HISTORY OF PHYSICAL AND OTHER LITERATURE FROM 1650 TO 1700.
Reasons for omitting Mathematics 831
Academy del Cimento 831
Royal Society 832
Academy of Sciences at Paris 832
State of Chemistry 832
Becker 833
Boyle 833
His Metaphysical Works 833
Extract from one of them 833
His Merits in Physics and Chemistry 834
General Character of Boyle 834
Of Hooke and Others 834
Lemery 835
Slow Progress of Zoology 835
Before Ray 835
His Synopsis of Quadrupeds 835
Merits of this Work 835
Redi 836
Swammerdam 836
Lister 836
Comparative Anatomy 836
Botany 837
Jungius 837
Morison 837
Ray 837
Rivinus 838
Tournefort 838
Vegetable Physiology 839
Grew 839
His Anatomy of Plants 840
He discovers the Sexual System 840
Camerarius confirms this 840
Predecessors of Grew 840
Malpighi 840
Early Notions of Geology 840
Burnet’s Theory of Earth 840
Other Geologists 841
Protogæa of Leibnitz 841
Circulation of Blood Established 842
Willis--Vieussens 842
Malpighi 842
Other Anatomists 842
Medical Theories 843
Polyglott of Walton 843
Hottinger 844
Spencer 844
Bochart 844
Pococke 844
D’Herbelot 844
Hyde 844
Maps of the Sansons 844
De Lisle’s Map of the World 845
Voyages and Travels 845
Historians 845
De Solis 845
Memoirs of De Retz 845
Bossuet on Universal History 846
English Historical Works 846
Burnet 846
General Character of 17th Century 846
Conclusion 847
PREFACE.
The advantages of such a synoptical view of literature as displays its
various departments in their simultaneous condition through an extensive
period, and in their mutual dependency, seem too manifest to be
disputed. And, as we possess little of this kind in our own language, I
have been induced to undertake that to which I am in some respects, at
least, very unequal, but which no more capable person, as far as I could
judge, was likely to perform. In offering to the public this
introduction to the literary history of three centuries--for I cannot
venture to give it a title of more pretension--it is convenient to state
my general secondary sources of information, exclusive of the
acquaintance I possess with original writers; and, at the same time, by
showing what has already been done, and what is left undone, to furnish
a justification of my own undertaking.
The history of literature belongs to modern, and chiefly to almost
recent times. The nearest approach to it that the ancients have left us
is contained in a single chapter of Quintilian, the first of the tenth
book, wherein he passes rapidly over the names and characters of the
poets, orators, and historians of Greece and Rome. This, however, is but
a sketch; and the valuable work of Diogenes Laertius preserves too
little of chronological order to pass for a history of ancient
philosophy, though it has supplied much of the materials for all that
has been written on the subject.
In the sixteenth century, the great increase of publications, and the
devotion to learning which distinguished that period, might suggest the
scheme of a universal literary history. Conrad Gesner, than whom no one,
by extent and variety of erudition, was more fitted for the labour,
appears to have framed a plan of this kind. What he has published, the
Bibliotheca Universalis, and the Pandectæ Universales, are, taken
together, the materials that might have been thrown into an historical
form; the one being an alphabetical catalogue of authors and their
writings; the other a digested and minute index to all departments of
knowledge, in twenty-one books, each divided into titles, with short
references to the texts of works on every head in his comprehensive
classification. The order of time is therefore altogether disregarded.
Possevin, an Italian Jesuit, made somewhat a nearer approach to this in
his Bibliotheca Selecta, published at Rome in 1593. Though his
partitions are rather encyclopædic than historical, and his method,
especially in the first volume, is chiefly argumentative, he gives under
each chapter a nearly chronological catalogue of authors, and sometimes
a short account of their works.
Lord Bacon, in the second book De Augmentis Scientiarum, might justly
deny, notwithstanding these defective works of the preceding century,
that any real history of letters had been written; and he
compares that of the world, wanting this, to a statue of Polypheme
deprived of his single eye. He traces the method of supplying this
deficiency in one of those luminous and comprehensive passages which
bear the stamp of his vast mind: the origin and antiquities of every
science, the methods by which it has been taught, the sects and
controversies it has occasioned, the colleges and academies in which it
has been cultivated, its relation to civil government and common
society, the physical or temporary causes which have influenced its
condition, form, in his plan, as essential a part of such a history, as
the lives of famous authors, and the books they have produced.
No one has presumed to fill up the outline which Bacon himself could but
sketch; and most part of the seventeenth century passed away with few
efforts on the part of the learned to do justice to their own
occupation; for we can hardly make an exception for the Prodromus
Historiæ Literariæ (Hamburg, 1659) of Lambecius, a very learned German,
who, having framed a magnificent scheme of a universal history of
letters, was able to carry it no farther than the times of Moses and
Cadmus. But, in 1688, Daniel Morhof, professor at Kiel in Holstein,
published his well-known Polyhistor, which received considerable
additions in the next age at the hands of Fabricius, and is still found
in every considerable library.
Morhof appears to have had the method of Possevin in some measure before
his eyes; but the lapse of a century, so rich in erudition as the
seventeenth, had prodigiously enlarged the sphere of literary history.
The precise object, however, of the Polyhistor, as the word imports, is
to direct, on the most ample plan, the studies of a single scholar.
Several chapters, that seem digressive in an historical light, are to be
defended by this consideration. In his review of books in every province
of literature, Morhof adopts a sufficiently chronological order; his
judgments are short, but usually judicious; his erudition so copious,
that later writers have freely borrowed from, and, in many parts, added
little to the enumeration of the Polyhistor. But he is far more
conversant with writers in Latin than the modern languages; and, in
particular, shows a scanty acquaintance with English literature.
Another century had elapsed, when the honour of first accomplishing a
comprehensive synopsis of literary history in a more regular form than
Morhof, was the reward of Andrès, a Spanish Jesuit, who, after the
dissolution of his order, passed the remainder of his life in Italy. He
published at Parma, in different years, from 1782 to 1799, his Origine
Progresso e Stato attuale d’ogni Litteratura. The first edition is in
five volumes quarto; but I have made use of that printed at Prato, 1806,
in twenty octavo volumes. Andrès, though a Jesuit, or perhaps because a
Jesuit, accommodated himself in some measure to the tone of the age
wherein his book appeared, and is always temperate, and often candid.
His learning is very extensive in surface, and sometimes minute and
curious, but not, generally speaking, profound; his style is flowing,
but diffuse and indefinite; his characters of books have a vagueness
unpleasant to those who seek for precise notions; his taste is correct,
but frigid; his general views are not injudicious, but display a
moderate degree of luminousness or philosophy. This work is, however, an
extraordinary performance, embracing both ancient and modern literature
in its full extent, and, in many parts, with little assistance from any
former publication of the kind. It is far better known on the
Continent than in England, where I have not frequently seen it quoted;
nor do I believe it is common in our private libraries.
A few years after the appearance of the first volumes of Andrès, some of
the most eminent among the learned of Germany projected a universal
history of modern arts and sciences on a much larger scale. Each single
province, out of eleven, was deemed sufficient for the labours of one
man, if they were to be minute and exhaustive of the subject: among
others, Bouterwek undertook poetry and polite letters; Buhle speculative
philosophy; Kästner the mathematical sciences; Sprengel anatomy and
medicine; Heeren classical philology. The general survey of the whole
seems to have been assigned to Eichhorn. So vast a scheme was not fully
executed; but we owe to it some standard works, to which I have been
considerably indebted. Eichhorn published, in 1796 and 1799, two
volumes, intended as the beginning of a General History of the
Cultivation and Literature of modern Europe, from the twelfth to the
eighteenth century. But he did not confine himself within the remoter
limit; and his second volume, especially, expatiates on the dark ages
that succeeded the fall of the Roman empire. In consequence, perhaps, of
this diffuseness, and also of the abandonment, for some reason with
which I am unacquainted, of a large portion of the original undertaking,
Eichhorn prosecuted this work no farther in its original form. But,
altering slightly its title, he published, some years afterwards, an
independent universal “History of Literature” from the earliest ages to
his own. This is comprised in six volumes, the first having appeared in
1805, the last in 1811.
The execution of these volumes is very unequal. Eichhorn was conversant
with oriental, with theological literature, especially of his own
country, and in general with that contained in the Latin language. But
he seems to have been slightly acquainted with that of the modern
languages, and with most branches of science. He is more specific, more
chronological, more methodical in his distribution than Andrès: his
reach of knowledge, on the other hand, is less comprehensive; and though
I could praise neither highly for eloquence, for taste, or for
philosophy, I should incline to give the preference in all these to the
Spanish Jesuit. But the qualities above mentioned render Eichhorn, on
the whole, more satisfactory to the student.
These are the only works, as far as I know, which deserve the name of
general histories of literature, embracing all subjects, all ages, and
all nations. If there are others, they must, I conceive, be too
superficial to demand attention. But in one country of Europe, and only
in one, we find a national history so comprehensive as to leave
uncommemorated no part of its literary labour. This was first executed
by Tiraboschi, a Jesuit born at Bergamo, and, in his later years,
librarian of the Duke of Modena, in twelve volumes quarto: I have used
the edition published at Rome in 1785. It descends to the close of the
seventeenth century. In full and clear exposition, in minute and exact
investigation of facts, Tiraboschi has few superiors; and such is his
good sense in criticism, that we must regret the sparing use he has made
of it. But the principal object of Tiraboschi was biography. A writer of
inferior reputation, Corniani, in his Secoli della litteratura Italiana
dopo il suo risorgimento (Brescia, 9 vols., 1804-1813), has gone more
closely to an appreciation of the numerous writers whom he passes in
review before our eyes. Though his method is biographical, he
pursues sufficiently the order of chronology to come into the class of
literary historians. Corniani is not much esteemed by some of his
countrymen, and does not rise to a very elevated point of philosophy;
but his erudition appears to me considerable, his judgments generally
reasonable; and his frequent analyses of books gives him one superiority
over Tiraboschi.
The Histoire Littéraire de l’Italie, by Ginguéné, is well known: he had
the advantage of following Tiraboschi; and could not so well, without
his aid, have gone over a portion of the ground, including in his
scheme, as he did, the Latin learning of Italy; but he was very
conversant with the native literature of the language, and has, not a
little prolixly, doubtless, but very usefully, rendered much of easy
access to Europe, which must have been sought in scarce volumes, and
was, in fact, known by name to a small part of the world. The Italians
are ungrateful if they deny their obligations to Ginguéné.
France has, I believe, no work of any sort, even an indifferent one, on
the universal history of her own literature; nor can we claim for
ourselves a single attempt of the most superficial kind. Warton’s
History of Poetry contains much that bears on our general learning; but
it leaves us about the accession of Elizabeth.
Far more has been accomplished in the history of particular departments
of literature. In the general history of philosophy, omitting a few
older writers, Brucker deserves to lead the way. There has been, of late
years, some disposition to depreciate his laborious performance, as not
sufficiently imbued with a metaphysical spirit, and as not rendering,
with clearness and truth, the tenets of the philosophers whom he
exhibits. But the Germany of 1744 was not the Germany of Kant and
Fichte; and possibly Brucker may not have proved the worse historian for
having known little of recent theories. The latter objection is more
material; in some instances he seems to me not quite equal to his
subject. But, upon the whole, he is of eminent usefulness; copious in
his extracts, impartial and candid in his judgments.
In the next age after Brucker, the great fondness of the German learned
both for historical and philosophical investigation produced more works
of this class than I know by name, and many more than I have read. The
most celebrated, perhaps, is that of Tennemann; but of which I only know
the abridgment, translated into French by M. Victor Cousin, with the
title Manuel de l’Histoire de Philosophie. Buhle, one of the society
above mentioned, whose focus was at Göttingen, contributed his share to
their scheme in a History of Philosophy from the revival of letters.
This I have employed through the French translation in six volumes.
Buhle, like Tennemann, has very evident obligations to Brucker; but his
own erudition was extensive, and his philosophical acuteness not
inconsiderable.
The history of poetry and eloquence, or fine writing, was published by
Bouterwek, in twelve volumes octavo. Those parts which relate to his own
country, and to Spain and Portugal, have been of more use to me than the
rest. Many of my readers must be acquainted with the Littérature du
Midi, by M. Sismondi; a work written in that flowing and graceful style
which distinguishes the author, and succeeding in all that it seeks to
give--a pleasing and popular, yet not superficial or unsatisfactory,
account of the best authors in the southern languages. We have nothing
historical as to our own poetry but the prolix volumes of Warton. They
have obtained, in my opinion, full as much credit as they deserve.
Without depreciating a book in which so much may be found and which has
been so great a favourite with the literary part of the public, it may
be observed that its errors as to fact, especially in names and dates,
are extraordinarily frequent, and that the criticism, in points of
taste, is not of a very superior kind.
