The Historians' History of the World 07

But in depicting this wonderful system which so dominated Europe in the early Middle Ages, when kings were but shadows or military dictators over uncertain realms, we must be careful not to give too much of an air of religiosity to the whole Middle Age. The men of the Middle Ages did not all live in a cowl. Symonds in his brilliant history of the Renaissance in Italy likens the whole mediæval attitude to that of St. Bernard, the greatest of its ascetics. St. Bernard would walk by the blue waters of Lake Geneva intent only upon his rosary and prayer. Across the lake gleam the snows of Mont Blanc,—a sight no traveller forgets when once he has seen it; but the saint, with his cowl drawn over his eyes, sees only his own sin and the vision of the last judgment. So, says Symonds, humanity walked along its way, a careful pilgrim unheeding the beauty or delight of the world around. Now this is very striking, but is it true? First of all, the Middle Ages, as ordinarily reckoned, include a stretch of ten centuries. We have already seen how unlike these centuries were, how they differed from each other as much as any centuries before or since. The nineteenth is hardly more different from the eighteenth than the twelfth was different from the eleventh. So much for the universalisation as we go up and down the centuries; it can hardly apply to all. Some gave us the Chansons des Gestes, the Song of Roland, the legends of Charlemagne and his paladins. Others gave us the delicious lyrics of the minnesingers and troubadours, of Walter von der Vogelweide and Bertran de Born. And as for their variety, we must again recall that the same century that gave us St. Francis of Assisi—that jongleur of God—and the Divine Comedy, gave us also Magna Charta and representative government.

But even if we concede that the monks dominated mediæval society as Symonds paints it, we must not imagine that they were all St. Bernards. Few indeed—the sainted few—were alone able to abstract themselves so completely from this life as to be unconscious of their surroundings. The successive reforms, Clugny, Carthusians, Cistercians, beginning in poverty and ending in wealth and worldly influence, show what sort of men wore the cowl. The monks were not all alike; some were worldly, some were religious, some were scholars, and some were merely indolent. The monastery was a home for the scholar, a refuge for the disconsolate, and an asylum for the disgraced. And a monk might often be a man whose sensibilities, instead of being dull, were more sharply awake than our own to-day. His faith kindled an imagination that brought the next world down into his daily life, and one who is in communion with eternity is an unconscious poet as well as a devotee. Dante’s great poem is just the essence of a thousand years of such visions. Those phases of the Middle Ages farthest removed from our times and our habits of thought are not necessarily sombre. They are gilded with the most alluring light that ever brightened humanity—the hope and vision of immortality.

It has seemed necessary to say this much at least about the ecclesiasticism of the Middle Ages so that we may get a new or at least a more sympathetic point of view as we study its details. Humanity was not in a comatose condition for a thousand years, to wake up one fine day and discover itself again in a Renaissance. Such an idea gives false conceptions of both the Middle Ages and that slow change by which men acquired new interests,—the Renaissance.