It is hardly necessary to add that in this he shines all the more brightly when compared with his great detractor. Roger Bacon, secure in the consciousness of his commanding abilities, attacks with a rare self-confidence, not Michael Scot alone, but all the scholars of his time. Not four of them, he says, know Hebrew, Greek, and Arabic.[192] Those who pretend to translate from these tongues are ignorant even of Latin, not to speak of the sciences treated of in the books which they pretend to render intelligible. Busy in penning these diatribes, Bacon does not seem to have reflected that the best way of reproving the imperfections of which he complained would have been to shame these scholars to some purpose by producing better versions on his own account. But the truth of the matter lies here, that Bacon was no linguist. This appears plainly from the tale he tells against himself in the Compendium Studii; how a hard word in Aristotle had baffled him till one day there came some outlandish students to hear him lecture, who laughed at his perplexity, telling him it was good Spanish for the plant called Henbane.[193] ‘Hinc illae lachrymae’ then, and a plague on Michael Scot and all his tribe, who know Spanish so well they will not put a plain Latin word for the puzzled professor to understand. No wonder that to Scot rather than to Bacon, for all his genius, that age owed the chief part of the first translation of Aristotle and a good beginning of the second.
CHAPTER VII
SCOT AGAIN AT COURT
The return of Michael Scot from Spain to the Imperial Court was doubtless a striking moment, not only in the life of the philosopher himself, but in the history of letters. He then appeared fresh from a great enterprise, and bringing with him the proofs of its success in the form of the Latin Averroës. We cannot doubt that his reception was worthy of the occasion and of one who had served his master so faithfully.
Frederick was now returned to his dominions in the south. He had established his imperial rights in Germany at the cost of a campaign in which the pretensions of Otho were successfully overcome, and, on his return homeward in 1220, he had received the crown once more in Rome at the hands of the supreme ecclesiastical authority. His progress was indeed a continual scene of triumph. Arrived at Palermo, the court gave itself up to feasting and gaiety of every kind.
Two ancient romantic authorities[194] choose with dramatic instinct this moment, and these gay and voluptuous surroundings, as the mise en scène amid which they show us Scot again appearing to resume the place he had quitted more than ten years before. It is quite possible that there may be a measure of historic truth here, as well as the art which can seize or create an occasion, and which loves to contrast the triumph of arms with the more peaceful honours of literary fame. Frederick, we must remember, in a sort represented both. He was Maecenas as well as Caesar. In welcoming Michael Scot and doing him honour at these imperial banquets he was but crowning the success of an enterprise in which his own name and interest were deeply engaged.
Traces of the impression made by this highly significant incident have been preserved in the arts of poetry and painting as well as in that of prose romance. Dante, who wrote his Divine Comedy less than a century later than the time of Scot, has given the philosopher a place in his poem, describing him as:
‘Quell’altro, che ne’ fianchi è così poco,
Michele Scotto fu.’[195]