Heeren undertook the history of classical literature--a great
desideratum, which no one had attempted to supply. But, unfortunately,
he has only given an introduction, carrying us down to the close of the
fourteenth century, and a history of the fifteenth. These are so good,
that we must much lament the want of the rest; especially as I am aware
of nothing to fill up the vacuity. Eichhorn, however, is here of
considerable use.
In the history of mathematical science, I have had recourse chiefly to
Montucla and, as far as he conducts us, to Kästner, whose catalogue and
analysis of mathematical works is far more complete, but his own
observations less perspicuous and philosophical. Portal’s History of
Anatomy, and some other books, to which I have always referred, and
which it might be tedious to enumerate, have enabled me to fill a few
pages with what I could not be expected to give from any original
research. But several branches of literature, using the word, as I
generally do, in the most general sense for the knowledge imparted
through books, are as yet deficient in anything that approaches to a
real history of their progress.
The materials of literary history must always be derived in great
measure from biographical collections, those especially which intermix a
certain portion of criticism with mere facts. There are some, indeed,
which are almost entirely of this description. Adrian Baillet, in his
Jugemens des Sçavans, published in 1685, endeavoured to collect the
suffrages of former critics on the merits of all past authors. His
design was only executed in a small part, and hardly extends beyond
grammarians, translators, and poets; the latter but imperfectly. Baillet
gives his quotations in French, and sometimes mingles enough of his own
to raise him above a mere compiler, and to have drawn down the animosity
of some contemporaries. Sir Thomas Pope Blount is a perfectly
unambitious writer of the same class. His Censura Celebriorum Autorum,
published in 1690, contains nothing of his own, except a few short dates
of each author’s life, but diligently brings together the testimonies of
preceding critics. Blount omits no class, nor any age; his arrangement
is nearly chronological, and leads the reader from the earliest records
of literature to his own time. The polite writers of modern Europe, and
the men of science, do not receive their full share of attention; but
this volume, though not, I think, much in request at present, is a very
convenient accession to any scholar’s library.
Bayle’s Dictionary, published in 1697, seems at first sight an
inexhaustible magazine of literary history. Those who are conversant
with it know that it frequently disappoints their curiosity; names of
great eminence are sought in vain, or are very slightly treated; the
reader is lost in episodical notes, perpetually frivolous, and disgusted
with an author who turns away at every moment from what is truly
interesting to some idle dispute of his own time, or some contemptible
indecency. Yet the numerous quotations contained in Bayle, the
miscellaneous copiousness of his erudition, as well as the good
sense and acuteness he can always display when it is his inclination to
do so, render his Dictionary of great value, though, I think, chiefly to
those who have made a tolerable progress in general literature.
The title of a later work by Père Niceron, Mémoires Pour Servir à
l’Histoire des Hommes Illustres de la République des Lettres, avec un
Catalogue Raisonné de leurs Ouvrages, in forty-three volumes 12mo,
published at Paris from 1727 to 1745, announces something rather
different from what it contains. The number of “illustrious men”
recorded by Niceron is about 1600, chiefly of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. The names, as may be anticipated, are frequently
very insignificant; and, in return, not a few of real eminence,
especially when Protestant, and, above all, English, are overlooked, or
erroneously mentioned. No kind of arrangement is observed; it is utterly
impossible to conjecture in what volume of Niceron any article will be
discovered. A succinct biography, though fuller than the mere dates of
Blount, is followed by short judgments on the author’s works, and by a
catalogue of them far more copious, at least, than had been given by any
preceding bibliographer. It is a work of much utility; but the more
valuable parts have been transfused into later publications.
The English Biographical Dictionary was first published in 1761. I speak
of this edition with some regard from its having been the companion of
many youthful hours; but it is rather careless in its general execution.
It is sometimes ascribed to Birch; but I suspect that Heathcote had more
to do with it. After several successive enlargements, an edition of this
Dictionary was published in thirty-two volumes from 1812 to 1817, by
Alexander Chalmers, whose name it now commonly bears. Chalmers was a man
of very slender powers, relatively to the magnitude of such a work; but
his life had been passed in collecting small matters of fact, and he has
added much of this kind to British biography. He inserts, beyond any one
else, the most insignificant names, and quotes the most wretched
authorities. But as the faults of excess, in such collections, are more
pardonable than those of omission, we cannot deny the value of his
Biographical Dictionary, especially as to our own country, which has not
fared well at the hands of foreigners.
Coincident nearly in order of time with Chalmers, but more distinguished
in merit, is the Biographie Universelle. The eminent names appended to a
large proportion of the articles contained in its fifty-two volumes, are
vouchers for the ability and erudition it displays. There is, doubtless,
much inequality in the performance; and we are sometimes disappointed by
a superficial notice where we had a right to expect most. English
literature, though more amply treated than had been usual on the
Continent, and with the benefit of Chalmer’s contemporaneous volumes, is
still not fully appreciated: our chief theological writers, especially,
are passed over almost in silence. There seems, on the other hand, a
redundancy of modern French names; those, above all, who have, even
obscurely and insignificantly been connected with the history of the
Revolution: a fault, if it be one, which is evidently gaining ground in
the supplementary volumes. But I must speak respectfully of a work to
which I owe so much, and without which, probably, I should never have
undertaken the present.
I will not here characterise several works of more limited biography;
among which are the Bibliotheca Hispana Nova of Antonio, the
Biographia Britannica, the Bibliothèque Française of Goujet; still less
is there time to enumerate particular lives, or those histories which
relate to short periods, among the sources of literary knowledge. It
will be presumed, and will appear by my references, that I have employed
such of them as came within my reach. But I am sensible that, in the
great multiplicity of books of this kind, and especially in their
prodigious increase on the Continent of late years, many have been
overlooked from which I might have improved these volumes. The press is
indeed so active, that no year passes without accessions to our
knowledge, even historically considered upon some of the multifarious
subjects which the present volumes embrace. An author who waits till all
requisite materials are accumulated to his hands, is but watching the
stream that will run on for ever; and though I am fully sensible that I
could have much improved what is now offered to the public by keeping it
back for a longer time, I should but then have had to lament the
impossibility of exhausting my subject. Epoiei, the modest phrase of the
Grecian sculptors, but expresses the imperfection that attaches to every
work of literary industry or of philosophical investigation. But I have
other warnings to bind up my sheaves while I may--my own advancing
years, and the gathering in the heavens.
I have quoted, to my recollection, no passage which I have not seen in
its own place; though I may possibly have transcribed in some instances,
for the sake of convenience, from a secondary authority. Without
censuring those who suppress the immediate source of their quotations, I
may justly say that in nothing I have given to the public has it been
practised by myself. But I have now and then inserted in the text
characters of books that I have not read, on the faith of my guides; and
it may be the case that intimation of this has not been always given to
the reader.
It is very likely that omissions, not, I trust, of great consequence,
will be detected; I might in fact say that I am already aware of them;
but perhaps these will be candidly ascribed to the numerous
ramifications of the subject, and the necessity of writing in a
different order from that in which the pages are printed. And I must add
that some omissions have been intentional: an accumulation of petty
facts, and especially of names to which little is attached, fatigues
unprofitably the attention; and as this is very frequent in works that
necessarily demand condensation, and cannot altogether be avoided, it
was desirable to make some sacrifice in order to palliate the
inconvenience. This will be found, among many other instances, in the
account of the Italian learned of the fifteenth century where I might
easily have doubled the enumeration, but with little satisfaction to the
reader.
But, independently of such slight omissions, it will appear that a good
deal is wanting in these volumes which some might expect in a history of
literature. Such a history has often contained so large a proportion of
biography, that a work in which it appears very scantily, or hardly at
all, may seem deficient in necessary information. It might be replied,
that the limits to which I have confined myself, and beyond which it is
not easy perhaps in the present age to obtain readers, would not admit
to this extension; but I may add, that any biography of the authors of
these centuries, which is not servilely compiled from a few known books
of that class, must be far too immense an undertaking for one man,
and besides its extent and difficulty, would have been particularly
irksome to myself, from the waste of time, as I deem it, which an
inquiry into trifling facts entails. I have more scruple about the
omission of extracts from some of the poets and best writers in prose,
without which they can be judged very unsatisfactorily: but in this also
I have been influenced by an unwillingness to multiply my pages beyond a
reasonable limit. But I have, in some instances, at least in the later
periods, gone more largely into analysis of considerable works than has
hitherto been usual. These are not designed to serve as complete
abstracts, or to supersede, instead of exciting, the reader’s industry;
but I have felt that some books of traditional reputation are less fully
known than they deserve.
Some departments of literature are passed over, or partially touched.
Among the former are books relating to particular arts, as agriculture
or painting, or to subjects of merely local interest, as those of
English law. Among the latter is the great and extensive portion of
every library, the historical. Unless where history has been written
with peculiar beauty of language, or philosophical spirit, I have
generally omitted all mention of it: in our researches after truth of
fact, the number of books that possess some value is exceedingly great,
and would occupy a disproportionate space in such a general view of
literature as the present. For a similar reason, I have not given its
numerical share to theology.
It were an impertinence to anticipate, for the sake of obviating, the
possible criticism of the public which has a right to judge, and for
those judgments I have had so much cause to be grateful, nor less so to
dictate how it should read what it is not bound to read at all; but
perhaps I may be allowed to say, that I do not wish this to be
considered as a book of reference on particular topics, in which point
of view it must often appear to disadvantage; and that, if it proves of
any value, it will be as an entire and synoptical work.
INTRODUCTION
TO THE
LITERATURE OF EUROPE
IN THE FIFTEENTH, SIXTEENTH,
AND
SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES.
CHAPTER I.
ON THE GENERAL STATE OF LITERATURE IN THE MIDDLE AGES TO THE END OF
THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY.
_Loss of Ancient Learning in the Fall of the Roman Empire--First
Symptoms of its Revival--Improvement in the Twelfth
Century--Universities and Scholastic Philosophy--Origin of Modern
Languages--Early Poetry--Provençal, French, German, and
Spanish--English Language and Literature--Increase of Elementary
Knowledge--Invention of Paper--Roman Jurisprudence--Cultivation of
Classical Literature--Its Decline after the Twelfth Century--Less
visible in Italy--Petrarch._
|Retrospect of learning in middle ages necessary.|
1. Although the subject of these volumes does not comprehend the
literary history of Europe, anterior to the commencement of the
fifteenth century, a period as nearly coinciding as can be expected in
any arbitrary division of time, with what is usually denominated the
revival of letters, it appears necessary to prefix such a general
retrospect of the state of knowledge for some preceding ages, as will
illustrate its subsequent progress. In this, however, the reader is not
to expect a regular history of mediæval literature, which would be
nothing less than the extension of a scheme already, perhaps, too much
beyond my powers of execution.[1]
[1] The subject of the following chapter has been already
treated by me in another work, the History of Europe during the
Middle Ages. I have not thought it necessary to repeat all that is
there said: the reader, if he is acquainted with those volumes, may
consider the ensuing pages partly as supplemental, and partly as
correcting the former where they contain anything inconsistent.
|Loss of learning in fall of Roman empire.|
|Boethius--his Consolation of Philosophy.|
2. Every one is well aware, that the establishment of the barbarian
nations on the ruins of the Roman empire in the West, was accompanied or
followed by an almost universal loss of that learning which had been
accumulated in the Latin and Greek languages, and which we call ancient
or classical; a revolution long prepared by the decline of taste and
knowledge for several preceding ages, but accelerated by public
calamities in the fifth century with overwhelming rapidity. The last of
the ancients, and one who forms a link between the classical period of
literature and that of the Middle Ages, in which he was a favourite
author, is Boethius, a man of fine genius, and interesting both from his
character and his death. It is well known, that, after filling the
dignities of Consul and Senator in the court of Theodoric, he fell a
victim to the jealousy of a sovereign, from whose memory, in many
respects glorious, the stain of that blood has never been effaced. The
Consolation of Philosophy, the chief work of Boethius, was written in
his prison. Few books are more striking from the circumstances of their
production. Last of the classic writers, in style not impure, though
displaying too lavishly that poetic exuberance which had distinguished
the two or three preceding centuries, in elevation of sentiment equal to
any of the philosophers, and mingling a Christian sanctity with
their lessons, he speaks from his prison in the swan-like tones of dying
eloquence. The philosophy that consoled him in bonds, was soon required
in the sufferings of a cruel death. Quenched in his blood, the lamp he
had trimmed with a skilful hand gave no more light; the language of
Tully and Virgil soon ceased to be spoken; and many ages were to pass
away, before learned diligence restored its purity, and the union of
genius with imitation taught a few modern writers to surpass in
eloquence the latinity of Boethius.
|Rapid decline of learning in sixth century.|
3. The downfall of learning and eloquence, after the death of Boethius
in 524, was inconceivably rapid. His contemporary Cassiodorus, Isidore
of Seville, and Martianus Capella, the earliest, but worst, of the
three, by very indifferent compilations, and that encyclopedic method
which Heeren observes to be an usual concomitant of declining
literature, superseded the use of the great ancient writers, with whom,
indeed, in the opinion of Meiners, they were themselves acquainted only
through similar productions of the fourth and fifth centuries. Isidore
speaks of the rhetorical works of Cicero and Quintilian as too diffuse
to be read.[2] The authorities upon which they founded their scanty
course of grammar, logic, and rhetoric were chiefly obscure writers, no
longer extant. But themselves became the oracles of the succeeding
period, wherein the trivium and quadrivium, a course of seven sciences,
introduced in the sixth century, were taught from their jejune
treatises.[3]
[2] Meiners, Vergleichung der sitten, &c., des mittelalters mit denen
unsers Jahrhunderts, 3 vols. Hanover, 1793. Vol. ii p. 333.
