THE DARK AGES. CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION. THE Dark Ages and the Middle Ages-or the Middle Age-used to be the same; two names for the same period. But they have come to be distinguished, and the Dark Ages are now no more than the first part of the Middle Age, while the term mediæval is often restricted to the later centuries, about 1100 to 1500, the age of chivalry, the time between the first Crusade and the Renaissance. This was not the old view, and it does not agree with the proper meaning of the name. The Middle Age, however lax the interpretation might be, distinctly meant at first the time between ancient and modern civilisation. It was a large comprehensive name that covered everything between Romulus Augustulus and the taking of Constantinople by the Turks, or between Claudian and the revival of Learning; it might include any A thing in past history that was too late to be classical and not yet modern. "The Monks finished what the Goths begun" is Pope's summary of the matter: and again in the Prologue to Thomson's tragedy of Sophonisba (1730)— "When Learning, after the long Gothic night, Fair o'er the Western world renew'd his light, Or, in other words, the darkness of the Dark Ages comes to an end about the time when Italian scholars reproduce the forms of classical poetry in their modern tongue. Trissino's Sophonisba, the first Italian tragedy in regular form, was an historical beacon marking the limit. Over the Gothic centuries the historian travels quickly till he comes to "at length Erasmus." It is all dark, and it is all "middle." The biographer of Dryden's friend, Mr Walter Moyle, expresses the common opinion: "From Ann. Dom. 440 to 1440 was a long but dark Period of Time, and he aimed only to preserve a Thread of the History of that Middle Age." Goldsmith was heretical and original in his Inquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning (1759) when he ended his chapter on the Obscure Ages much earlier, and began the new world of polite learning with Dante, "who first followed Nature, and was persecuted by the critics as long as he lived." Goldsmith also tried to correct the ordinary opinions about the want of learning in the Obscure Ages. "The most barbarous times had men of learning, if commentators, compilers, polemic divines, and intricate metaphysicians deserve the title." But Goldsmith does not recognise what has now come to be the commonplace arrangement among most historians, separating the Dark Ages from the "Mediæval Period properly so called," which is really improperly so called, by a rather violent wresting of the term "mediæval." The old division was much more logical, a consistent and definite refusal to see anything worth the attention of a scholar in the period between the fifth and the fifteenth century. All was "Gothic," all was "Dark"; "dans la cloaque des siècles caligineux et dans la sentine des nations apedeftes," as it is expressed with unusual levity by the poet Chapelain, in his most honourable defence of Lancelot and the old romances. This old reckoning of "the long night of the Middle Ages," which Goldsmith had begun to criticise, is preserved in full force by one modern historian, in terms that express a very distinct opinion, not merely a traditional commonplace: "The GræcoRoman world had descended into the great hollow which is roughly called the Middle Ages, extending from the fifth to the fifteenth century, a hollow in which many great, beautiful, and heroic things were done and created, but in which knowledge, as we understand it, and as Aristotle understood it, had no place. The revival of learning and the Renaissance are memorable as the first sturdy breasting by humanity of the hither slope of the great hollow which lies between us and the ancient world. The modern man, reformed and regenerated by knowledge, looks across it and recognises on the opposite ridge, in the far-shining cities and stately porticoes, in the art, politics, and science of antiquity, many more ties of kinship and sympathy than in the mighty concave between, wherein dwell his Christian ancestry, in the dim light of scholasticism and theology." But the Renaissance does not often nowadays speak with such conviction, and "mediæval" has generally lost its meaning of "dark." The change was really brought about by those very books of chivalry for which Chapelain, the correct epic poet, made so unexpected and so pleasant an apology. When Lancelot came back with Gawain "out of Faerie," when "Gothic". that is, mediæval art and literature revived in credit, and "the fictions of the Gothic romances were more or less restored to honour, then followed naturally a new division of history, throwing back the darkness, and redeeming the proper centuries of romance from the disrepute that had befallen them. The Crusades, cathedrals, tournaments, old coloured glass and other splendid, things, coming to be popularly known and appreciated, naturally determined the meaning of "Middle Ages" and "mediæval" so as to denote especially the centuries to which these matters belonged-that is to say, roughly, from 1100 to 1500. "Dark" ceased to be a popular term for times so interesting as those of Ivanhoe, of Notre Dame de Paris, of Tannhäuser: the change in the meaning of "Gothic" corresponds with this general change of 1 The Service of Man, by James Cotter Morison, 1887, p. 177. the popular historical conception: "Gothic," with all its offence withdrawn, was restricted to a type of architecture not older than the twelfth century: it used to be a common term of contempt for everything in art, manners, and literature before the return of Greek grammar to the West. The change of view may be defended as a sound and reasonable one. The date 1100 is an epoch, if there is anything to be called an epoch in the whole course of history, though "mediæval" may be a doubtful word for what began then. The Middle Age, regarded as an interval of confusion between two periods of more or less rational order, really ended at the close of the eleventh century. It was then that the wandering of the German nations was completed; out of the Teutonic anarchy came the unity of Christendom, consciously realised in the enterprise of the first Crusade. The establishment. of the Normans in England meant the end of the old roving business, however it might be kept up in remoter places here and there. Magnus of Norway, the last king of the old fashion, died in 1103: his son was Sigurd the Crusader. The Northern world. before 1100 was still in great part the world of the Germania, with its indomitable liberty, its protestant self-will; after 1100 Germania is harmonised in the new conception of Christendom. Tacitus gives the key to the earlier period; now, the interpreter is Dante in the De Monarchia. Or it might be said, using the words of Polybius when he foresaw the majesty of the Roman Empire, that in 1100 history |