First of all must be named the Frank in whose lifetime the dual conception of universal empire and universal church, divinely ap pointed sacred and inviolable, began to control the order of Eu ropean society. Charles the Great (Charlemagne) lent his forces to the plan of resuscitating the Roman empire at a moment when his own power made him the arbiter of Western Europe, when the papacy needed his alliance, and when the Eastern empire had passed under the usurped regency of a female. He modelled an empire, Roman in name, but essentially Teutonic, since it owed such substance as its fabric possessed to Frankish armies and the sinews of the German people. As a structure composed of divers ill-connected parts it fell to pieces at its builder's death, leaving little but the incubus of a memory, the fascination of a mighty name, to dominate the mind of mediaeval Europe. As an idea, the Empire grew in visionary power, and remained one of the chief obstacles in the way of both Italian and German national coher ence. Real force was not in it, but rather in that counterpart to its unlimited pretensions, the Church which had evolved it from barbarian night, and which used her own more vital energies for undermining the rival of her creation. Charles the Great, having proclaimed himself successor of the Caesars, was obscurely ambi tious of imitating the Augusti also in the sphere of letters. He caused a scheme of humanistic education to be formulated, and gave employment at his court to rhetoricians of whom Alcuin was the most considerable. But very little came of the Revival of Learning which Charles is supposed to have encouraged ; and the empire he restored was accepted by the mediaeval intellect in a crude theological and vaguely mystical spirit. We should, how ever, here remember that the study of Roman law, which was one important precursory symptom of the Renaissance, owed much to mediaeval respect for the empire as a divine institution. This, to gether with the municipal Italian intolerance of the Lombard and Frankish codes, kept alive the practice and revived the science of Latin jurisprudence at an early period.
Philosophy had tried to free it self from the trammels of theological orthodoxy in the hardy spec ulations of some schoolmen, notably of Scotus Erigena and Abe lard. These innovators found, however, small support, and were defeated by opponents who used the same logical weapons with authority to back them. Nor were the rationalistic opinions of the Averroists without their value, though the Church condemned these deviators from her discipline as heretics. Such mediaeval materialists, moreover, had but feeble hold upon the substance of real knowledge. Imperfect acquaintance with authors whom they had studied in Latin translations made by Jews from Arabic com mentaries on Greek texts, together with almost total ignorance of natural laws, condemned them to sterility. Like the other schio machists of their epoch, they fought with phantoms in a visionary realm. A similar judgment may be passed upon those Paulician, Albigensian, Paterine and Epicurean dissenters from the Catholic creed who opposed the phalanxes of orthodoxy with frail imagina tive weapons, and alarmed established orders in the state by the audacity of their communistic opinions. Physical science strug gled into feeble life in the cells of Gerbert and Roger Bacon. But these men were accounted magicians by the vulgar ; and, while the one eventually assumed the tiara, the other was incarcerated in a dungeon. The schools meanwhile resounded still to the intermi nable dispute upon abstractions. Are only universals real, or has each name a corresponding entity? From the midst of the Fran ciscans who had persecuted Roger Bacon because he presumed to know more than was consistent with human humility arose John of Parma, adopting and popularizing the mystic prophecy of Joachim of Flora. The reign of the Father is past ; the reign of the Son is passing ; the reign of the Spirit is at hand. Such was the formula of the Eternal Gospel, which as an unconscious forecast of the Renaissance, has attracted retrospective students by its felicity of adaptation to their historical method. Yet we must re member that this bold intuition of the abbot Joachim indicated a monastic reaction against the tyrannies and corruptions of the Church, rather than a fertile philosophical conception. The Frati celli spiritualists, and similar sects who fed their imagination with his doctrine, expired in the flames to which Fra Dolcino Longino and Margharita were consigned. To what extent the accusations of profligate morals brought against these reforming sectarians were justified remains doubtful; and the same uncertainty rests upon the alleged iniquities of the Templars. It is only certain that at this epoch the fabric of Catholic faith was threatened with various forms of prophetic and Oriental mysticism, symptomatic of a widespread desire to grasp at something simpler, purer and less rigid than Latin theology afforded. Devoid of criticism, de
void of sound learning, devoid of a firm hold on the realities of life, these heresies passed away without solid results and were forgotten.