Eichhorn, Allgemeine Geschichte der Cultur und Litteratur, vol. ii.
p. 29. Heeren, Geschichte des studium der classischen Litteratur.
Göttingen, 1797. These three books, with the Histoire Littéraire de
la France, Brucker’s History of Philosophy, Turner’s and Henry’s
Histories of England, Muratori’s43d Dissertation, Tiraboschi, and
some few others, who will appear in the notes, are my chief
authorities for the dark ages. But none, in a very short compass,
is equal to the third discourse of Fleury, in the 13th volume of
the 12mo edition of his Ecclesiastical History.
[3] The trivium contained grammar, logic, and rhetoric;
the quadrivium, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy, as in
these two lines, framed to assist the memory:--
“GRAMM. loquitur; DIA. vera docet; RHET. verba colorat; MUS. canit;
AR. numerat; GEO. ponderat; AST. colit astra.”
But most of these sciences, as such, were hardly taught at all. The
arithmetic, for instance, of Cassiodorus or Capella is nothing but
a few definitions mingled with superstitious absurdities about the
virtues of certain numbers and figures. Meiners, ii. 339. Kästner,
Geschichte der Mathematik, p. 8.
The arithmetic of Cassiodorus occupies little more than two folio
pages, and does not contain one word of the common rules. The
geometry is much the same; in two pages we have some definitions
and axioms, but nothing farther. His logic is longer and better,
extending to sixteen folio pages. The grammar is very short and
trifling, the rhetoric the same.
|A portion remains in the church.|
4. This state of general ignorance lasted, with no very sensible
difference, on a superficial view, for about five centuries, during
which every sort of knowledge was almost wholly confined to the
ecclesiastical order. But among them, though instances of gross
ignorance were exceedingly frequent, the necessity of preserving the
Latin language, in which the Scriptures, the canons, and other
authorities of the church, and the regular liturgies, were written, and
in which alone the correspondence of their well organised hierarchy
could be conducted, kept flowing, in the worst seasons, a slender but
living stream; and though, as has been observed, no great difference may
appear, on a superficial view, between the seventh and eleventh
centuries, it would easily be shown that, after the first prostration of
learning, it was not long in giving signs of germinating afresh, and
that a very slow and gradual improvement might be dated farther back
than is generally believed.[4]
[4] M. Guizot confirms me in a conclusion to which I had previously
come, that the seventh century is the _nadir_ of the human mind in
Europe, and that its movement in advance began before the end of
the next, or, in other words, with Charlemagne. Hist. de la
Civilisation en France, ii. 345. A notion probably is current in
England, on the authority of the older writers, such as Cave or
Robertson, that the greatest darkness was later; which is true as
to England itself. It was in the seventh century that the
barbarians were first tempted to enter the church, and obtain
bishoprics, which had, in the first age after their invasion, been
reserved to Romans. Fleury, p. 18.
|Prejudices of the clergy against profane learning.|
5. Literature was assailed in its downfall by enemies from within as
well as from without. A prepossession against secular learning had taken
hold of those ecclesiastics who gave the tone to the rest; it was
inculcated in the most extravagant degree by Gregory I., the founder, in
a great measure, of the papal supremacy, and the chief authority
in the dark ages;[5] it is even found in Alcuin, to whom so much is due,
and it gave way very gradually in the revival of literature. In some of
the monastic foundations, especially in that of Isidore, though himself
a man of considerable learning, the perusal of heathen authors was
prohibited. Fortunately Benedict, whose order became the most widely
diffused, while he enjoined his brethren to read, copy, and collect
books, was silent as to their nature, concluding, probably, that they
would be wholly religious. This, in course of time, became the means of
preserving and multiplying classical manuscripts.[6]
[5] Gregory has been often charged, on the authority of a passage in
John of Salisbury, with having burned a library of heathen authors.
He has been warmly defended by Tiraboschi, iii. 102. Even if the
assertion of our countryman were more positive, he is of too late
an age to demand much credit. Eichhorn, however, produces vehement
expressions of Gregory’s disregard for learning, and even for the
observance of grammatical rules. ii. 443.
[6] Heeren, p. 59. Eichhorn, ii. 11, 12, 40, 49, 50.
|Their usefulness in preserving it.|
6. If, however, the prejudices of the clergy stood in the way of what we
more esteem than they did, the study of philological literature, it is
never to be forgotten, that but for them the records of that very
literature would have perished. If they had been less tenacious of their
Latin liturgy, of the vulgate translation of Scripture, and of the
authority of the fathers, it is very doubtful whether less superstition
would have grown up, but we cannot hesitate to pronounce, that all
grammatical learning would have been laid aside. The influence of the
church upon learning, partly favourable, partly the reverse, forms the
subject of Eichhorn’s second volume; whose comprehensive views and well
directed erudition, as well as his position in a great protestant
university, give much weight to his testimony. But we should remember
also, that it is, as it were, by striking a balance that we come to this
result; and that, in many respects, the clergy counteracted that
progress of improvement which, in others, may be ascribed to their
exertions.
|First appearances of reviving learning in Ireland and England.|
7. It is not unjust to claim for these islands the honour of having
first withstood the dominant ignorance, and even led the way in the
restoration of knowledge. As early as the sixth century, a little
glimmer of light was perceptible in the Irish monasteries: and in the
next, when France and Italy had sunk in deeper ignorance, they stood,
not quite where national prejudice has sometimes placed them, but
certainly in a very respectable position.[7] That island both drew
students from the Continent, and sent forth men of comparative eminence
into its schools and churches. I do not find, however, that they
contributed much to the advance of secular, and especially of
grammatical learning. This is rather due to England, and to the happy
influence of Theodore, our first primate, an Asiatic Greek by birth,
sent hither by the pope in 668, through whom and his companion Adrian,
some knowledge of the Latin and even Greek languages was propagated in
the Anglo-Saxon church. The Venerable Bede, as he was afterwards styled,
early in the eighth century, surpasses every other name of our ancient
literary annals; and, though little more than a diligent compiler from
older writers, may perhaps be reckoned superior to any man the world (so
low had the east sunk like the west) then possessed. A desire of
knowledge grew up; the school of York, somewhat later, became
respectable, before any liberal education had been established in
France; and from this came Alcuin, a man fully equal to Bede in ability,
though not, probably, in erudition.[8] By his assistance, and that of
one or two Italians, Charlemagne laid in his vast dominions the
foundations of learning, according to the standard of that age, which
dispelled, at least for a time, some part of the gross ignorance wherein
his empire had been enveloped.[9]
[7] Eichhorn, ii. 176, 188. See also the first volume of Moore’s
History of Ireland, where the claims of his country are stated
favourably, and with much learning and industry, but not with
extravagant partiality.
[8] Eichhorn, ii. 188, 207, 263. Hist. Litt. de la France, vols. iii.
and iv. Henry’s History of England, vol. iv. Turner’s History of
Anglo-Saxons. No one, however, has spoken so highly or so fully of
Alcuin’s merits as M. Guizot in his Histoire de la Civilisation en
France, vol. ii. p. 344-385.
[9] Besides the above authors, see, for the merits of Charlemagne as
a restorer of letters, his Life by Gaillard, and Andrés, Origine,
&c., della Litteratura, i. 165.
|Few schools before the age of Charlemagne.|
8. The praise of having originally established schools belongs to some
bishops and abbots of the sixth century. They came in place of the
imperial schools overthrown by the barbarians.[10] In the downfall of
that temporal dominion, a spiritual aristocracy was providentially
raised up, to save from extinction the remains of learning, and religion
itself. Some of those schools seem to have been preserved in the south
of Italy, though merely, perhaps, for elementary instruction. But in
France the barbarism of the later Merovingian period was so complete,
that, before the reign of Charlemagne, all liberal studies had come to
an end.[11] Nor was Italy in a much better state at his accession,
though he called two or three scholars from thence to his literary
councils: the libraries were destroyed, the schools chiefly closed;
wherever the Lombard dominion extended, illiteracy was its
companion.[12]
[10] Eichhorn, ii. 5, 45. Guizot (vol. ii. p. 116) gives a list of
the episcopal schools in France before Charlemagne.
[11] Ante ipsum Carolum regem in Galliâ nullum fuerat studium
liberalium artium. Monachus Engolimensis, apud Launoy de Scholis
celebrioribus.
[12] Tiraboschi. Eichhorn. Heeren.
|Beneficial effects of those established by him.|
9. The cathedral and conventual schools, created or restored by
Charlemagne, became the means of preserving that small portion of
learning which continued to exist. They flourished most, having had time
to produce their fruits, under his successors, Louis the Debonair,
Lothaire, and Charles the Bald.[13] It was, doubtless, a fortunate
circumstance, that the revolution of language had now gone far enough to
render Latin unintelligible without grammatical instruction. Alcuin and
others who, like him, endeavoured to keep ignorance out of the church,
were anxious, we are told, to restore orthography; or, in other words,
to prevent the written Latin from following the corruptions of speech.
They brought back, also, some knowledge of better classical authors than
had been in use. Alcuin’s own poems could at least not have been written
by one unacquainted with Virgil:[14] the faults are numerous, but the
style is not always inelegant; and from this time, though quotations
from the Latin poets, especially Ovid and Virgil, and sometimes from
Cicero, are not very frequent, they occur sufficiently to show that
manuscripts had been brought to this side of the Alps. They were,
however, very rare: Italy was still, as might be expected, the chief
depository of ancient writings; and Gerbert speaks of the facility of
obtaining them in that country.[15]
[13] The reader may find more of the history of these schools in a
little treatise by Launoy, De Scholis celebrioribus a Car. Mag. et
post Car. Mag. instauratis; also in Hist. Litt. de la France, vols.
iii. and iv.; Crevier, Hist. de l’Université de Paris, vol. i.;
Brucker’s Hist. Phil. iii.; Muratori, Dissert. xliii.; Tiraboschi,
iii. 158; Eichhorn, 261, 295; Heeren, and Fleury.
[14] A poem by Alcuin, De Pontificibus Ecclesiæ Eboracensis, is
published in Gale’s xv. Scriptores, vol. iii. Henry quotes a
passage from this, describing the books at York, in which we read
this line--
Acer Atistoteles, rhetor _atque_ Tullius ingens. Such a verse
could not have come from Alcuin; though he errs in the quantity of
syllables, where memory alone could set him right, he was not
ignorant of common rules. It is found in Gale:
Rhetor _quoque_ Tullius ingens.
[15] Nosti quot scriptores in urbibus aut in agris Italise passim
habeantur. Gerbert, Epist. 130, apud Heeren, p. 166.
|The tenth century more progressive than usually supposed.|
10. The tenth century used to be reckoned by mediæval historians the
darkest part of this intellectual night. It was the iron age, which they
vie with one another in describing as lost in the most consummate
ignorance. This, however, is much rather applicable to Italy and
England, than to France and Germany. The former were both in a
deplorable state of barbarism. And there are, doubtless, abundant proofs
of ignorance in every part of Europe. But, compared with the seventh and
eighth centuries, the tenth was an age of illumination in France. And
Meiners, who judged the middle ages somewhat, perhaps, too severely, but
with a penetrating and comprehensive observation, of which there had
been few instances, has gone so far as to say, that “in no age, perhaps,
did Germany possess more learned and virtuous churchmen of the episcopal
order, than in the latter half of the tenth, and beginning of the
eleventh century.”[16] Eichhorn points out indications of a more
extensive acquaintance with ancient writers in several French and German
ecclesiastics of this period.[17] In the eleventh century, this
continued to increase; and, towards its close, we find more vigorous and
extensive attempts at throwing off the yoke of barbarous ignorance, and
either retrieving what had been lost of ancient learning, or supplying
its place by the original powers of the mind.
