sent themselves as they might, and reformers of the sixteenth century by
Then they hit upon order, it was igno- his portrait of the good parson.
antly and involuntarily. Here for Affinity merely

He advanced a che first time appears a superiority few steps beyond the threshold of his of intellect, which at the instant of art, but he paused at the end of the conception suddenly halts, rises above vestibule.He half opens the great itself passes judgment, and says to door of the temple, but does not take itse) * This phrase tells the same his seat there ; at most, he sat down thing as the last - remove it; these in it only at intervals. / In Arciie and Wo ideas

are disjointed — connect Palamon, in Troilus and Cressida, te hem; this description is feeble-re- sketches sentiments, but does not create Consider it.” When a man can speak characters; he easily and naturally thus he has an idea, not learned in the traces the winding course of events schools, but personal and practical, of and conversations, but does not mark the human mind, its process and needs, the precise outline of a striking figure. and of things also, their composition If occasionally, as in the description of and combinations ; he has a style, that the temple of Mars, after the Thebaid is, he is capable of making every thing of Statius, feeling at his back the glowanderstood and seen by the human ing breeze of poetry, he draws out his mind. He can extract from every feet, clogged with the mud of the mid object, landscape, situation, character, dle age, and at a bound stands vpon the special and significant marks, so the poetic plain on which Statius as to group and arrange them, in order imitated Virgil and equalled Lucan, he, to compose an artificial work which at other times, again falls back into the surpasses the natural work in its purity childish gossip of the trouvères, or the and completeness. He is capable, as dull gabble of learned clerks-to“ Dan Chaucer was, of seeking out in the old Phebus or Apollo-Delphicus.” Else. common forest of the middle ages, where, a commonplace remark on art stories and legends, to replant them in intrudes in the midst of an impassioned his own soii, and make them send out description. He uses three thousand new shoots. He has the right and the verses to conduct Troilus to his first power, as Chaucer had, of copying and interview. (He is like a precocious and translating, because by dint of retouch- poetical child, who mingles in his loveing he impresses on his translations dreams quotations from his grammar and copies his original mark; he re- and recollections of his alphabet. * / creates what he imitates, because Even in the Canterbury Tales he repeats

by the side -, , fancies and monotonous stories, he can forgets to concentrate his passion or facko display, as Chaucer did, the charming his idea. He begins a jest, and scarcely ideas of an amiable and elastic mind, ends it. He dilutes a bright coloring the thirty master-forms of the four- in a monotonous stanza. ( His voice is dicen teenth century, the splendid freshness like that of a boy breaking into man of the verdurous landscape and spring- hood. At first a manly and firm accent time of England. He is not far from is maintained, then a shrill sweet sound conceiving an idea of truth and 'fe. shows that his growth is nou finished. He is on the brink of inde pendent and that his strength is subject to thought and fertile discovery. This weakness. Chaucer sets out as if to was Chaucer's position. At the dis- quit the middle age; but in the end he

. affinity with the poets of Elizabeth * Canterbury Tales ; yesterday he was by his gallery of pictures, and with the translating the Roman de la Rose. To-day

* Tennyson, in his Dream of Fair Women, * Speaking of Cressida, IV., book i. p. 236
sings:
Dan Chaucer, the first warbler, whose sweet Right as our first letter is now an a,
breath

In beautie first so stood she makeles,
Preluded those melodious bursts, that fill Her goodly looking gladed all the prees,
The spacious times of great Elizabeth

Nas never seene thing to be praised so derre
With sounds that echo still. '-TR.

Nor under cloude blacke so bright a storre.

in lensily

bacha

а

he says:

