The reward of this obedience to Nature was signal. In the first place the Middle Ages created, or practically created, the STORY. Of course there were stories before; of course the Odyssey would be the best story in the world if, of the main elements of Romance—Passion and Mystery—one were a little more developed, and is almost the best story in the world as it is. Of course there are capital fabliaux in Herodotus, fine apologues in Plato, good things of other kinds elsewhere. But the ancients not only hampered themselves by almost always telling their longer stories in verse, but seldom knew how to manage them in verse or prose. The Iliad is such a bad story that it has tempted the profanity of those who would make it not one but a dozen stories; the Æneid is a story, dull à dormir debout as such, with some good rambling and fighting, a great descent to Hades, a capital boxing-match, not a bad regatta, and a famous but borrowed episode of passion. Out of Herodotus, till we come to the very verge of the classical period with Apuleius and Lucian, it is almost impossible to find a Greek, quite impossible to find a Roman, who knows how to tell a story at all. The exquisite substance of mythology receives no due honour from the story-teller as such. Read Ovid (who had as much of the story-telling spirit in him as any ancient except Herodotus), and then turn to what is often the mere doggerel and jargon of the mediæval Latin story-tellers in prose and verse. The gift, no matter whether it came from the East or from the West, from the North or from the South, from the Heaven above or the earth beneath, or rose a new Aphrodite from the Atlantic sea, is here and is not there.
Without this gift of story-telling there could not have appeared—though it would not by itself have been enough to produce—the greater gift of the Romance. It would be as unnecessary as it would be foolish to enter here into the secular and truceless war as to the origin, the nature, and so forth of this famous thing. It is sufficient to observe, once more, that the thing is here and is not there, except almost by accident. And the gift of the Romance—in that wide historical sense in which it could be, and was, in the Middle Ages applied to almost every manner of subject—was a gift to literature so inestimable that perhaps no other has ever quite equalled it. At once, with that nonchalance (they called it nonchaloir) in which no time has ever equalled these Ages, they swept away the Doctrine of the Subject, with all the cants and heresies which pullulate round its undoubtedly noble articles of original faith. Romance was perfectly prepared to deal with any subject, from religion to stag-hunting, from chronology to love. It depended no doubt on the individual craftsman whether the result was good or bad; but the method has, in the right hands, triumphed over the most intractable materials, added charm to the most commonplace, made the most grotesque acceptable. Could anything be thinner and more ordinary than the subject of Floire et Blanchefleur? Can anything be more charming, not merely than its most perfect outcome in Aucassin et Nicolette, but even than the diffuser and less happily phrased verse-forms? In the Arthurian Legend the success is greater still. Romance takes a dim personality, and a handful of cacophonous place-names, out of a suspicious compilation of pseudo-history, and spins it, in a single lifetime, into a story the most elaborate, the most artful, the most variedly interesting, the fullest of meaning (if men must have meaning) in the whole literary world.
Even to Dante it did not occur to subject the methods and the results of this new and potent kind to such an examination as that which Aristotle had partly given to the older literature. Nor, at that time and in those circumstances, was even Dante likely to have led such an inquiry to a good end. The Middle Ages, while consciously abandoning, almost or altogether, the old aim at Action, had not arrived at the modern command of Character. They worked at and by mediate things—Incident, Atmosphere, Description, Manners, Passion—and they made all these and others subserve a Romantic Unity of plot which, instead of being circular like the Classical Unity, was calculated for indefinite prolongation, not merely in straight line, but after the manner of a tree, with branches and inarchings skyward, earthward, and horizontal. The scheme admitted adornments of various kinds, which must have been difficult if not impossible to reconcile with the more sober and exacting classical model. It permitted a much greater indulgence of the resort to the methods of other arts, especially painting, than classical literature had, until its latest days, thought proper. It paid very little attention to mere probability. All these points invited the comparative critic, but they did not find him. In three respects, however, the difference between classical and mediæval Imitation or Representation was almost more striking than in any other, and all of these presented the most tempting opportunities for criticism. These were the attitude of the new literature to Religion, its attitude to the passion of Love, and its use of an implement which, though by no means unknown to Classical literature, had been more sparingly used therein, the method of Allegory.