[16] Vergleichung der Sitten, ii. 384. The eleventh century he holds
far more advanced in learning than the sixth. Books were read in
the latter which no one looked at in the earlier. P. 399.
[17] Allg. Gesch. ii. 335, 398.
|Want of genius in the dark ages.|
11. It is the most striking circumstance in the literary annals of the
dark ages, that they seem to us still more deficient in native,
than in acquired ability. The mere ignorance of letters has sometimes
been a little exaggerated, and admits of certain qualifications; but a
tameness and mediocrity, a servile habit of merely compiling from
others, runs through the writers of these centuries. It is not only that
much was lost, but that there was nothing to compensate for it; nothing
of original genius in the province of imagination; and but two
extraordinary men, Scotus Erigena and Gerbert, may be said to stand out
from the crowd in literature and philosophy. It must be added, as to the
former, that his writings contain, at least in such extracts as I have
seen, unintelligible rhapsodies of mysticism, in which, perhaps, he
should not even have the credit of originality. Eichhorn, however,
bestows great praise on Scotus; and the modern historians of philosophy
treat him with respect.[18]
[18] Extracts from John Scotus Erigena will be found in Brucker, Hist.
Philosophiæ, vol. iii. p. 619; in Meiners, ii. 373; or more fully,
in Turner’s History of England, vol. i. 447, and Guizot, Hist. de
la Civilisation en France, iii. 137, 178. The reader may consult
also Buhle, Tennemann, and the article on Thomas Aquinas in the
Encyclopædia Metropolitana, ascribed to Dr. Hampden. But, perhaps,
Mr. Turner is the only one of them who has seen, or at least read
the metaphysical treatise of John Scotus, entitled De Divisione
Naturæ, in which alone we find his philosophy. It is very rare out
of England.
|Prevalence of bad taste.|
12. It would be a strange hypothesis, that no man endowed with superior
gifts of nature lived in so many ages. Though the pauses of her
fertility in these high endowments are more considerable, I am disposed
to think, that any previous calculation of probabilities would lead us
to anticipate, we could not embrace so extreme a paradox. Of military
skill, indeed, and civil prudence, we are not now speaking. But, though
no man appeared of genius sufficient to burst the fetters imposed by
ignorance and bad taste, some there must have been, who, in a happier
condition of literature, would have been its legitimate pride. We
perceive, therefore, in the deficiencies of these writers, the effect
which an oblivion of good models, and the prevalence of a false standard
of merit, may produce in repressing the natural vigour of the mind.
Their style, where they aim at eloquence, is inflated and redundant,
formed upon the model of the later fathers, whom they chiefly read; a
feeble imitation of that vicious rhetoric which had long overspread the
latinity of the empire.[19]
[19] Fleury, l. xlv. § 19, and Troisième Discours (in vol. xiii.),
p. 6. Turner’s History of England, iv. 137, and History of
Anglo-Saxons, iii. 403. It is sufficient to look at any extracts
from these writers of the dark ages to see the justice of this
censure. Fleury, at the conclusion of his excellent third
discourse, justly and candidly apologises for these five ages, as
not wholly destitute of learning, and far less of virtue. They have
been, he says, outrageously depreciated by the humanists of the
sixteenth century, who thought good Latin superior to every thing
else; and by protestant writers, who laid the corruptions of the
church on its ignorance. Yet there is an opposite extreme into
which those who are disgusted with the commonplaces of superficial
writers sometimes run; an estimation of men by their
_relative_ superiority above their own times, so as to forget
their position in comparison with a fixed standard.
An eminent living writer, who has carried the philosophy of
history, perhaps, as far as any other, has lately endeavoured, at
considerable length, to vindicate in some measure the intellectual
character of this period. (Guizot, vol. ii. p. 123-224.) It is with
reluctance that I ever differ from M. Guizot; but the passages
adduced by him, (especially if we exclude those of the fifth
century, the poems of Avitus, and the homilies of Cæsarius,) do not
appear adequate to redeem the age by any signs of genius they
display. It must always be a question of degree; for no one is
absurd enough to deny the existence of a relative superiority of
talent, or the power of expressing moral emotions, as well as
relating facts, with some warmth and energy. The legends of saints,
an extensive though quite neglected portion of the literature of
the dark ages, to which M. Guizot has had the merit of directing
our attention, may probably contain many passages, like those he
has quoted, which will be read with interest; and it is no more
than justice, that he has given them in French, rather than in that
half-barbarous Latin, which, though not essential to the author’s
mind, never fails, like an unbecoming dress, to show the gifts of
nature at a disadvantage. But the questions still recur: Is this in
itself excellent? Would it indicate, wherever we should meet with
it, powers of a high order? Do we not make a tacit allowance in
reading it, and that very largely, for the mean condition in which
we know the human mind to have been placed at the period? Does it
instruct us, or give us pleasure?
In what M. Guizot has said of the moral influence of these
legends, in harmonising a lawless barbarian race (p. 157), I
should be sorry not to concur: it is a striking instance of that
candid and catholic spirit with which he has always treated the
mediæval church.
|Deficiency of poetical talent.|
13. It might naturally be asked, whether fancy and feeling were extinct
among the people, though a false taste might reign in the
cloister. Yet it is here that we find the most remarkable deficiency,
and could appeal scarce to the vaguest tradition, or the most doubtful
fragment, in witness of any poetical talent worthy of notice, except a
very little in the Teutonic languages. The Anglo-Saxon poetry has
occasionally a wild spirit, rather impressive, though it is often turgid
and always rude. The Scandinavian, such as the well-known song of Regner
Lodbrog, if that be as old as the period before us, which is now denied,
displays a still more poetical character. Some of the earliest German
poetry, the song on the victory of Louis III. over the Normans in 883,
and, still more, the poem in praise of Hanno, archbishop of Cologne, who
died in 1075, are warmly extolled by Herder and Bouterwek.[20] In the
Latin verse of these centuries, we find, at best, a few lines among
many, which show the author to have caught something of a classical
style: the far greater portion is very bad.[21]
|Imperfect state of language may account for this.|
14. The very imperfect state of language, as an instrument of refined
thought, in the transition of Latin to the French, Castilian, and
Italian tongues, seems the best means of accounting in any satisfactory
manner for this stagnation of the poetical faculties. The delicacy that
distinguishes in words the shades of sentiment, the grace that brings
them to the soul of the reader with the charm of novelty united to
clearness, could not be attainable in a colloquial jargon, the offspring
of ignorance, and indeterminate possibly in its forms, which those who
possessed any superiority of education would endeavour to avoid. We
shall soon have occasion to advert again to this subject.
[20] Herder, Zerstreute Blätter, vol. v. p. 169, 184. Heinsius,
Lehrbuch der Deutschen Sprachwissenschaft, iv. 29. Bouterwek
Geschichte der Poesie und Beredsamkeit, vol. ix. p. 78, 82. The
author is unknown; aber dem unbekannten sichert sein werk die
unsterblichkeit, says the latter critic. One might raise a question
as to the capacity of an anonymous author to possess immortal fame.
Nothing equal to this poem, he says occurs in the earlier German
poetry: it is an outpouring of genius, not without faults, but full
of power and feeling: the dialect is still Frankish, but approaches
to Swabian. Herder calls it “a truly Pindaric song.” He has given
large extracts from it in the volume above quoted, which glows with
his own fine sense of beauty.
[21] Tiraboschi supposes Latin versifiers to have been common in Italy.
Le Città al pari che le campagne risonavan di versi. iii. 207.
The specimens he afterwards produces, p. 219, are miserable.
Hroswitha, abbess of Gandersheim, has, perhaps, the greatest
reputation among these Latin poets. She wrote, in the tenth
century, sacred comedies in imitation of Terence, which I have not
seen, and other poetry which I saw many years since, and thought
very bad. Alcuin has now and then a Virgilian cadence.
|Improvement at beginning of twelfth century.|
|Leading circumstances in progress of learning.|
15. At the beginning of the twelfth century, we enter upon a new
division in the literary history of Europe. From this time we may deduce
a line of men, conspicuous, according to the standard of their times, in
different walks of intellectual pursuit, and the commencement of an
interesting period, the later Middle Ages; in which, though ignorance
was very far from being cleared away, the natural powers of the mind
were developed in considerable activity. We shall point out separately
the most important circumstances of this progress; not all of them
concurrent in efficacy with each other, for they were sometimes opposed,
but all tending to arouse Europe from indolence, and to fix its
attention on literature. These are, 1st. The institution of
universities, and the methods pursued in them: 2d. The cultivation of
the modern languages, followed by the multiplication of books, and the
extension of the art of writing: 3d. The investigation of the Roman law:
And lastly, the return to the study of the Latin language in its ancient
models of purity. We shall thus come down to the fifteenth century, and
judge better of what is meant by the revival of letters, when we
apprehend with more exactness their previous condition.
|Origin of the university of Paris.|
16. Among the Carlovingian schools it is doubtful whether we can reckon
one at Paris; and though there are some traces of public instruction in
that city about the end of the ninth century, it is not certain that we
can assume it to be more ancient. For two hundred years more, indeed, it
can only be said, that some persons appear to have come to Paris for the
purposes of study.[22] The commencement of this famous university, like
that of Oxford, has no record. But it owes its first reputation to the
sudden spread of what is usually called the scholastic philosophy.
[22] Crevier, i. 13-75.
|Modes of treating the science of theology.|
17. There had been hitherto two methods of treating theological
subjects: one that of the fathers, who built them on scripture,
illustrated and interpreted by their own ingenuity, and in some measure
also on the traditions and decisions of the church; the other, which is
said by the Benedictines of St. Maur to have grown up about the
eighth century (though Mosheim seems to refer it to the sixth), using
the fathers themselves, that is the chief writers of the first six
hundred years, who appear now to have acquired that distinctive title of
honour, as authority, conjointly with scripture and ecclesiastical
determinations, by means of extracts or compends of their writings.
Hence about this time we find more frequent instances of a practice
which had begun before--that of publishing _Loci communes_ or
_Catenæ patrum_, being only digested extracts from the authorities
under systematic heads.[23] Both these methods were usually called
positive theology.
[23] Fleury, 3me discours. p. 48. (Hist. Ecclés. vol. xiii. 12mo ed.)
Hist. Litt. de la France, vii. 147. Mosheim, in Cent. vi. et post.
Muratori, Antichità Italiane, dissert. xliii. p. 610. In this
dissertation, it may be observed by the way, Muratori gives the
important fragment of Caius, a Roman presbyter before the end of
the second century, on the canon of the New Testament, which has
not been quoted, as far as I know, by any English writer, nor,
which is more remarkable, by Michaelis. It will be found in
Eichhorn, Einleitung in das Neue Testament, iv. 35. The Latinity is
very indifferent for the second century; yet it cannot be much
later, and may possibly be suspected of being a translation from a
Greek original.
Upon this great change in the theology of the church, which
consisted principally in establishing the authority of the fathers,
the reader may see M. Guizot, Hist. de la Civilisation, iii. 121.
There seem to be but two causes for this: the one, a consciousness
of ignorance and inferiority to men of so much talent as Augustin
and a few others; the other, a constantly growing jealousy of the
free exercise of reason, and a determination to keep up unity of
doctrine.
|Scholastic philosophy; its origin.|
|Roscelin.|
18. The scholastic theology was a third method; it was in its general
principle, an alliance between faith and reason; an endeavour to arrange
the orthodox system of the church, such as authority had made it,
according to the rules and methods of the Aristotelian dialectics, and
sometimes upon premises supplied by metaphysical reasoning. Lanfranc and
Anselm made much use of this method in the controversy with Berenger as
to transubstantiation; though they did not carry it so far as their
successors in the next century.[24] The scholastic philosophy seems
chiefly to be distinguished from this theology by a larger infusion of
metaphysical reasoning, or by its occasional inquiries into subjects not
immediately related to revealed articles of faith.[25] The origin of
this philosophy, fixed by Buhle and Tennemann in the ninth century, or
the age of Scotus Erigena, has been brought down by Tiedemann, Meiners,
and Hampden,[26] so low as the thirteenth. But Roscelin of Compiegne, a
little before 1100, may be accounted so far the founder of the
schoolmen, that the great celebrity of their disputations, and the rapid
increase of students, is to be traced to the influence of his theories,
though we have no proof that he ever taught at Paris. Roscelin
also, having been the first to revive the famous question as to the
reality of universal ideas, marks, on every hypothesis, a new era in the
history of that philosophy. The principle of the schoolmen in their
investigations was the expanding, developing, and if possible
illustrating and clearing from objection, the doctrines of natural and
revealed religion in a dialectical method and by dint of the subtlest
reasoning. The questions which we deem altogether metaphysical, such as
that concerning universal ideas, became theological in their hands.[27]
[24] Hist. Litt. de la France, ubi suprà. Tennemann, Manuel de l’Hist.
de la Philosophie, i. 332. Crevier, i. 100. Andrés, ii. 15.