he is studying the complicated machin- | into a reflective mood, straightway
ery of the heart, discovering the issues of Saint Thomas, Peter Lombard, the
primitive education or of the ruling manual of sins, the treatise on define
disposition, and creating the comedy tion and syllogism, the army of the
of manners; to-morrow, he will have ancients and of the Fathers, descend
no pleasure but in curious events, from their glory, enter his brain, speak
smooth allegories, amorous discussions, in his stead; and the trouvère's pleas-
imitated from the French, or learned ant voice becomes the dogmatic and
moralities from the ancients. X Alter-sleep-inspiring voice of a doctor. In
nately he is an observer and a trouvère; love and satire he has experience, and
instead of the step he ought to have he invents; in what regardls morality
advanced, he has but made a half- and philosophy he has learning, and
step. Who has prevented him, and the copies. For an instant, by a solitary
others who surround him? We meet leap, he entered upon the close obser.
with the obstacle in the tales he has vation and the genuine study of man;
translated of Melibeus, of the Parson, he could not keep his ground, he did
in his Testament of Love ; in short, so not take his seat, he took a poetic ex
long as he writes verse, he is at his cursion; and no one followed him.
ease; as soon as he takes to prose, a The level of the century is lower ; ho
sort of chain winds around his feet is on it himself for the most part. He
and stops him. His imagination is is in the company of narrators like
free, and his reasoning a slave. The Froissart, of elegant speakers like
rigid scholastic divisions, the mechani- Charles of Orléans, of gossipy and bar.
cal manner of arguing and replying, ren verse-writers like Gower, Lydgate,
authority of Aristotle and the Fathers, frail and Meeting blossom, many useless
come and weigh down his budding branches, still more dying or dead
thought. His native invention disap branches ; such is this literature. And
pears under the discipline imposed. why? Because it had no longer a root ?
The servitude is so heavy, that even in after three centuries of effort, a heavy
the work of one of his contemporaries, instrument cut it underground. This
the Testament of Love, which, for a instrument was the Scholastic Philos.
long time, was believed to be written ophy.
by Chaucer, amid the most touching

4

VI. plaints and the most smarting pains,

the beautiful ideal lady, the heavenly Beneath every literature there is a thodar

mediator who appears in a vision, philosophy. Beneath every work of Love, sets her theses, establishes that! art is an idea of nature and of life ; this the cause of a cause is the cause of the idea leads the poet. Whether the au. thing caused, and reasons as pedanti-thor knows it or not, he writes in order

cally as they would at Oxford. In to exhibit it; and the characters which Ceruri la what can talent, even feeling, end, he fashions, like the events which hc

when it is kept down by such shack- arranges, only serve to bring to light

les ? What succession of original the dim creative conception which Amanion traths and new doctrines could be raises and combines them. I nder

found and proved, when in a moral lying Homer appears the noble l.fe of tale, like that of Melibeus and his wife heroic paganism and of happy Greece. Prudence, it was thought necessary to Underlying Dante, the sad and violent establish a formal controversy, to quote life of fanatical Catholicism and of the Seneca and Job, to forbid tears, to bring much-hating Italians. From either we forward the weeping Christ to authorize i might draw a theory of man and of the tears, to enumerate every proof, to call beautiful. It is so with others; and in Solomon, Cassiodorus, and Cato; this is how, according to the variations, in short, to write a book for schools? the birth, blossom, decline, or slug The public cares only for pleasant and gishness of the master-idea, literature lively thoughts ; not serious and gene- varies, is born, flourishes, degenerates, ral ideas; these latter are for a special comes to an end. Whoever plants the class only. As soon as Chaucer gets one, plants the other whoever under

tandene

ܐ ܢ،

a

.nem?

mines the one, undermines the other. I and variant minds thought they had Place in all the minds of any age a found the temple of truth; they rushec new grand idea of nature and life, so at it headlong, in legions, breaking in that they feel and įroduce it with their the doors, chambering over the walls, whole heart and strength, and you will leaping into the interior, and so found see them, seized with the craving to themselves at the bottom of a moat. express it, invent forms of art and Three centuries of labor at the bottom groups of figures. Take away from of this black moat added not one idea these minds every grand new idea of to the human mind. nature and life, and you will see them, For consider the questions which deprived ci the craving to express all- they treat of. They seem to be marchimportant thoughts, copy, sink into ing, but are merely marking ime. silence, or rave.

People would say, to see them moi! What has become of these all-impor. and toil, that they will educe from want thoughts. What labor worked heart and brain some great original them out? What studies nourished creed, and yet all belief was imposed The laborers did not lack upon them from the outset.

