[3] Italian Diary.
CHAPTER VIII.
INDICATIONS OF THE SURVIVANCE OF ANCIENT LITERATURE, THROUGH A PERIOD EXTENDING FROM THE DECLINE OF LEARNING IN THE SEVENTH CENTURY, TO ITS RESTORATION IN THE FIFTEENTH.
General epithets usually carry with them a meaning that oversteps the bounds of truth: we hear of “the dark ages”—“the period of intellectual night”—“the season of winter in the history of man”—and we are apt to imagine that during the times thus designated the human mind had become utterly palsied, and that all learning was extinct. But in fact throughout that period, reason, though often misdirected, was not sleeping: philosophy was rather bewildered than inert; and learning, although immured, was not lost.
In no part of the period that extends from the reign of Justinian, when Greek and Roman literature everywhere lay open to the light of day, till the fall of the Constantinopolitan empire, and the revival of western learning in the fifteenth century, do we lose the traces even of the classic authors, much less of those that belong to sacred literature; for in each of the intervening ages, and in every quarter of Europe, there were writers whose works, being still extant, give evidence of their acquaintance with most of the principal authors of more remote times.
Under the vague impression that has been created by certain loose modes of speaking, relative to the deep and universal ignorance said to have prevailed throughout Europe during a space of seven hundred years, the existence of a large number of manuscripts of the classic authors, undoubtedly executed during those very ages of ignorance, presents a great apparent difficulty: for, from what motive, it may be asked, or for whose use, were these works transcribed, so frequently as that they were found in all parts of Europe, on the revival of earning in the fifteenth century? The facts that are now to be mentioned, will furnish a sufficient solution of this question, by proving that, in the West and in the East, during those times of general intellectual lethargy, there were more than a few individuals who cultivated polite literature with ardour, and to whom the possession and preservation of books was a matter of the liveliest interest. The names about to be mentioned—as the well-informed reader will recollect—bear but a small proportion to the whole number that might be adduced: it is sufficient for our purpose to refer to one or two writers in each century.
But before naming individual men, whose extant writings give evidence of the continuity of literature, and therefore assure us of the safe transmission of ancient books to modern times, it will be serviceable to bring clearly into view what it is which is needed for constituting the Living Medium of this transmission. Now, for bringing this matter home to the convictions and the consciousness of the reader, let him take up his own family history, and pursue it, retrogressively, inquiring how many individuals are needed—or let us rather say how few—to make up a chain of historical and literary conveyance, through any given track of time past; for instance, from this present time, 1858, into the mid-time of the Elizabethan era, as thus:—
I will now assume the fact—whether it be true or not does not signify to the argument—that my progenitors in a direct line were educated persons—or if not so—that each father in the line secured for his son an ordinary grammar-school education—instruction just sufficient for making him cognisant of the most noted persons and authors of preceding times; so that, in each case, if the father himself did not teach the son, the father’s friend and townsman, the schoolmaster, did it, as for instance:—From my father’s own lips I received the rudiments of general history, and of literary history, so that in my boyhood I came to be familiar with all the principal names of public men and authors, up from that time to times indefinitely remote. This process of paternal instruction carries me up to the last decade of the eighteenth century: say, to the time of the breaking out of the French Revolution. But then, my father had received, either from his father, or from his father’s proxy, the schoolmaster, a like kind and amount of general information, by means of which we are carried up, without a break, to the times of Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, Sir Joshua Reynolds; and in fact my father distinctly remembers, when a boy, seeing, and being in company with, some of these illustrious men, the friends of my grandfather. Then he had received—we will suppose—a similar initiation in literary and political history, and if so, then we are furnished with stepping-stones up to the times of Bentley, Pope, Swift, Addison, Watts, and although this last name would seem to stand beyond the limit of any immediate recollections, yet it is a fact that the “Divine Songs” have come to me by means of a single intervening person—from one who, as a favoured little girl, learned them, standing at the amiable doctor’s knee. Thus it is that we travel safely, and with a distinct cognisance of the way, through more than a century of literary conveyance. At this rate, and if we may take this last preceding period of time as our gauge of centuries past, then we shall require the aid of only eight or nine persons, in series, to bring us into correspondence with Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. Fewer than this—we might take six long-lived men to put us into this position of proximity with the worthies of the Elizabethan era.
In making good our supposition, it is not necessary to assume the fact (which we can seldom certainly know) that there has been, in any one family, a continuous succession of fathers and sons—the father living long enough to instruct the son. We should rather take the case of the intellectual filiation of college life: we imagine the learned professor, during the last ten years of his official life, imparting his mental substance to a hundred or two of scholars, some two or three of whom, at least, will live to do the like, from the same chair, in behalf of their successors. On this ground the individual teachers need not be more than twelve, upon whose oral testimony, in succession, we rely in passing from an age of generally diffused intelligence, to the times of the revival of learning, and of printed books.
It will be remembered that—if indeed there were grounds of doubt concerning the safe transmission of ancient books to modern times, any such suspicions can attach only to the period that is usually designated as the “Dark Ages,” and these need not be reckoned as more than seven, reaching back from the times of Dante, Petrarch, Chaucer, Wickliffe, to the pontificate of Gregory the Great, in whose times, as appears from his writings, the learning of the preceding ages was still familiarly known to more than a few.
The Sixth Century of the Christian era abounds with the names of writers in all departments of literature, many of whose works, having descended to modern times, present ample evidence of the scarcely diminished diffusion of general learning. Among many others, such were—Procopius, the historian of the reign of Justinian—and Agathias, who continued that history, and was a learned man;—Boethius, author of what is regarded as the last specimen of pure Latinity—a poem on “the Consolations of Philosophy;”—Hesychius, the lexicographer—Proclus, a platonic philosopher;—Fulgentius, and Cassiodorus, ecclesiastical writers;—Priscianus, a grammarian;—Gildas the wise, an Anglo-Saxon historian;—Evagrius Scholasticus, an ecclesiastical historian;—Simplicius, the commentator upon Aristotle and Epictetus;—Marcellinus Ammianus, an historian and critic, whose works contain copious references to ancient literature; and Stephen, of Byzantium, a grammarian and geographer. We might take in hand the work of this last-named writer—ΠΕΡΙ ΠΟΛΕΩΝ, as furnishing, by itself, a sufficient mass of evidence in proof of the extensive book-learning of those times which immediately overlook the gulf—the dark ages. This Stephen, the geographer, in the course of his account of the cities and towns of the ancient world, cites, or makes some reference to, the works of more than three hundred authors, to which he had access at any moment, while compiling his own.