[25] A Jesuit of the sixteenth century thus shortly and clearly
distinguishes the positive from the scholastic, and both from
natural or metaphysical theology. At nos theologiam scholasticam
dicimus quæ certiori methodo et rationibus imprimis ex divina
scriptura ac traditionibus seu decretis patrum in conciliis
definitis veritatem eruit, ac discutiendo comprobat. Quod cum in
scholis præcipue argumentando comparetur, id nomen sortita est.
Quamobrem differt a positiva theologia, non re sed modo,
quemadmodum item alia ratione non est eadem cum naturali theologia,
quo nomine philosophi metaphysicen nominarunt. Positiva igitur non
ita res disputandas proponit, sed pæne sententiam ratam et firmam
ponit, præcipue in pietatem incumbens. Versatur autem et ipsa in
explicatione Scripturæ sacræ, traditionum, conciliorum et sanctorum
patrum. Naturalis porro theologia Dei naturam per naturæ argumenta
et rationes inquirit, cum supernaturalis, quam scholasticam
dicimus, Dei ejusdem naturam, vim, proprietates, cæterasque res
divinas per ea principia vestigat, quæ sunt hominibus revelata
divinitas. Possevin, Bibliotheca Selecta, l. 3. c. i.
Both positive and scholastic theology were much indebted to Peter
Lombard, whose Liber Sententiarum is a digest of propositions
extracted from the fathers, with no attempt to reconcile them. It
was therefore a prodigious magazine of arms for disputation.
[26] The first of these, according to Tennemann, begins the list of
schoolmen with Hales; the two latter agree in conferring that
honour on Albertus Magnus. Brucker inclines to Roscelin, and has
been followed by others. It may be added, that Tennemann divides
the scholastic philosophy into four periods, which Roscelin, Hales,
Ockham, and the sixteenth century terminate; and Buhle into three,
ending with Roscelin, Albertus Magnus, and the sixteenth century.
It is evident, however, that, by beginning the scholastic series
with Roscelin, we exclude Lanfranc and even Anselm; the latter of
whom was certainly a deep metaphysician; since to him we owe the
subtle argument for the existence of a Deity, which Des Cartes
afterwards revived. Buhle, 679. This argument was answered at the
time by one Gaunelo; so that metaphysical reasonings were not
unknown in the eleventh century. Tennemann, 344.
[27] Brucker, though he contains some useful extracts, and tolerable
general views, was not well versed in the scholastic writers.
Meiners (in his Comparison of the Middle Ages) is rather
superficial as to their philosophy, but presents a lively picture
of the schoolmen in relation to literature and manners. He has
also, in the Transactions of the Göttingen Academy, vol. xii. pp.
26-47, given a succinct, but valuable, sketch of the Nominalist and
Realist Controversy. Tenneman, with whose Manuel de la Philosophie
alone I am conversant, is supposed to have gone very deeply into
the subject in his larger history of philosophy. Buhle appears
superficial. Dr. Hampden, in his Life of Thomas Aquinas, and view
of the scholastic philosophy, published in the Encyclopædia
Metropolitana, has the merit of having been the only Englishman,
past or present, so far as I know, since the revival of letters,
who has penetrated far into the wilderness of scholasticism. Mr.
Sharon Turner has given some extracts in the fourth volume of his
History of England.
|Progress of scholasticism; increase of university of Paris.|
19. Next in order of time to Roscelin came William of Champeaux, who
opened a school of logic at Paris in 1109; and the university can only
deduce the regular succession of its teachers from that time.[28] But
his reputation was soon eclipsed, and his hearers drawn away by a more
potent magician, Peter Abelard, who taught in the schools of Paris in
the second decade of the twelfth century. Wherever Abelard retired, his
fame and his disciples followed him; in the solitary walls of the
Paraclete, as in the thronged streets of the capital.[29] And the
impulse given was so powerful, the fascination of a science which now
appears arid and unproductive was so intense, that from this time for
many generations it continued to engage the most intelligent and active
minds. Paris, about the middle of the twelfth century, in the words of
the Benedictines of St. Maur, to whom we owe the Histoire Littéraire de
la France, was another Athens; the number of students (hyperbolically
speaking, as we must presume) exceeding that of the citizens. This
influx of scholars induced Philip Augustus, some time afterwards, to
enlarge the boundaries of the city; and this again brought a fresh
harvest of students, for whom, in the former limits, it had been
difficult to find lodgings. Paris was called, as Rome had been, the
country of all the inhabitants of the world, and we may add, as, for
very different reasons, it still claims to be.[30]
[28] Crevier, i. 3.
[29] Hist. Litt. de la France, vol. xii. Brucker, iii. 750.
[30] Hist. Litt. de la France, ix. 78. Crevier, i. 274.
|Universities founded.|
|Oxford.|
20. Colleges with endowments for poor scholars were founded in the
beginning of the thirteenth century, or even before, at Paris and
Bologna, as they were afterwards at Oxford and Cambridge, by munificent
patrons of letters; charters incorporating the graduates and students
collectively under the name of universities were granted by sovereigns,
with privileges perhaps too extensive, but such as indicated the dignity
of learning, and the countenance it received.[31] It ought, however, to
be remembered, that these foundations were not the cause, but the effect
of that increasing thirst for knowledge, or the semblance of knowledge,
which had anticipated the encouragement of the great. The schools of
Charlemagne were designed to lay the basis of a learned education, for
which there was at that time no sufficient desire.[32] But in the
twelfth century, the impetuosity with which men rushed to that source of
what they deemed wisdom, the great university of Paris, did not depend
upon academical privileges or eleemosynary stipends, which came
afterwards, though these were undoubtedly very effectual in keeping it
up. The university created patrons, and was not created by them. And
this may be said also of Oxford and Cambridge in their incorporate
character, whatever the former may have owed, if in fact it owed
anything, to the prophetic munificence of Alfred. Oxford was a school of
great resort in the reign of Henry II., though its first charter was
only granted by Henry III. Its earlier history is but obscure, and
depends chiefly on a suspicious passage in Ingulfus, against which we
must set the absolute silence of other writers.[33] It became in the
thirteenth century second only to Paris in the multitude of its
students, and the celebrity of its scholastic disputations. England
indeed, and especially through Oxford, could show more names of the
first class in this line than any other country.[34]
[31] Fleury, xvii. 13, 17. Crevier, Tiraboschi, &c. A University,
universitas doctorum et scholarium, was so called either from its
incorporation, or from its professing to teach all subjects, as
some have thought. Meiners, ii. 405. Fleury, xvii. 15. This
excellent discourse of Fleury, the fifth, relates to the
ecclesiastical literature of the later middle ages.
[32] These schools, established by the Carlovingian princes in
convents and cathedrals, declined, as it was natural to expect,
with the rise of the universities. Meiners, ii. 406. Those of
Paris, Oxford, and Bologna contained many thousand students.
[33] Giraldus Cambrensis, about 1180, seems the first unequivocal
witness to the resort of students to Oxford, as an established seat
of instruction. But it is certain that Vacarius read there on the
civil law in 1149, which affords a presumption that it was already
assuming the character of a university. John of Salisbury, I think,
does not mention it. In a former work, I gave more credence to its
foundation by Alfred than I am now inclined to do. Bologna, as well
as Paris, was full of English students about 1200. Meiners, ii. 428.
[34] Wood expatiates on what he thought the glorious age of the
university. “What university, I pray, can produce an invincible
Hales, an admirable Bacon, an excellent well-grounded Middleton, a
subtle Scotus, an approved Burley, a resolute Baconthorpe, a
singular Ockham, a solid and industrious Holcot, and a profound
Bradwardin? all which persons flourished within the compass of one
century. I doubt that neither Paris, Bologna, or Rome, that grand
mistress of the Christian world, or any place else, can do what the
renowned Bellosite (Oxford) hath done. And without doubt all
impartial men may receive it for an undeniable truth, that the most
subtle arguing in school divinity did take its beginning in England
and from Englishmen; and that also from thence it went to Paris,
and other parts of France, and at length into Italy, Spain, and
other nations, as is by one observed. So that though Italy boasteth
that Britain takes her Christianity first from Rome, England may
truly maintain that from her (immediately by France) Italy first
received her school divinity.” Vol. i. p. 159, A.D. 1168.
|Collegiate foundations not derived from the Saracens.|
21. Andrés is inclined to derive the institution of collegiate
foundations in universities from the Saracens. He finds no trace of
these among the ancients; while in several cities of Spain, as Cordova,
Granada, Malaga, colleges for learned education both existed and
obtained great renown. These were sometimes unconnected with each other,
though in the same city, nor had they, of course, those privileges which
were conferred in Christendom. They were therefore more like ordinary
schools of gymnasia than universities; and it is difficult to perceive
that they suggested anything peculiarly characteristic of the latter
institutions, which are much more reasonably considered as the
development of a native germ, planted by a few generous men, above all
by Charlemagne, in that inclement season which was passing away.[35]
[35] Andrés, ii. 129.
|Scholastic philosophy promoted by Mendicant Friars.|
22. The institution of the Mendicant orders of friars, soon after the
beginning of the thirteenth century, caused a fresh accession, in
enormous numbers, to the ecclesiastical state, and gave encouragement to
the scholastic philosophy. Less acquainted, generally, with grammatical
literature than the Benedictine monks, less accustomed to collect and
transcribe books, the disciples of Francis and Dominic betook themselves
to disputation, and found a substitute for learning in their own
ingenuity and expertness.[36] The greatest of the schoolmen were the
Dominican Thomas Aquinas, and the Franciscan Duns Scotus. They were
founders of rival sects, which wrangled with each other for two or three
centuries. But the authority of their writings, which were incredibly
voluminous, especially those of the former,[37] impeded, in some
measure, the growth of new men; and we find, after the middle of the
fourteenth century, a diminution of eminent names in the series of the
schoolmen, the last of whom, that is much remembered in modern times,
was William Ockham.[38] He revived the sect of the Nominalists,
formerly instituted by Roscelin, and, with some important variances of
opinion, brought into credit by Abelard, but afterwards overpowered by
the great weight of leading schoolmen on the opposite side,--that of the
Realists. The disciples of Ockham, as well as himself, being politically
connected with the party in Germany unfavourable to the high pretensions
of the Court of Rome, though they became very numerous in the
universities, passed for innovators in ecclesiastical, as well as
philosophical principles. Nominalism itself indeed was reckoned by the
adverse sect cognate to heresy. No decline however seems to have been as
yet perceptible in the spirit of disputation, which probably, at the end
of the fourteenth century, went on as eagerly at Paris, Oxford, and
Salamanca, the great scenes of that warfare, as before; and which, in
that age, gained much ground in Germany, through the establishment of
several universities.
[36] Meiners, ii. 615, 629.
[37] The works of Thomas Aquinas are published in seventeen volumes
folio; Rome, 1570; those of Duns Scotus in twelve; Lyon, 1639. It
is presumed that much was taken down from their oral lectures; some
part of these volumes is of doubtful authenticity. Meiners, ii.
718. Biogr. Univ.
[38] “In them (Scotus and Ockham), and in the later schoolmen
generally, down to the period of the reformation, there is more of
the parade of logic, a more formal examination of arguments, a more
burthensome importunity of syllogising, with less of the
philosophical power of arrangement and distribution of the subject
discussed. The dryness again irreparable from the scholastic method
is carried to excess in the later writers, and perspicuity of style
is altogether neglected.” Encyclopædia Metropol. part xxxvii. p. 805
The introduction of this excess of logical subtlety, carried to the
most trifling sophistry, is ascribed by Meiners to Petrus Hispanus
afterwards Pope John XXI., who died in 1271. ii. 705. Several
curious specimens of scholastic folly are given by him in this
place. They brought a discredit upon the name, which has adhered to
it, and involved men of fine genius, such as Aquinas himself, in
the common reproach.
The barbarism of style, which amounted almost to a new language,
became more intolerable in Scotus and his followers than it had
been in the older schoolmen. Meiners, 722. It may be alleged, in
excuse of this, that words are meant to express precise ideas; and
that it was as impossible to write metaphysics in good Latin, as
the modern naturalists have found it to describe plants and
animals.
|Character of this philosophy.|
|It prevails least in Italy.|
23. Tenneman has fairly stated the good and bad of the scholastic
philosophy. It gave rise to a great display of address, subtlety, and
sagacity in the explanation and distinction of abstract ideas, but at
the same time to many trifling and minute speculations, to a contempt of
positive and particular knowledge, and to much unnecessary
refinement.[39] Fleury well observes, that the dry technical style of
the schoolmen, affecting a geometrical method and closeness, is in fact
more prolix and tedious, than one more natural, from its formality in
multiplying objections and answers.[40] And as their reasonings commonly
rest on disputable postulates, the accuracy they affect is of no sort of
value. But their chief offences were the interposing obstacles to the
revival of polite literature, and to the free expansion of the mind.
