on accent, alliteration and assonance, is naturally inherited from the German tradition. With very slight modification the method of Anglo-Saxon poetry is also that of Langland in his Piers Plowman of the Chaucerian age. Though this was subsequently abandoned by English poets in favour of the French system of rhyme and numbered syllables, the use—all the more artistic for being disguised—of alliteration and accent has survived as one of the chief formal beauties of all our poetry.
Whereas the Teutonic poetry, when it came in contact with Christianity in England or France, soon lost its characteristic themes, its mythology, and much of its savagery, the older matter and spirit still flourished among the pagan Norsemen, and were re-imported into northern England with the invasions of the Danes.
(5) More distinguishable and pronounced effects upon the literature of western Europe were produced by a backward invasion of the Celtic themes and temperament. There was much Celtic blood in northern Italy and in Spain, still more in France and the British Islands. When once the Celtic temperament emerged in literature it was sure of a ready and wide response. Perhaps no such emergence would have happened if it had not been that in the Dark Ages the Christian scholars—the only authors of that epoch—were especially cultured and ardent in Wales and Ireland. The racial and patriotic feelings of the British Celts were pathetic and intense, and, whether among those in western Britain, or among the emigrants to Brittany, the exploits of their race were celebrated in song marked by a high spirit of pride, as well as by a peculiar mysticism and a remarkable sentiment of chivalry and romance. The actual contributions of the Celts to our own literary making are the subject of brief remark elsewhere.
(6) The influence of the East during the period before the first Renaissance was of no small importance. The language through which it came, but not often the language in which it originated, was the Arabic of the Saracens, whether as invaders of Spain or of Sicily. It is precisely while the literary state of Europe was at its lowest that the Saracenic culture was at its height. Into Spain, where the Moors had established themselves in splendour and opulence, there followed all the learning of the Semitic East, in philosophy, natural science, and medicine, together with the literary forms of the Arabs and the music of their accompaniments. Though the western Saracens were politically altogether separate from the Caliphate of Bagdad, the literary language was common to the Moslem world, and men of learning and artistic gift—whether Arabs or Jews—were equally welcome at either end. In the reign of Abd-ur-Rahman, in the early part of the tenth century, there particularly flourished in Moorish Spain the light verse of love and its gay surroundings. Meanwhile Cordova developed what was practically a University, to which congregated all manner of Oriental talent, and in which studies in science and philosophy were prosecuted with zeal. Nor was the diffusion of all this culture restricted to the Arabs or their Spanish subjects. Many Christians from other parts of western Europe sought a knowledge of mathematics or medicine at Cordova, nor were these severer accomplishments all that the visitor would acquire.
To literature proper the true Arabs would have contributed little. In their original home their poetry had mostly taken the shape of the qasîda, a loosely connected ode, in which an introduction concerning the forsaken camping ground was regularly followed by reflections on the singer’s love affairs, and these by thoughts concerning his desert wanderings, his steed, and finally his chief. Of most importance to us, perhaps, is the fact that this Arabic verse was in rhyme, and that short odes, or ghazels, of fourteen lines, appear to anticipate the sonnet, a form which arose in Sicily in a court frequented by cultured Moslems.
After the establishment of Islam, the new religion at first exercised a cramping effect, but the same fondness for rhyme (which, indeed, was associated with notions of sacred or magic power) introduced it even into the prose of the Koran. When the Saracen conquest had extended widely and included Persia, the superior culture of the Persians gave them, from about A.D. 750, a predominating influence at the court of the Abbasids at Bagdad. Arabic literature, therefore, widened its forms and themes, and its poetry now embraced lyrics of love and wine, satires and elegies, largely of Persian origin. Of this poetry in general it may be said that it is marked by a peculiar predilection for sententious wisdom in the shape of proverbs and aphorisms, and for fables and allegories which convey similar maxims. These, we shall find, appear in full force in Spain, where they are converted into part of the earliest literature in Spanish. For the collection of such fables the Arabs and Persians could reach a hand in either direction. From the west they could take the Greek fables of Aesop and convert them into the Arabic fables of Loqman; from the east they could gather the Indian fables of Pilpay (or Bidpai), translated first from the Indian Pancatantra into the Middle Persian (better called Pehlevi), and thence by Muqaffa into the Arabic Kalila and Dimna. In this collection the actions of the beasts serve subtly to convey to a prince rules of wise conduct, more moral than the later principles of Macchiavelli. The Orientals showed an equal passion for purely romantic stories, provided that they contained wonderful and magical occurrences, much prowess, and luscious suggestions of magnificence and pleasure. The Thousand and One Nights, better known as the Arabian Nights, form an immense body of such compositions, which have been perpetually translated and re-translated, and which are still among the standard books of the world.
