[FULL-SIZE] -- [Medium-Size]
The cause is not far to seek; think of that stout cornific * doctor with leaden eyes, a confrère of Froissart, if you like, but how different! He holds in his hand his manual of canon-law, Peter the Lombard, a treatise on the syllogism. For ten hours a day he disputes in Baralipton on the hicaeity.
* Cornificien, a name given by Jean of Sarisberg to those
who disfigured dialectics by their extravagant, cornus
arguments.—Translator.
As soon as he became hoarse, he dipped his nose again into his yellow folio; his syllogisms and quiddities ended by making him stupid; he knew nothing about things or dared not consider them; he only wielded words, shook formulas together, bruised his own head, lost all common sense, and reasoned like a machine for Latin verses.* What a master for the sons of noblemen, and for keen poetic minds, and what an education was this labyrinth of dry logic and extravagant scholasticism. Tired, disgusted, irritated, stupefied, they forgot the ugly dream as soon as possible, ran in the open air, and thought only of the chase, of war and the ladies; they were not so foolish as to turn their eyes a second time towards their crabbed litany; if they did come back to it, that was out of vanity; they wanted to set some Latin fable in their songs, or some learned abstraction, without comprehending a word of it, donning it for fashion’s sake, as the ermine of learning. With us of today, general ideas spring up in every mind,—living and flourishing ones; among the laity of that time their root was cut off, and among the clergy there remained of them but a fagot of dead wood. And so mankind was only the better fitted for the life of the body and more capable of violent passions; with regard to this the style of Froissart, artless as it is, deceives us. We think we are listening to the pretty garrulousness of a child at play; beneath this prattle we must distinguish the rude voice of the combatants, bear-hunters and hunters of men too, and the broad, coarse hospitality of feudal manners.
* See the discourse of Jean Petit on the assassination of
the Duke of Orleans.