Italy was the land where the schoolmen had least influence; many of the
Italians who had a turn for those discussions repaired to Paris,[41] and
it was accordingly from Italy that the light of philological learning
spread over Europe. Public schools of theology were not opened in Italy
till after 1360.[42] Yet we find the disciples of Averroes numerous in
the university of Padua about that time.
[39] Manuel de la Philosophie, i. 337. Eichhorn, ii. 396.
[40] See 5me discours, xvii. 30-50.
[41] Tiraboschi, v. 115.
[42] Id. 137, 160. De Sade, Vie de Pétrarque, iii. 757.
|Literature in modern languages.|
24. II. The universities were chiefly employed upon this scholastic
theology and metaphysics, with the exception of Bologna, which dedicated
its attention to the civil law, and of Montpelier, already famous as a
school of medicine. The laity in general might have remained in as gross
barbarity as before, while topics so removed from common utility were
treated in an unknown tongue. We must therefore look to the rise of a
truly native literature in the several languages of western Europe, as a
more essential cause of its intellectual improvement; and this will
render it necessary to give a sketch of the origin and early progress of
those languages and that new literature.
|Origin of the French, Spanish, and Italian languages.|
25. No one can require to be informed, that the Italian, Spanish, and
French languages are the principal of many dialects deviating from each
other in the gradual corruption of the Latin, once universally spoken by
the subjects of Rome in her western provinces. They have undergone this
process of change in various degrees, but always from similar causes;
partly from the retention of barbarous words belonging to their
aboriginal languages, or the introduction of others through the
settlement of the northern nations in the empire; but in a far greater
proportion, from ignorance of grammatical rules, or from vicious
pronunciation and orthography. It has been the labour of many
distinguished writers to trace the source and channels of these streams
which have supplied both the literature and the common speech of the
south of Europe; and perhaps not much will be hereafter added to
researches which, in the scarcity of extant documents, can never be
minutely successful. Du Cange, who led the way in the admirable preface
to his Glossary; Le Bœuf, and Bonamy, in several memoirs among the
transactions of the Academy of Inscriptions about the middle of
the last century; Muratory, in his 32d, 33d, and 40th dissertation on
Italian antiquities; and, with more copious evidence and successful
industry than any other, M. Raynouard, in the first and sixth volume of
his Choix des Poesies des Troubadours, have collected as full a history
of the formation of these languages as we could justly require.
|Corruption of colloquial Latin in the lower empire.|
26. The pure Latin language, as we read it in the best ancient authors,
possesses a complicated syntax, and many elliptical modes of expression
which give vigour and elegance to style, but are not likely to be
readily caught by the people. If, however, the citizens of Rome had
spoken it with entire purity, it is to be remembered, that Latin, in the
later times of the republic, or under the empire, was not like the Greek
of Athens, or the Tuscan of Florence, the idiom of a single city, but a
language spread over countries in which it was not originally
vernacular, and imposed by conquest upon many parts of Italy, as it was
afterwards upon Spain and Gaul. Thus we find even early proofs, that
solecisms of grammar, as well as barbarous phrases, or words
unauthorised by use of polite writers, were very common in Rome itself;
and in every succeeding generation, for the first centuries after the
Christian æra, these became more frequent and inevitable. A vulgar Roman
dialect, called _quotidianus_ by Quintilian, _pedestris_ by
Vegetius, _usualis_ by Sidonius, is recognised as distinguishable
from the pure Latinity to which we give the name of classical. But the
more ordinary appellation of this inferior Latin was _rusticus_; it
was the country language or _patois_, corrupted in every manner,
and from the popular want of education, incapable of being restored,
because it was not perceived to be erroneous.[43] Whatever may have been
the case before the fall of the Western Empire, we have reason to
believe that in the sixth century the colloquial Latin had undergone, at
least in France, a considerable change even with the superior class of
ecclesiastics. Gregory of Tours confesses that he was habitually falling
into that sort of error, the misplacing inflexions and prepositions,
which constituted the chief original difference of the rustic tongue
from pure Latinity. In the opinion, indeed, of Raynouard, if we take his
expressions in their natural meaning, the Romance language, or that
which afterwards was generally called Provençal, is as old as the
establishment of the Franks in Gaul. But this is, perhaps, not
reconcileable with the proofs we have of a longer continuance of Latin.
In Italy, it seems probable that the change advanced more slowly.
Gregory the Great, however, who has been reckoned as inveterate an enemy
of learning as ever lived, speaks with superlative contempt of a regard
to grammatical purity in writing. It was a crime in his eyes for a
clergyman to teach grammar; yet the number of laymen who were competent
or willing to do so had become very small.
[43] Du Cange, preface, pp. 13, 29. Rusticum igitur sermonem non
humiliorem paulo duntaxat, et qui sublimi opponitur, appellabant;
sed eum etiam, qui magis reperet, barbarismis solæcismisque
scateret, quam apposite Sidonius squamam sermonis Celtici, &c.,
vocat.--Rusticum, qui nullis vel grammaticæ vel orthographiæ
legibus astringitur. This is nearly a definition of the early
Romance language; it was Latin without grammar or orthography.
The squama sermonis Celtici, mentioned by Sidonius, has led Gray,
in his valuable remarks on rhyme, vol. ii. p. 53, as it has some
others, into the erroneous notion that a real Celtic dialect, such
as Cæsar found in Gaul, was still spoken. But this is incompatible
with the known history of the French language; and Sidonius is one
of those loose declamatory writers, whose words are never to be
construed in their proper meaning: the common fault of Latin
authors from the third century. Celticus sermo was the patois of
Gaul, which, having once been Gallia Celtica, he still called such.
That a few proper names, or similar words in French are Celtic, is
well known.
Quintilian has said, that a vicious orthography must bring on a
vicious pronunciation. Quod male scribitur, male etiam dici necesse
est. But the converse of this is still more true, and was in fact
the great cause of giving the new Romance language its
_visible_ form.
27. It may render this more clear, if we mention a few of the growing
corruptions, which have in fact transformed the Latin into French and
the sister tongues.--The prepositions were used with no regard to the
proper inflexions of nouns and verbs. These were known so inaccurately,
and so constantly put one for another, that it was necessary to have
recourse to prepositions instead of them. Thus _de_ and _ad_ were made
to express the genitive and dative cases, which is common in charters
from the sixth to the tenth century. It is a real fault in the Latin
language, that it wants both the definite and indefinite article; _ille_
and _unus_, especially the former, were called in to help this
deficiency. In the forms of Marculfus, published towards the end of the
seventh century, _ille_ continually occurs as an article; and it appears
to have been sometimes used in the sixth. This of course, by an easy
abbreviation, furnished the articles in French and Italian. The people
came soon to establish more uniformity of case in the noun, either by
rejecting inflexions, or by diminishing their number.--Raynouard gives a
long list of old French nouns formed from the Latin accusative by
suppressing _em_ or _am_.[44] The active auxiliary verb, than which
nothing is more distinctive of the modern languages from the Latin, came
in from the same cause, the disuse, through ignorance, of several
inflexions of the tenses; to which we must add, that here also the Latin
language is singularly deficient, possessing no means of distinguishing
the second perfect from the first, or ‘I have seen’ from ‘I saw.’ The
auxiliary verb was early applied, in France and Italy, to supply this
defect; and some have produced what they think occasional instances of
its employment even in the best classical authors.
[44] See a passage of Quintilian, l. 9, c. 4, quoted in Hallam’s Middle
Ages, iii. 316.
In the grammar of Cassiodorus, a mere compilation from old writers,
and in this instance from one Cornutus, we find another remarkable
passage, which I do not remember to have seen quoted, though
doubtless it has been so, on the pronunciation of the letter
_M_. To utter this final consonant, he says, before a word
beginning with a vowel, is wrong, durum ac barbarum sonat; but it
is an equal fault to omit it before one beginning with a consonant;
par enim atque idem est vitium, ita cum vocali sicut cum consonanti
_M_ literam, exprimere. Cassiodorus, De orthographia, cap. 1.
Thus we perceive that there was a nicety as to the pronunciation of
this letter, which uneducated persons would naturally not regard.
Hence in the inscriptions of a low age, we frequently find this
letter omitted; as in one quoted by Muratori, Ego L. Contius me
bibo [vivo] archa [archam] feci, and it is very easy to multiply
instances. Thus the neuter and the accusative terminations were
lost.
|Continuance of Latin in seventh century.|
28. It seems impossible to determine the progress of these changes, the
degrees of variation between the polite and popular, the written and
spoken Latin, in the best ages of Rome, in the decline of the empire,
and in the kingdoms founded upon its ruins; or finally, the exact epoch
when the grammatical language ceased to be generally intelligible. There
remains, therefore, some room still for hypothesis and difference of
opinion. The clergy preached in Latin early in the seventh century, and
we have a popular song of the same age on the victory obtained by
Clotaire II. in 622 over the Saxons.[45] This has been surmised by some
to be a translation, merely because the Latin is better than they
suppose to have been spoken. But, though the words are probably not
given quite correctly, they seem reducible, with a little emendation, to
short verses of an usual rythmical cadence.[46]
[45] Le Bœuf, in Mém. de l’Acad. des Inscript. vol. xvii.
[46] Turner, in Archæologia, vol. xiv. 173. Hallam’s Middle Ages, iii.
326. Bouterwek, Gesch. der Französen Poesie, p. 18, observes,
that there are many fragments of popular Latin songs preserved. I
have not found any quoted, except one, which he gives from La
Revaillère, which is simple and rather pretty; but I know not
whence it is taken. It seems the song of a female slave, and is
perhaps nearly as old as the destruction of the empire.
At quid jubes, pusiole,
Quare mandas, filiole,
Carmen dulce me cantare
Cum sim longe exul valde
Intra mare,
O cur jubes canere?
Intra seems put for trans. The metre is rhymed trochaic; but that
is consistent with antiquity. It is, however, more pleasing than
most of the Latin verse of this period, and is more in the tone of
the modern languages. As it is not at all a hackneyed passage, I
have thought it worthy of quotation.
|It is changed to a new language in eighth and ninth.|
29. But in the middle of the eighth century, we find the rustic language
mentioned as distinct from Latin;[47] and in the council of Tours held
in 813 it is ordered that homilies shall be explained to the people in
their own tongue, whether rustic Roman or Frankish. In 842 we find the
earliest written evidence of its existence, in the celebrated oaths
taken by Louis of Germany and his brother Charles the Bald, as well as
by their vassals, the former in Frankish or early German, the latter in
their own current dialect. This, though with somewhat of a closer
resemblance to Latin, is accounted by the best judges a specimen of the
language spoken south of the Loire; afterwards variously called the
Langue d’oc, Provençal, or Limousin, and essentially the same with the
dialects of Catalonia and Valencia.[48] It is decidedly the opinion of
M. Raynouard, as it was of earlier inquirers, that the general
language of France in the ninth century was the southern dialect, rather
than that of the north, to which we now give the exclusive name of
French, and which they conceive to have deviated from it afterwards.[49]
And he has employed great labour to prove, that, both in Spain and
Italy, this language was generally spoken with hardly as much difference
from that of France, as constitutes even a variation of dialect; the
articles, pronouns, and auxiliaries being nearly identical; most
probably not with so much difference as would render the native of one
country by any means unintelligible in another.[50]
[47] Acad. des. Inscript. xvii. 713.
[48] Du Cange, p. 35. Raynouard, passim. M. de la Rue has called it,
“un Latin expirant.” Recherches sur les Bardes d’Armorique. Between
this and “un Français naissant” there may be only a verbal
distinction; but, in accuracy of definition, I should think M.
Raynouard much more correct. The language of this oath cannot be
called Latin without a violent stretch of words: no Latin scholar,
as such, would understand it, except by conjecture. On the other
hand, most of the words, as we learn from M. R., are Provençal of
the twelfth century. The passage has been often printed, and
sometimes incorrectly. M. Roquefort, in the preface to his
Glossaire de la Langue Romane, has given a tracing from an ancient
manuscript of Nitard, the historian of the ninth century, to whom
we owe this important record of language.
[49] The chief difference was in orthography; the Northerns wrote
Latin words with an _e_ where the South retained _a_; as charitet,
caritat: veritet, veritat; appelet, apelat. Si l’on rétablissait
dans les plus anciens textes Français les _a_ primitifs en place
des _e_, on aurait identiquement la langue des troubadours.
Raynouard, Observations sur le Roman du Rou, 1829, p. 5.