But the Saracens were by no means sunk in sententiousness or frivolity. They were impassioned for philosophy and science, especially the sciences of mathematics, astronomy, medicine, and chemistry. For their acquirements in these directions they were indebted to the Greeks, and chiefly through the Syrians of Mesopotamia. Here Hellenism, introduced by Alexander, had grown into peculiar strength, nor was the Greek blood itself inconsiderable. From the Syrians the Arabs derived their knowledge both of Aristotle and of Plato, although, from their practical turn of mind, it was the Aristotelian philosophy which they mainly affected, and which passed into the famous Arabic translation of Averrhoes. Carried to Cordova, much of this learning, and particularly that derived from Aristotle, was disseminated through western Europe. The Arabic influence on thought, reflected from Greece, was therefore great. From a more purely literary point of view, we must reckon with the introduction of Oriental apologues and tales, although many of these, as will be seen immediately, come in also from eastern Europe through a Greek medium.
In point of form it is impossible not to conclude that the minstrelsy and poetry which prevailed in Moorish Spain contributed liberally to the fashioning of the troubadour poetry of Provence. The itinerant Arab minstrel was not welcomed solely by Moors; he played his part among the true Spaniards, and Spaniards themselves turned minstrels after the same fashion. The eastern, or Catalonian, part of Spain was in language virtually identical with the neighbouring south of France, and no border separated the Catalonian minstrelsy from the Provençal districts. In 1112 the Count of Barcelona became the ruler of Provence, and in his train followed all the poetry and song which had grown familiar in Catalonia. It is dangerous to attempt to decide the more and less of direct borrowing; but the manner of the troubadour, his rhymes, his themes of the tenso, the planh, and the morning and evening songs, so closely recall the machinery and devices of the Saracens, that the affiliation can hardly be denied.
(7) Direct effect of Greece upon Europe to the West was in abeyance from the fall of Rome till the Renaissance. Occasionally indeed, but very seldom, we hear of scholars who read some Greek, and Theodore of Tarsus actually visited and taught in Anglo-Saxon England in the later seventh century. But such influence of Greek work as appears during the dark and mediaeval times comes only in circuitous ways and from inferior writers of inferior matter. It for the most part appears in stories derived from the post-classical Greek romances, or from Oriental tales first translated into Greek and then recast into Latin.
Greek romance itself—beginning as early as the second century, but mostly produced at uncertain dates from the fourth century onwards—at once betrays an Oriental atmosphere. Its genesis is not so much in the Greek mind as in the eastern mind, with which the empire of Alexander had brought the Greeks into contact. The writers commonly hail from Asia Minor or Alexandria, and the scenes and adventures are apt to be Babylonian, Syrian, or Egyptian. Their chief features are much the same. A number of unlikely and inconsequent adventures, comprising separations and stratagems of lovers, travels, voyages, dangers, pirates, magic, murders, descriptions, and dreams, are tediously repeated with unessential variations. One of the first examples, it is true, deals with wanderings in the north and west, among Celts and Cimmerians. This is the Marvels beyond Thule of Antonius Diogenes. But the Babylonica of Iamblichus and the Aethiopica (or Theagenes and Chariclea) of Heliodorus have their mise-en-scène in the east, with events and wonders in the Oriental style. The latter work enjoyed a special vogue, and portions of its contents were not scorned even in comparatively late times by Italians like Tasso and Guarini, and Frenchmen like Hardy and Racine. This, together with the Leucippe and Cleitophon of Achilles Tatius, and the pastoral romance of Daphnis and Chloe by Longus, played no small part in the conception of the French sentimental romances of the seventeenth century, beginning with D’Urfé and carried on by Scudéry and La Calprenède. The work of Longus is on the whole the most important, since it contains the new element of pastoral setting and description and some novelty of simple sentiment. In the Dark Ages themselves we cannot tell how far these productions were known in any direct form in the west, but at least we know that nothing travels more quickly than stories. Another romance, with the usual elements of love and adventure, and with the addition of “recognition of the long-lost,” was the famous story of Apollonius of Tyre, of which we possess only the Latin version, through which the tale was passed westward. This work was favourite reading in the age with which we are here concerned. It was translated even into Anglo-Saxon, and later came in again as an English version of a French rendering.
