but as they join and become a _terra firma,_ a thin soil gathers
on them God knows whence: and, God knows whence, the seed is
brought, 'it may chance of wheat, or of some other grain.' There
is a price, again, for this resurrection: but how nobly, how
blithely paid you may learn, without seeking recondite examples,
from Cuthbert's famous letter describing the death of Bede.
Compare that story with that of the last conversation of
Socrates; and you will surely recognise that the two men are
brothers born out of time; that Bede's work has been a legacy;
that his life has been given to recreating--not scholarship
merely nor literature merely--but, through them both, something
above them both--the soul of Europe. And this may or may not lead
you on to reflect that beyond our present passions, and beyond
this War, in a common sanity Europe (and America with her) will
have to discover that common soul again.
But eminent spirits such as Bede's are, by their very eminence,
less representative of the process--essentially fugitive and
self-abnegatory--than the thousands of copyists who have left no
name behind them. Let me read you a short paragraph from "The
Cambridge History of English Literature," Chapter 11, written,
the other day, by one of our own teachers:
The cloister was the centre of life in the monastery, and in
the cloister was the workshop of the patient scribe. It is hard
to realise that the fair and seemly handwriting of these
manuscripts was executed by fingers which, on winter days,
when the wind howled through the cloisters, must have been
numbed by icy cold. It is true that, occasionally, little
carrels or studies in the recesses of the windows were screened
off from the main walk of the cloister, and, sometimes, a small
room or cell would be partitioned off for the use of a single
scribe. The room would then be called the Scriptorium, but it
is unlikely that any save the oldest and most learned of the
community were afforded this luxury. In these scriptoria of
various kinds the earliest annals and chronicles in the
English language were penned, in the beautiful and painstaking
forms in which we know them.
If you seek testimony, here are the _ipsissima verba_ of a poor
monk of Wessobrunn endorsed upon his MS:
The book which you now see was written in the outer seats
of the cloister. While I wrote I froze: and what I could not
write by the beams of day I finished by candlelight.
We might profitably spend--but to-day cannot spare--a while upon
the pains these men of the Middle Ages took to accumulate books
and to keep them. The chained volumes in old libraries, for
example, might give us a text for this as well as start us
speculating why it is that, to this day, the human conscience
incurably declines to include books with other portable property
covered by the Eighth Commandment. Or we might follow several of
the early scholars and humanists in their passionate chasings
across Europe, in and out of obscure monasteries, to recover the
lost MSS of the classics: might tell, for instance, of Pope
Nicholas V, whose birth-name was Tommaso Parentucelli, and how he
rescued the MSS from Constantinople and founded the Vatican
Library: or of Aurispa of Sicily who collected two hundred and
thirty-eight for Florence: or the story of the _editio princeps_
of the Greek text of Homer. Or we might dwell on the awaking of
our literature, and the trend given to it, by men of the Italian
and French renaissance; or on the residence of Erasmus here, in
this University, with its results.