The sys zeal. In the twelfth century the ener- tem was made ; they could only argy of their minds was admirable. Atrange and comment upon it. The conOxford there were thirty thousand ception comes not from them, but scholars. No building in Paris could from Constantinople. Infinitely comcontain the crowd of Abelard's disci- plicated and subtle as it is, the supreme ples ; when he retired to solitude, they work of Oriental mysticism :.1d Greek accompanied him in such a multitude, metaphysics, so disproportioned to that the desert became a town. No their young understanding, they exhaust difficulty repulsed them. There is a themselves to reproduce it, and more story of a young boy, who, though over burden their unpractised hands beaten by his master, was wholly bent with the weight of a logical instrument on remaining with him, that he might which Aristotle created for theory and still learn. When the terrible ency- not for practice, and which ought to clopedia of Aristotle was introduced, have remained in a cabinet of philosothough disfigured and unintelligible, it phical curiosities, without being ever carwas devoured. The only question pre- ried into the field of action. Whether sented to them, that of universals, so the divine essence engendered the Son, abstract and dry, so embarrassed by) or was engendered by the Father ; why Arabic obscurities and Greek subtilties, the three persons together are not during centuries, was seized upon greater than one alone ; attributes de eagerly. Heavy and awkward as was termine persons, not substance, that is, the instrument supplied to them, Inature; how properties can exist in the mean syllogism, they made themselves nature of God, and not determine it ; masters of it, rendered it still more if created spirits are local and can be heavy, plunged in into every object( circumscribed ; if God can know more and in every direction. They con- things than He is aware of ; ” *_these structed monstrous books, in greaf are the ideas which they moot: what numbers, cathedrals of syllogism, of truth could issue thence ? From hand unheard of architecture, of prodigious to hand the chimera grows, and spreads finish, heightened in effect by intensity wider its gloomy wings. “ Can God of intellectual power, which the whole cause that, the place and body being um of human labor has only twice retained, the body shall have no pozibeen able to match.* These young tion, that is, existence in place ?

Whether the impossiblity of being en• Under Proclus and under Hegel. Dụns gendered is a constituent property of scotus, at the age of thirty-one, died, leaving the First Person of the Trinity-beside his sermons and commentaries, twelve folio volumes, in a small close handwriting, in Whether identity, similitude, and equal. & stye like Hegel's, on the same subject as ity are real relations in God." | Dung Proclus treats of. Similarly with Saint Thomas and the whole train of schoolmen. No idea * Peter Lombard, Book of Sentences. I: was can be formed of such a labor before handling the classic of the middle age The books themselves.

# Duns Scotus, ed. 1639.

Scotus distinguishes three kinds of Under i vis constraint mer. ceased tu matter: matter which is firstly first, think; für he who speaks of thought secondly first, thirdly first. According speaks of an effort at invention, an in to hini, we must clear this triple hedge dividual creation, an energetic actior. of :siny abstractions in order to un- They recite a lesson, or sing a cate derstand the production of a sphere chism ; even in paradise,even in ecstasy of brass. Under such a regimen, and the divinest raptures of love, Danté imbecility soon makes its appear- thinks himself bound to show an exact ance. Saint Thomas himself corsiders, memory and a scholastic orthodoxy " whether the body of Christ arose How then 'th the rest? Some like with its wounds-whether this body Raymond Lully, set about inventing an noves with the motion of the host instrument of reasoning to serve in and the chalice in consecration,- place of the understanding. About the whether at the first instant of concep- fourteenth century, under the blows uf ciun Christ had the use of free judg. Occam, this verbal science began to ment, -whether Christ was slain by totter ; they saw that its entities were Tiinself or by another?” Do you only words; it was discredited. In think you are at the limits of human | 1367, at Oxford, of thirty thousand folly ? Listen. He considers “whether students, there remained six thouthe dove in which the Holy Spirit ap- sand ; * they still set their “ Barbara peared was a real animal, whether a and Felapton,” but only in the way of glorified body can occupy one and the routine. X Each one in turn mechani: same place at the same time as another cally traversed the petty region of glorified body,—whether in the state threadbare cavils, scratched himself in of innocence all children were mascu. the briars of quibbles, and burdened line?” I pass over others as to the himself with his bundle of texts ; nothdigestion of Christ, and some stilling more. The vast body of science more untranslatable. * This is the point which was to have formed and vivified reached by the most esteemed doctor, the whole thought of man, was reduced the most judicious mind, the Bossuet to a text-book. of the middle age. Even in this ring So, little by little, the conception of inanities the answers are laid down. which fertilized and ruled all others, Roscellinus and Abelard were excom- dried up; the deep spring, whence municated, exiled, imprisoned, because flowed all poetic streams, was found they swerved from it. There is a com- empty ; science furnished nothing plete minute dogma which closes all more to the world. issues; there is no means of escaping; works could the world produce V As after a hundred wriggles and a hundred Spain, later on, renewing the middleefforts, you must come and tumble age, after having shone splendidly and into a formula. If by mysticism you foolishly by her chivalry and devotion, try ts Aly over their heads, if by experi- by Lope de Vega and Calderon, Loyola ence you endeavor to creep beneath, and St. Theresa, became enervated powerful talons await you at your exit. through the Inquisition and through The wise man passes for a ragician, casuistry, and ended by sinking into a the enlightened man for a heretic. brutish silence ; so the middle age, The Waldenses, the Catharists, the dis- outstripping Spain, after displaying the ciples of "ohn of Parma, were burned ; senseless heroism of the crusades, an} Roger Bacon died only just in time, the poetical ecstasy of the cloister, a:otherwise he might have been burned. ter producing chivalry and saintship,