Of a different character was the Barlaam and Josaphat of John of Damascus, an ecclesiastical writer of the eighth century. The story is derived from Buddhist sources in India. Though magic plays its part, the whole is naturally of a moral and theological turn. The mediaeval world found it vastly interesting, for after its conversion into Latin by Vincent of Beauvais in the thirteenth century, it passed into nearly every European language which could pretend to a literature.
Meanwhile, through Greek versions, there came in tales of purely non-Greek construction. Chief among these was the work known to more modern times as the Seven Wise Masters, originally an Indian production, styled the Parables of Sandabar. This was turned into Persian or Arabic, then into Greek under the name of Syntipas, thence, in the thirteenth century, into Latin as Dolopathos, and thence again versified into French.
All this material appears and reappears in the fabliaux of France, in the earliest novelle of the Italians, and naturally in Boccaccio.
Other productions popular in the Dark Ages, of special note as the storehouse upon which the French trouvères in particular drew for their classical cycles of romances (to be dealt with in the chapter on French literature), were those attributed to “Dares Phrygius,” “Dictys Cretensis,” and “Callisthenes.” If we place the two former under the head of Greek work, it is because of their ascription to Greek writers and their possible derivation, at least in part, from lost Greek sources. They deal with the story of Troy, ostensibly from complementary points of view—a Trojan and a Greek. That there actually was some sort of history by Dares of Phrygia appears from a passage in Aelian; but the book On the Destruction of Troy, in which mediaeval readers put their simple trust, is a Latin production of a date probably not earlier than the sixth century A.D., although it pretends to be a translation of Dares by the classical writer Nepos. Similarly an actual Greek Dictys of Crete apparently did write an account of the Trojan war and the Greek heroes, but the book in actual use was but a fourth-century production in Latin, asserting itself to be a translation. Portions of these two compilations were versified, transfused, and invested with an atmosphere of mediaeval chivalry, by Trouvères, including the Norman-English Benoît de Sainte-More, whom again Guido Colonna, in the thirteenth century, exploited for his Latin History of the Trojan War, a work which became the standard reference for “matter of Troy” as it appears in Chaucer, Lydgate (Troy Book), and Gower. It is not from Homer, but from these pseudo-classical accounts, that we derive such episodes as those of Troilus and Cressida.
For the cycle of Alexander the same generation of Trouvères and their English followers were indebted to a late Byzantine writer, who pretended to be the Greek Callisthenes, contemporary of the great Macedonian. In point of fact his History of Alexander is an imaginative mixture of passages culled from history with eastern stories and marvels. It is, of course, in a Latin version that this farrago became known to the authors of the romans.
We must not forget the vogue during these ages, devoted as they were to tale and apologue, of the fables of “Aesop.” Of these there were in mediaeval times various versions and collections, some derived directly from the Latin Phaedrus, who had versified from the Greek; others from the later Greek remodelling by Babrius; others again from an Arabic collection, which combined a compilation of the Greek with a compilation from the Indian Fables of Bidpai (or Pilpay). One early version, of uncertain provenance, was that of King Alfred; and it was apparently a general massing of all this material which, after passing through German and French hands, became the famous Esope of Caxton.
To all that literary matter which pretended to classical antiquity the Middle Ages, entirely lacking historical perspective, gave the comprehensive name of “Roman.” How freely that term was used, and how miscellaneous had been the sources of legend, is manifested in the strange medley of the thirteenth or fourteenth century, known as the Gesta Romanorum, in which fragments of classical history, legends of saints, and Oriental stories, are combined without the least notion of their relations or contradictions. To the Gesta every writer, whether in England, beginning with Chaucer, or in Italy, beginning with Boccaccio, had free recourse for the matter of his poems or his plots.