[50] The proofs of this similarity occupy most part of the first and
sixth volumes in M. Raynouard’s excellent work.
It is a common error to suppose that French and Italian had a
double source, barbaric as well as Latin; and that the northern
nations, in conquering those regions, brought in a large share of
their own language. This is like the opinion, that the Norman
Conquest infused the French we now find in our own tongue. There
are certainly Teutonic words, both in French and Italian, but not
sufficient to affect the proposition that these languages are
merely Latin in their origin. These words in many instances express
what Latin could not; thus _guerra_ was by no means synonymous
with _bellum_. Yet even Roquefort talks of “un jargon composé
de mots Tudesques et Romains.” Discours Preliminaire, p. 19;
forgetting which, he more justly remarks afterwards, on the oath of
Charles the Bald, that it shows “la langue Romane est entièrement
composée de Latin.” A long list could, no doubt, be made of French
and Italian words that cannot easily be traced to any Latin with
which we are acquainted; but we may be surprised that it is not
still longer.
|Early specimens of French.|
|Poem on Boethius.|
30. Thus, in the eighth and ninth centuries, if not before, France had
acquired a language unquestionably nothing else than a corruption of
Latin, (for the Celtic or Teutonic words that entered into it were by no
means numerous, and did not influence its structure), but become so
distinct from its parent, through modes of pronunciation as well as
grammatical changes, that it requires some degree of practice to trace
the derivation of words in many instances. It might be expected that we
should be able to adduce, or at least prove to have existed, a series of
monuments in this new form of speech. It might naturally appear that
poetry, the voice of the soul, would have been heard wherever the joys
and sufferings, the hopes and cares of humanity, wherever the
countenance of nature, or the manners of social life, supplied their
boundless treasures to its choice; and among untutored nations it has
been rarely silent. Of the existence of verse, however, in this early
period of the new languages, we find scarce any testimony, a doubtful
passage in a Latin poem of the ninth century excepted,[51] till we come
to a production on the captivity of Boethius, versified chiefly from
passages in his Consolation, which M. Raynouard, though somewhat wishing
to assign a higher date, places about the year 1000. This is printed by
him from a manuscript formerly in the famous abbey of Fleury, or St.
Benoit-sur-Loire, and now in the public library of Orleans. It is a
fragment of 250 lines, written in stanzas of six, seven, or a greater
number of verses of ten syllables, sometimes deviating to eleven or
twelve; and all the lines in each stanza rhyming masculinely with each
other. It is certainly by much the earliest specimen of French
verse;[52] even if it should only belong, as Le Bœuf thought,
to the eleventh century.
[51] In a Latin eclogue quoted by Paschasius Radbert (ob. 865) in the
life of St. Adalhard, abbot of Corbie (ob. 826), the romance poets
are called upon to join the Latins in the following lines: “Rustica
concelebret Romana Latinaque lingua, Saxo, qui, pariter plangens,
pro carmine dicat; Vertite huc cuncti, cecinit quam maximus ille,
Et tumulum facite, et tumulo superaddite carmen.”
Raynouard, Choix des Poésies, vol. ii. p. cxxxv. These lines are
scarcely intelligible; but the quotation from Virgil, in the ninth
century, perhaps deserves remark, though, in one of Charlemagne’s
monasteries, it is not by any means astonishing. Nennius, a Welsh
monk of the same age, who can hardly write Latin at all, has quoted
another line; “Purpurea intexti tollant aulæa a Britanni;” which is
more extraordinary, and almost leads us to suspect an
interpolation, unless he took it from Bede. Gale, xv. Scriptores,
iii. 102.
[52] Raynouard, vol. ii. pp. 5, 6, and preface, p. cxxvii.
|Provençal grammar.|
31. M. Raynouard has asserted what will hardly bear dispute, that “there
has never been composed any considerable work in any language, till it
has acquired determinate forms of expressing the modifications of ideas
according to time, number, and person,” or, in other words, the elements
of grammar.[53] But whether the Provençal or Romance language were in
its infancy so defective, he does not say; nor does the grammar he has
given lead us to that inference. This grammar, indeed, is necessarily
framed, in great measure, out of more recent materials. It may be
suspected, perhaps, that a language formed by mutilating the words of
another, could not for many ages be rich or flexible enough for the
variety of poetic expression. And the more ancient forms would long
retain their prerogative in writing: or, perhaps, we can only say, that
the absence of poetry was the effect, as well as the evidence, of that
intellectual barrenness, more characteristic of the dark ages than their
ignorance.
[53] Observations philogiques et grammaticales, sur le Roman de Rou
(1829), p. 26. Two ancient Provençal grammars, one by Raymond Vidal
in the twelfth century, are in existence. The language therefore
must have had its determinate rules before that time.
M. Raynouard has shown, with a prodigality of evidence, the
regularity of the French or Romance language in the twelfth
century, and its retention of Latin forms, in cases when it had not
been suspected. Thus it is a fundamental rule, that, in nouns
masculine, the nominative ends in s in the singular, but wants it
in the plural; while the oblique cases lose it in the singular, but
retain it in the plural. This is evidently derived from the second
declension in Latin. As, for example--
Sing. Li princes est venus, et a este sacrez rois.
Plur. Li evesque et li plus noble baron se sont assemble.
Thus also the possessive pronoun is always _mes_, _tes_,
_ses_, (meus, tuus, suus) in the nominative singular;
_mon_, _ton_, _son_, (meum, &c.), in the oblique
regimen. It has been through ignorance of such rules that the old
French poetry has seemed capricious, and destitute of strict
grammar; and, in a philosophical sense, the simplicity and
extensiveness of M. Raynouard’s discovery entitle it to the
appellation of beautiful.
|Latin retained in use longer in Italy.|
32. In Italy, where we may conceive the corruption of language to have
been less extensive, and where the spoken patois had never acquired a
distinctive name, like _lingua Romana_ in France, we find two
remarkable proofs, as they seem, that Latin was not wholly
unintelligible in the ninth and tenth centuries, and which therefore
modify M. Raynouard’s hypothesis as to the simultaneous origin of the
Romance tongue. The one is a popular song of the soldiers, on their
march to rescue the Emperor Louis II. in 881, from the violent detention
in which he had been placed by the duke of Benevento; the other, a
similar exhortation to the defenders of Modena in 924, when that city
was in danger of siege from the Hungarians. Both of these were published
by Muratori, in his fortieth dissertation on Italian Antiquities; and
both have been borrowed from him by M. Sismondi, in his Littérature du
Midi.[54] The former of these poems is in a loose trochaic measure,
totally destitute of regard to grammatical inflections. Yet some of the
leading peculiarities of Italian, the article and the auxiliary verb, do
not appear. The latter is in accentual iambics, with a sort of
monotonous termination in the nature of rhyme; and in very much superior
Latinity, probably the work of an ecclesiastic.[55] It is difficult to
account for either of these, especially the former, which is merely a
military song, except on the supposition that the Latin language was not
grown wholly out of popular use.
[54] Vol. i. pp. 23, 27.
[55] I am at a loss to know what Muratori means by saying, “Son versi
di dodici sillabe, ma computata la ragione de’ tempi, vengono ad
essere uguali a gli endecasillabi.” p. 551. He could not have
understood the metre, which is perfectly regular, and even
harmonious, on the condition only, that no “ragione de’ tempi”
except such as accentual pronunciation observes, shall be demanded.
The first two lines will serve as a specimen:--
“O tu, qui servas armis ista mænia,
Noli dormire, moneo, sed vigila.”
This is like another strange observation of Muratori in the same
dissertation, that, in the well-known lines of the emperor Adrian
to his soul, “Animula vagula, blandula,” which could perplex no
schoolboy, he cannot discover “un’esatta norma di metro;” and
therefore takes them to be merely rhythmical.
|French of eleventh century.|
33. In the eleventh century, France still affords us but few extant
writings. Several, indeed, can be shown to have once existed. The
Romance language, comprehending the two divisions of Provençal and
Northern French, by this time distinctly separate from each other, was
now, say the authors of the Histoire Littéraire de la France, employed
in poetry, romances, translations, and original works in different kinds
of literature; sermons were preached in it, and the code, called
the Assizes de Jerusalem, was drawn up under Godfrey of Bouillon in
1100.[56] Some part of this is doubtful, and especially the age of these
laws. They do not mention those of William the Conqueror, recorded in
French by Ingulfus. Doubts have been cast by a distinguished living
critic on the age of this French code, and upon the authenticity of the
History of Ingulfus itself; which he conceives, upon very plausible
grounds, to be a forgery of Richard II.’s time: the language of the laws
indeed appears to be very ancient, but not probably distinguishable at
this day from the French of the twelfth century. It may be said, in
general, that, except one or two translations from books of Scripture,
very little now extant has been clearly referred to an earlier
period.[57] Yet it is impossible to doubt that the language was much
employed in poetry, and had been gradually ramifying itself by the
shoots of invention and sentiment; since, at the close of this age, or
in the next, we find a constellation of gay and brilliant versifiers,
the Troubadours of southern France, and a corresponding class to the
north of the Loire.
[56] Vol. vii. p. 107.
[57] Roquefort, Glossaire de la Langue Romane, p. 25, and État de la
Poésie Française, p. 42, and 206, mentions several religious works
in the royal library, and also a metrical romance in the British
Museum, lately published in France on the fabulous voyage of
Charlemagne to Constantinople. Raynouard has collected a few
fragments in Provençal. But I must dissent from this excellent
writer in referring the famous poem of the Vaudois, La Nobla
Leyczon, to the year 1100. Choix des Poésies des Troubadours, vol.
ii. p. cxxxvii. I have already observed, that the two lines which
contain what he calls la date de l’an 1100, are so loosely
expressed, as to include the whole ensuing century. (Hallam’s
Middle Ages, iii. 467.) And I am now convinced that the poem is not
much older than 1200. It seems probable that they reckoned 1100
years, on a loose computation, not from the Christian era, but from
the time when the passage of Scripture to which these lines allude
was written. The allusion may be to 1 Pet. i. 20. But it is clear
that, at the time of the composition of this poem, not only the
name of _Vaudois_ had been imposed on those sectaries, but they had
become subject to persecution. We know nothing of this till near
the end of the century. This poem was probably written in the south
of France, and carried afterwards to the Alpine valleys of
Piedmont, from which it was brought to Geneva and England in the
seventeenth century. La Nobla Leyczon is published at length by
Raynouard. It consists of 479 lines, which seem to be rhythmical or
aberrant Alexandrines; the rhymes uncertain in number, chiefly
masculine. The poem censures the corruptions of the church, but
contains little that would be considered heretical; which agrees
with what contemporary historians relate of the original Waldenses.
Any doubts as to the authenticity of this poem are totally
unreasonable. M. Raynouard, an indisputably competent judge,
observes, “Les personnes qui l’examineront avec attention jugeront
que le manuscrit n’a pas été interpolé,” p. cxliii.
I will here reprint more accurately than before the two lines
supposed to give the poem the date of 1100:--
“Ben ha mil et cent ancz compli entièrement,
Que fo scripta l’ora car sen al derier temps.”
Can M. Raynouard, or any one else, be warranted by this in saying,
_La date de l’an 1100_, qu’on lit dans ce poème, merite toute
confiance?
|Metres of modern languages.|
34. These early poets in the modern languages chiefly borrowed their
forms of versification from the Latin. It is unnecessary to say, that
metrical composition in that language, as in Greek, was an arrangement
of verses corresponding by equal or equivalent feet; all syllables being
presumed to fall under a known division of long and short, the former
passing for strictly the double of the latter in quantity of time. By
this law of pronunciation all verse was measured; and to this not only
actors, who were assisted by an accompaniment, but the orators also
endeavoured to conform. But the accented, or, if we choose rather to
call them so, emphatic syllables, being regulated by a very different
though uniform law, the uninstructed people, especially in the decline
of Latinity, pronounced, as we now do, with little or no regard to the
metrical quantity of syllables, but according to their accentual value.
And this gave rise to the popular or rhythmical poetry of the lower
empire; traces of which may be found in the second century, and even
much earlier, but of which we have abundant proofs after the age of
Constantine.[58] All metre, as Augustin says, was rhythm, but all rhythm
was not metre: in rhythmical verse, neither the quantity of syllables,
that is, the time allotted to each by metrical rule, nor even, in some
degree, their number, was regarded, so long as a cadence was retained in
which the ear could recognise a certain approach to uniformity. Much
popular poetry, both religious and profane, and the public hymns
of the church, were written in this manner; the distinction of long and
short syllables, even while Latin remained a living tongue, was lost in
speech, and required study to attain it. The accent or emphasis, both of
which are probably, to a certain extent, connected with quantity and
with each other, supplied its place; the accented syllable being,
perhaps, generally lengthened in ordinary speech; though this is not the
sole cause of length, for no want of emphasis or lowness of tone can
render a syllable of many letters short. Thus we find two species of
Latin verse: one metrical, which Prudentius, Fortunatus, and others
aspired to write; the other rhythmical, somewhat licentious in number of
syllables, and wholly accentual in its pronunciation. But this kind was
founded on the former, and imitated the ancient syllabic arrangements.