On the first point it would be very easy to enlarge beyond the widest toleration of this treatise; it is here only necessary to point out how delicate, and how important, are the new duties prescribed to the critic of mediæval literature in regard to it. The “blinded Papist” view (which makes itself felt even in some observations of such a man as Scott now and then) may not be so common as it once was, but it is not entirely obsolete. And it may be doubted whether that to which it has given place—a philosophical pity, contemptuous or sympathising, for “superstition” generally—is not even more hampering, while there can be no doubt of the hamper imposed on the yet earlier Renaissance by the superior contempt which it felt for mediæval childishness and ignorance. In this literature, and in the romantic branch of it more particularly, allowance has to be made at every moment, in every respect and condition, for the omnipresence of an elaborate creed which nobody doubted, with which everybody indeed was so saturated and familiar that he could jest with it and at it, as one jests with and at a best-beloved and best-known person and friend. It supplies subject, it affects treatment, it colours phrase and image. Although it is very easy to underrate the amount of actual religious feeling in antiquity, yet this feeling, at its noblest and sincerest, was unquestionably of an entirely different character from that of the “Ages of Faith.” Take, at their best and strongest, the sincere fetichism of the ancient equivalent of the “charcoal-burner,” the beautiful mythology of the poet, the sublime mysticism of the Platonist, and the exalted if slightly Pharisaical morality of the better Stoic—combine them with all the art of the student of development. But you will not succeed in making anything in the least like the creed of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, with Christ, or rather with the Virgin and the Devil, fighting perpetually for Mansoul, with Angels and Deadly Sins under their command, with a miracle possible at every moment, Death and Fortune ruling affairs subject to, but not always interfered with by, the higher influences, the Sacraments to be resorted to at will or neglected at peril, Purgatory to be faced or anticipated and won through, Hell or Heaven for final goal. It is almost impossible to allow too much in degree (though it is extremely possible to allow wrongly in kind) for the influence which this ever-present set of thoughts, beliefs, feelings, which was absent from antiquity and present in the Middle Ages, had upon the literary utterance of the latter. The unnatural gloom and the half-inarticulate gaiety which have been discovered in this literature (the latter at least as truly as the former), its occasional irrationality, as we are pleased to call it (perhaps “irrationalism” would be a better word), its shuddering attraction for the horrible and loathsome, its delight in dream, its quaint and almost flighty revulsions and contrasts—all are due to this.
Equally a commonplace, and yet still more important to, and still more neglected by, criticism, is the attitude of the Middle Ages to Love—which is very mainly conditioned by their attitude to Religion. The not infrequent, though very idle, debate as to whether the Venus of chivalry was Urania or Pandemos is, of course, best avoided by the frank acknowledgment that she was (as indeed Her Divinity always has been) both. The distinction from antiquity, and its influence upon literature, do not lie in the least in this direction, or in the fact of the mixture, but in its nature and character. With exceptions, of course, the tone of antiquity in literature, as to love and to its objects, is either the tone of slightly unreal philosophising, or the tone of the naughty story, or that of half-paraded, half-confessing contempt. The two former require no treatment here; the latter is important. Love and its objects are, to an average serious man of letters of the Classics when not a subject for conventional escapades, a rather regrettable incident attached to humanity, something not in the least spoudaion, something only not among the parerga of life because it is almost impossible to avoid them, something useful, not unpleasant, rather better than a constitutional or a bath, but affording a much less worthy employment than talking in a porch, or declaiming in a school. This is undeniably the average attitude of the average man of letters of old. That of his mediæval brother need hardly be described; but its causes come within our view. You have to reckon, not merely with the cult of the Virgin, as has often been done, but with the whole Christian (especially mediæval-Christian) theory of morals and of sin. Why excite yourself about actions indifferent at best, always rather below the attention of a serious man, and at worst leading to unpleasant and dubious consequences? Excitement becomes easy when the consequence of a moment’s guilty indulgence may be the Inferno for eternity. Nay, from a less purely selfish point of view there are reasons enough. Imagination—the real Imagination of Apollonius or Philostratus, not the mere image-furnishing faculty of the ancients generally—had “come to town,” and brought a transformed Love with her. The sense of mystery, of miracle, of the invisible, grafted itself upon the strongest of the merely physical instincts, and the result pervaded literature. The trumpery subject, proper for comedy, for epic episodes, for a carefully kept-under seasoning to tragedy, for light trifles, became, with Religion, the subject of nearly all poetry, and of not a little prose, and made its influence felt in all manner of ways. It even, although the Middle Age was confessedly not strong in character, paved the way to that last grace, thanks to the fancy of the time for rehandling the same subjects and persons. Trace Briseis-Briseida, a fashion-plate in Dares, a slave-girl in Benoist, to the Cressida of Chaucer and of Henryson; trace Guanhumara, a handsome Roman damsel of good family and nothing more, down to the complex woman and Queen of the complete Lancelot, and you will see how character-drawing arose.