* Utrum angelus diligat se ipsum dilectione Francis of Assisi, St. Louis, and Dante aatura'i vel electi ra? Utrum in statu innocen- languished under the Inquisition and siæ fuerit generatio per coitum ? Utrum omnes the scholastic learning, and be ame luissent nati in sexu masculino? Utrum.cog; extinguished in idle raving and inanity nitio angeli posset dici matutina et vespertina ? Utrum martyribus aureola debeatur?' U'trum * The Rev. Henry Anstey, in his Introduc. virgo Maria fuerit virgo in concipiendo. Utrumtion to Munimenta Academica, Lond., 1868 remanserit virgo post partum? 1 he reader says that “the statement of Richard of Armagb may look out in the test the reply to these last that

there were in the thinteen the endlibre 30,000 Thomas,

is almost inc . grcu, ed. 1677.)

P *

Must we quote all these good peopolitics, a litany ( ancient and modern ple who speak without having any legends gleaned from the compilers, thing to say? You may find them in marred in the passage by the pedantry Warton; * dozens of translators, im of the schools and the ignorance of the porting the poverties of French litera- age. It is a cart-load of scholastic ture, and imitating imitations; rhym- rubbish; the sewer tumbles upon this ing chroniclers, most commonplace of feeble spirit, which of itself was flowing mei, whom we only read because we clearly, but now, obstructed by tiles, must accept history from every quar. bricks, plaster, ruins from all quarters ter, even from imbeciles; spinners and of the globe, drags on darkened and spinsters of didactic poems, who pile sluggish. Gower, one of the most ap yerses on the training of falcors, learned 4 his time,* supposed that on heraldry, on chemistry; editors of Latin was invented by the old prophetmoralities, who invent the same dream ess Carmentis; that the grammarians, over again for the hundredth time, Aristarchus, Donatus, and Didyinus, and get themselves taught universal regulated its syntax, pronunciation, and history by the goddess Sapience. Like prosody; that it was adorned by Cicero the writers of the Latin decadence, with the flowers of eloquence and these folk only think of copying, com- rhetoric; then enriched by translations piling, abridging, constructing in text from the Arabic, Chaldæan, and Greek; books, in rhymed memoranda, the en- and that at last, after much lab is of cyclopedia of their times.

celebrated writers, it attained its final Lis.en to the most illustrious, the perfection in Ovid, the poet of love. grave Gower—“morall Gower,” as he Elsewhere he discovers that Ulysses was called it Doubtless here and there learned rhetoric from Cicero, magic he contains a remnant of brilliancy and from Zoroaster, astronomy from Ptol. grace. He is like an old secretary of emy, and philosophy from Plato. And à Court of Love, André le Chapelain what a style! so long, so dull,t si) or any other, who would pass the day drawn out by repetitions, the mos in solemnly registering the sentences minute details, garnished with referof ladies, and in the evening, partly ences to his text, like a man who, with asleep on his desk, would see in a half his eyes glued to his Aristotle and his dream their sweet smile and their Ovid, a slave of his musty parchments, beautiful eyes. I The ingenious but can do nothing but cop; and string his exhausted vein of Charles of Orléans rhymes together. Schoolboys even ir still flows in his French ballads. He old age, they seem to believe that every has the same fondling delicacy, almost truth, all wit, is in their great wooda little affected. The pour little poetic bound books; that they have no need spring flows yet in thin transparent to find out and invent for themselves; streamlets over the smooth pebbles, that their whole business is to repeat; and murmurs with a babble, pretty, that this is, in fact, man's business. but so low that at times you cannot The scholastic system had enthroned near it. But dull is the rest! His the dead letter, and peopled the worid great poem, Confessio Amantis, is a with dead understandings. Jialogue between a lover and his con- After Gower come Occleve and fessor, imitated chiefly from Jean de Lydgate. f “My father Chaucer would Meung, having for object, like the willingly have taught me,” says Oc Roman de la Rose, to explain and cleve, “but I was dull, and learned classify the impediments of love. little or nothing.” He paraphrased in The superannuated theme is always verse a treatise of Egidius, on govern. reappearing, covered by a crude erudi- ment; these are moralities. There are tion. You will find here an exposition others, on compassion, after Augus. of hermetic science, lectures on the tine, and on the art of dying; then philosophy of Aristotle, a treatise on love tales; a letter from Cupid, dated • History of English Poetry, vol. ii.

a