Thus the trochaic, or line, in which the stress falls on the uneven
syllables, commonly alternating by eight and seven, a very popular metre
from its spirited flow, was adopted in military songs, such as that
already mentioned of the Italian soldiers in the ninth century. It was
also common in religious chants. The line of eight syllables, or dimeter
iambic, in which the cadence falls on the even places, was still more
frequent in ecclesiastical verse. But these are the most ordinary forms
of versification in the early French or Provençal, Spanish, and Italian
languages. The line of eleven syllables, which became in time still more
usual than the former, is nothing else than the ancient hendecasyllable;
from which the French, in what they call masculine rhymes, and ourselves
more generally, from a still greater deficiency of final vowels, have
been forced to retrench the last syllable. The Alexandrine of twelve
syllables might seem to be the trimeter iambic of the ancients. But
Sanchez has very plausibly referred its origin to a form more usual in
the dark ages, the pentameter; and shown it in some early Spanish
poetry.[59] The Alexandrine, in the southern languages, had generally a
feminine termination, that is, in a short vowel, thus becoming of
thirteen syllables, the stress falling on the penultimate, as is the
usual case in a Latin pentameter verse, accentually read in our present
mode. The variation of syllables in these Alexandrines, which run from
twelve to fourteen, is accounted for by the similar numerical variety in
the pentameter.
[58] The well-known lines of Adrian to Florus, and his reply, “Ego
nolo Florus esse,” &c., are accentual trochaics, but not wholly so;
for the last line, Scythicas pati pruinas, requires the word pati
to be sounded as an iambic. They are not the earliest instance
extant of disregard to quantity, for Suetonius quotes some
satirical lines on Julius Cæsar.
[59] The break in the middle of the Alexandrine, it will occur to
every competent judge, has nothing analogous to it in the trimeter
iambic, but exactly corresponds to the invariable law of the
pentameter.
|Origin of rhyme in Latin.|
35. I have dwelt, perhaps tediously, on this subject, because vague
notions of a derivation of modern metrical arrangements, even in the
languages of Latin origin, from the Arabs or Scandinavians, have
sometimes gained credit.[60] It has been imagined also that the peculiar
characteristic of the new poetry, rhyme, was borrowed from the Saracens
of Spain.[61] But the Latin language abounds so much in consonances,
that those who have been accustomed to write verses in it well know the
difficulty of avoiding them, as much as an ear formed on classical
models demands; and as this gingle is certainly pleasing in itself, it
is not wonderful that the less fastidious vulgar should adopt it in
their rhythmical songs. It has been proved by Muratori, Gray, and
Turner, beyond the possibility of doubt, that rhymed Latin verse was in
use from the end of the fourth century.[62]
[60] Roquefort, Essai sur la Poésie Française dans le 12me et 13me
siècles, p. 66. Galvani, Osservazioni sulla poesia de’ Trovatori.
(Modena, 1829) Sanchez, Poesias Castellanas anteriores al 15mo
siglo, vol. i. p. 122.
Tyrwhitt had already observed, “The metres which the Normans used,
and which we seem to have borrowed from them, were plainly copied
from the Latin rhythmical verses, which, in the declension of that
language, were current in various forms among those who either did
not understand, or did not regard, the true quantity of syllables;
and the practice of rhyming is probably to be deduced from the same
original.” Essay on the Language and Versification of Chaucer, p.
51.
[61] Andrès, with a partiality to the Saracens of Spain, whom, by an
odd blunder, he takes for his countrymen, manifested in almost
every page, does not fail to urge this. It had been said long
before by Huet, and others who lived before these subjects had been
thoroughly investigated. Origine e Progresso, &c., ii. 194. He has
been copied by Ginguéné and Sismondi.
[62] Muratori, Antichità Italiane dissert., 40. Turner, in Archæologia,
vol. xiv., and Hist. of England, vol. iv. pp. 328, 653. Gray has
gone as deeply as any one into this subject; and, though writing at
what may be called an early period of metrical criticism, he has
fallen into a few errors, and been too easy of credence,
unanswerably proves the Latin origin of rhyme. Gray’s Works by
Mathias, vol. ii. p. 30-54.
|Provençal and French poetry.|
36. Thus, about the time of the first crusade, we find two dialects of
the same language, differing by that time not inconsiderably from each
other, the Provençal and French, possessing a regular grammar,
established forms of versification (and the early troubadours added
several to those borrowed from the Latin[63]), and a flexibility which
gave free scope to the graceful turns of poetry. William, duke of
Guienne, has the glory of leading the van of surviving Provençal
songsters. He was born in 1070, and may possibly have composed some of
his little poems before he joined the crusaders in 1096. If these are
genuine, and no doubt of them seems to be entertained, they denote a
considerable degree of previous refinement in the language.[64] We do
not, I believe, meet with any other troubadour till after the middle of
the twelfth century. From that time till about the close of the
thirteenth, they were numerous almost as the gay insects of spring;
names of illustrious birth are mingled in the list with those whom
genius has saved from obscurity; they were the delight of a luxurious
nobility, the pride of southern France, while the great fiefs of
Toulouse and Guienne were in their splendour. Their style soon extended
itself to the northern dialect. Abelard was the first of recorded name,
who taught the banks of the Seine to resound a tale of love; and it was
of Eloise that he sung.[65] “You composed,” says that gifted and
noble-spirited woman, in one of her letters to him, “many verses in
amorous measure, so sweet both in their language and their melody, that
your name was incessantly in the mouths of all, and even the most
illiterate could not be forgetful of you. This it was chiefly that made
women admire you. And as most of these songs were on me and my love,
they made me known in many countries, and caused many women to envy me.
Every tongue spoke of your Eloise; every street, every house resounded
with my name.”[66] These poems of Abelard are lost; but in the Norman,
or northern French language, we have an immense number of poets
belonging to the twelfth, and the two following centuries. One hundred
and twenty-seven are known by name in the twelfth alone.[67] Thibault,
king of Navarre and count of Champagne, about the middle of the next, is
accounted the best, as well as noblest of French poets.
[63] See Raynouard, Roquefort, and Galvini, for the Provençal and
French metres, which are very complicated.
[64] Raynouard, Choix des Poésies des Troubadours, vol. ii. Auguis,
Recueil des Anciens Poètes Français, vol. i.
[65] Bouterwek, on the authority of La Ravaillere, seems to doubt
whether these poems of Abelard were in French or Latin. Gesch. der
Französen Poesie, p. 18. I believe this would be thought quite
paradoxical by any critic at present.
[66] Duo autem, fateor, tibi specialiter inerant, quibus feminarum
quarumlibet animos statim allicere poteras, dictandi videlicet et
cantandi gratia; quæ cæteros minimè philosophos assecutos esse
novimus. Quibus quidem quasi ludo quodam laborem exercitii recreans
philosophici pleraque amatorio metro vel rithmo composita
reliquisti carmina, quæ præ nimiâ suavitate tam dictaminis quam
cantus sæpius frequentata tuum in ore omnium nomen incessanter
tenebant, ut etiam illiteratos melodiæ dulcedo tui non sineret
immemores esse. Atque hinc maxime in amorem tui feminæ suspirabant.
Et cum horum pars maxima carminum nostros decantaret amores, multis
me regionibus brevi tempore nunciavit, et multarum in me feminarum
accendit invidiam. And in another place: Frequenti carmine tuam in
ore omnium Heloissam ponebas: me plateæ omnes, me domus singulæ
resonabant. Epist. Abælardi et Heloissæ. These epistles of Abelard
and Eloisa, especially those of the latter, are, as far as I know,
the first book that gives any pleasure in reading which had been
produced in Europe for 600 years, since the Consolation of
Boethius, But I do not press my negative judgment. We may at least
say that the writers of the dark ages, if they have left anything
intrinsically very good, have been ill-treated by the learned, who
have failed to extract it. Pope, it may be here observed, has done
great injustice to Eloisa in his unrivalled Epistle, by putting the
sentiments of a coarse and abandoned woman into her mouth. Her
refusal to marry Abelard arose not from an abstract predilection
for the name of mistress above that of wife, but from her
disinterested affection, which would not deprive him of the
prospect of ecclesiastical dignities, to which his genius and
renown might lead him. She judged very unwisely, as it turned out,
but from an unbounded generosity of character. He was, in fact,
unworthy of her affection, which she expresses in the tenderest
language. Deum testem invoco, si me Augustus universo præsidens
mundo matrimonii honore dignaretur, totumque mihi orbem confirmaret
in perpetuum præsidendum, charius mihi et dignius videretur tua
dici meretrix quam illius imperatrix.
[67] Auguis, Discours Préliminaire, p. 2. Roquefort, Etat de la Poésie
Française aux 12me et 13me siècles.
37. In this French and Provençal poetry, if we come to the consideration
of it historically, descending from an earlier period, we are at once
struck by the vast preponderance of amorous ditties. The Greek and Roman
muses, especially the latter, seem frigid as their own fountain in
comparison. Satires on the great, and especially, on the clergy,
exhortations to the crusade, and religious odes, are intermingled in the
productions of the troubadours; but love is the prevailing theme.
This tone they could hardly have borrowed from the rhythmical Latin
verses, of which all that remain are without passion or energy. They
could as little have been indebted to their predecessors for a peculiar
gracefulness, an indescribable charm of gaiety and ease, which many of
their lighter poems display. This can only be ascribed to the polish of
chivalrous manners, and to the influence of feminine delicacy on public
taste. The well-known dialogue, for example, of Horace and Lydia, is
justly praised; nothing extant of this amœbean character, from Greece
or Rome, is nearly so good. But such alternate stanzas, between speakers
of different sexes, are very common in the early French poets; and it
would be easy to find some quite equal to Horace in grace and spirit.
They had even a generic name, _tensons_, contentions; that is,
dialogues of lively repartee, such as we are surprised to find in the
twelfth century, an age accounted by many almost barbarous. None of
these are prettier than what are called _pastourelles_, in which
the poet is feigned to meet a shepherdess, whose love he solicits, and
by whom he is repelled, (not always finally,) in alternate stanzas.[68]
Some of these may be read in Roquefort, Etat de la Poésie Française,
dans le 12me et 13me siècles; others in Raynouard, Choix des Poésies des
Troubadours; in Auguis, Recueil des Anciens Poètes Français; or in
Galvani, Osservazioni sulla Poesia de’ Trovatori.
[68] These have, as Galvani has observed, an ancient prototype in the
twenty-seventh pastoral of Theocritus, which Dryden has translated
with no diminution of its freedom. Some of the Pastourelles are
also rather licentious; but that is not the case with the greater
part. M. Raynouard, in an article of the Journal des Savans for
1824, p. 613, remarks the superior decency of the southern poets,
scarcely four or five transgressing in that respect; while many of
the fabliaux in the collections of Barbazan and Méon are of the
most coarse and stupid ribaldry; and such that even the object of
exhibiting ancient manners and language scarcely warranted their
publication in so large a number.
38. In all these light compositions which gallantry or gaiety inspired,
we perceive the characteristic excellencies of French poetry, as
distinctly as in the best vaudeville of the age of Louis XV. We can
really sometimes find little difference, except an obsoleteness of
language, which gives them a kind of poignancy. And this style, as I
have observed, seems to have been quite original in France, though it
was imitated by other nations.[69] The French poetry, on the other hand,
was deficient in strength and ardour. It was also too much filled with
monotonous commonplaces; among which the tedious descriptions of spring,
and the everlasting nightingale, are eminently to be reckoned. These,
perhaps, are less frequent in the early poems, most of which are short,
than they became in the prolix expansion adopted by the allegorical
school in the fourteenth century. They prevail, as is well known, in
Chaucer, Dunbar, and several other of our own poets.
[69] Andrès, as usual, derives the Provençal style of poetry from the
Arabians; and this has been countenanced, in some measure, by
Ginguéné and Sismondi. Some of the peculiarities of the Trobadours,
their tensons, or contentions, and the envoi, or termination of a
poem, by an address to the poem itself or the reader, are said to
be of Arabian origin. In assuming that rhyme was introduced by the
same channel, these writers are probably mistaken. But I have seen
too little of oriental, and, especially, of Hispano-Saracenic
poetry, to form any opinion how far the more essential
characteristics of Provençal verse may have been derived from it.
One seems to find more of oriental hyperbole in the Castilian
poetry.
|Metrical romances. Havelok the Dane.|