But undoubtedly one of the greatest, and perhaps the most characteristic, of the influences of the love-motive on literature, and the development of literary methods through this and other motives, is the mediæval use of Allegory. The thing, of course, is not new—nothing ever is in the strict sense. It may actually have dwelt upon the banks of Nile: it certainly did on those of Ilissus and Tiber. But the very strong prominence of it in the Scriptures, and in ecclesiastical writings generally, could not fail to develop it in the younger vernaculars; and its alliance (a dangerous one no doubt, but a real and natural) with Imagination could not long be missed. Many ingenious and industrious hands have traced its origin from Homer to Claudian, and from Claudian to the Romance of the Rose. How it thence coloured all literature is sufficiently known. But no critic has even yet exhausted, nor are a hundred critics likely to exhaust, the subtle and innumerable ramifications of its literary influence and manifestations.
These things and others showed themselves no doubt mainly in the Romance—the chief, the most characteristic, and, so far as anything is original, the most original of the literary products of the Middle Ages. But the Romance was far indeed from being the only new development in literary morphology that the period had to offer. Until nearly its closing time, no great change or advance was made in History, though the artificial speech, which ancient exaggerations of oratory had imposed on the historian, was to a great extent dropped, and the purview of the writer was insensibly widened in other directions. But the immense cultivation of the short tale—first in verse, then in prose—was a matter closely connected, but by no means identical, with the progress of Romance itself. And, as in another matter glanced at above, the restless character of the time, and its constant tendency to reproduce with slight alteration, had, here also, a great influence. In all these alterations the arts and crafts of the future novelist and dramatist were insensibly exercising themselves. But the drama itself demands at least a glance. That the modern play owes nothing to the mediæval is the foolishest of critical delusions; but it would hardly be rash to say that the mediæval drama owes nothing to the ancient. When the horror with which (for not such very bad reasons) the Church regarded stage plays altogether had been a little relaxed, the natural and the artificial dramas followed entirely different lines. Hroswitha’s work, and Christus Patiens, and the rest, have absolutely nothing to do with Miracle or Mystery or Farce, which are the romance and the short story thrown, according to the natural histrionic bent of man, into presentation by personages instead of by continuous narration. And the laws which they developed, and by which they helped the greater and more genuine modern drama to be what it was, were natural likewise, and had nothing to do with Aristotle or with Horace, with Plato or with Aristophanes.
This would by itself have sufficed to give the new drama a very different nature, and therefore a most important comparative critical influence, when contrasted with the old. The Greek drama (which the Roman more or less slavishly copied) may have had its infancies; but we possess it only in its riper age. Nor is it even possible that these infancies, granting their existence, could have shown anything like the multiform influences which betray themselves in the mediæval drama. Both may have been originally liturgic; but there is such an infinite difference in the complexity of the liturgies! Both may have been preceded by epic and perhaps lyric; but in other respects the Greek drama was certainly among the first—as the mediæval drama was nearly the last—to take rank among literary kinds. And these differences, putting others aside, would have accounted, in great part, for the singularly undulating and diverse character which (in company, no doubt, with an imperfection as great as the diversity) distinguished the new drama from the splendid, but somewhat narrow, perfection of the old. Even in the stock types, in the Vices and Fools of the new form, there was little or nothing of the fixed character of the Roman—we can say little of the Greek—"comedy of art."
And so, not merely in more kinds of literature than one, but in every kind of literature, with hardly a single exception, the Middle Ages provided their successors with the material for an entirely new Calculus of Critical Variations—for a complete redressing of whatever positive errors or mere relative gaps had existed in the older criticism, by reason of the absence of opportunities for observation.