We are apt to take for granted that the men of the middle ages were immersed in meditations on the other world, and that their intellectual exercises were confined to ab stractions of the schools, hallucinations of the fancy, allegories, visions. This assumption applies indeed in a broad sense to that period which was dominated by intolerant theology, and deprived of positive knowledge. Yet there are abundant signs that the na tive human instincts, the natural human appetities, remained un altered and alive beneath the crust of orthodoxy. In the person of a pope like Boniface VIII. those ineradicable forces of the natural man assumed, if we may trust the depositions of ecclesiastics, well acquainted with his life, a form of brutal atheistic cynicism. In the person of an emperor, Frederick II., they emerged under the more agreeable garb of liberal culture and Epicurean scepticism. Fred erick dreamed of remodelling society upon a mundane type, which anticipated the large toleration and cosmopolitan enlighten ment of the actual Renaissance. But his efforts were defeated by the unrelenting hostility of the Church, and by the incapacity of his contemporaries to understand his aims. Af ter being forced in his lifetime to submit to authority, he was consigned by Dante to hell. Frederick's ideal of civilization was derived in a large meas ure from Provence, where a beautiful culture had prematurely bloomed, filling southern Europe with the perfume of poetry and gentle living. Here, if anywhere, it seemed as though the ecclesias tical and feudal fetters of the middle ages might be broken, and humanity might enter on a new stage of joyous and unimpeded evolution. This was, however, not to be. The Church preached Simon de Montfort's crusade, and organized Dominic's Inquisi tion; what Quinet calls the "Renaissance sociale par l'Amour" was extirpated by sword, fire, famine and pestilence. Meanwhile the Provençal poets had developed their modern language with incomparable richness and dexterity, creating forms of verse and modes of emotional expression which determined the latest me diaeval phase of literature in Europe. The naturalism of which we have been speaking found free utterance now in the fabliaux of jongleurs, lyrics of minnesingers, tales of trouveres, romances of Arthur and his knights—compositions varied in type and tone, but in all of which sincere passion and real enjoyment of life pierce through the thin veil of chivalrous mysticism or of allegory with which they were sometimes conventionally draped. The tales of Lancelot and Tristram, the lives of the troubadours and the Wacht lieder of the minnesingers, sufficiently prove with what sensual freedom a knight loved the lady whom custom and art made him profess to worship as a saint. We do not need to be reminded that Beatrice's adorer had a wife and children, or that Laura's poet owned a son and daughter by a concubine, in order to perceive that the mystic passion of chivalry was compatible in the middle ages with commonplace matrimony or vulgar illegitimate connec tions. But perhaps the most convincing testimony to the presence of this ineradicable naturalism is afforded by the Latin songs of wandering students, known as Carmina Burama, written by the self-styled Goliardi. In these compositions, remarkable for their facile handling of mediaeval Latin rhymes and rhythms, the alle gorizing mysticism which envelops chivalrous poetry is discarded. Love is treated from a frankly carnal point of view. Bacchus and Venus go hand in hand, as in the ancient ante-Christian age. The open-air enjoyments of the wood, the field, the dance upon the village green are sung with juvenile light-heartedness. No grave note, warning us that the pleasures of this earth are fleeting, that the visible world is but a symbol of the invisible, that human life is a probation for the life beyond, interrupts the tinkling music as of castanets and tripping feet which gives a novel charm to these unique relics of the 13th century. Goliardic poetry is further curi ous as showing how the classics even at that early period were a fountain-head of pagan inspiration. In the taverns and low places of amusement haunted by those lettered songsters, on the open road and in the forests trodden by their vagrant feet, the deities of Greece and Rome were not in exile, but at home within the hearts of living men. Thus, while Christendom was still preoccu pied with the Crusades, two main forces of the Renaissance, nat uralism and enthusiasm for antique modes of feeling, already brought their latent potency to light, prematurely indeed and pre cociously, yet with a promise that was destined to be kept.