There was, as we have seen, a time in Europe, extending over many
centuries, when mankind dwelt under the preoccupation of making
literature, and still making more of it. The 5th century B.C. in
Athens was such a time; and if you will you may envy, as we all
admire, the men of an age when to write at all was tantamount to
asserting genius; the men who, in Newman's words, `deserve to be
Classics, both because of what they do and because they can do
it.' If you envy--while you envy--at least remember that these
things often paid their price; that the "Phaedo," for example,
was bought for us by the death of Socrates. Pass Athens and come
to Alexandria: still men are accumulating books and the material
for books; threshing out the Classics into commentaries and
grammars, garnering books in great libraries.
There follows an age which interrupts this hive-like labour with
sudden and insensate destruction. German tribes from the north,
Turkish from the east, break in upon the granaries and send up
literature in flames; the Christian Fathers from Tertullian to
Gregory the Great (I regret to say) either heartily assisting or
at least warming their benedictory hands at the blaze: and so
thoroughly they do their work that even the writings of
Aristotle, the Philosopher, must wait for centuries as 'things
silently gone out of mind or things violently destroyed' (to
borrow Wordsworth's fine phrase) and creep back into Europe bit
by bit, under cover of Arabic translations.
The scholars set to work and begin rebuilding: patient,
indefatigable, anonymous as the coral insects at work on a
Pacific atoll-building, building, until on the near side of the
gulf we call the Dark Age, islets of scholarship lift themselves
above the waters: mere specks at first, but ridges appear and
connect them: and, to first seeming, sterile enough: