Historical and Political Essays | Page 7

too hard and unsympathising; till the corruption and despotism of the Empire had withdrawn the best men from political life and attached a certain taint or stigma to public employment; till new religions arose in the East, bringing with them new ideals to govern the world. Gradually we may trace the contemplative virtues rising to the foremost place until, about the fifth century, the ideal had totally changed. The heroic type was replaced by the saintly type. The supremely good man was now the ascetic. The first condition of sanctity was a complete abandonment of secular duties and cares and a complete subjugation of the body. A vast literature of legends arose reflecting and glorifying the prevailing ideal and holding up the hermit life as the supreme pattern of perfection, and this literature occupies a place in medi?valism very similar to that held by the 'Lives' of Plutarch in antiquity.
Ancient art was essentially the glorification of the body, a representation of the full strength and beauty of developed manhood. The saint of the medi?val mosaic represents the body in its extreme maceration and humiliation. The rhetorician, Dio Chrysostom, in a somewhat whimsical passage, which was suggested by a remark of Plato, found a special moral significance in the fact that Homer, though he places his heroes on the the banks of what he calls 'the fishy Hellespont,' never makes them eat fish, but always flesh and the flesh of oxen, for this, as he says, is 'strength-producing food' and is therefore suited for the formation of heroes and the proper diet for men of virtue. Compare this judgment with the protracted, and indeed incredible, fasts which the monkish writers delighted in attributing to the saints of the desert, and we have a vivid picture of the change that had passed over the ideal.
But as time moved on the ascetic ideal gradually declined and was replaced by the very different ideal of chivalry. It consisted chiefly of three new elements. The first element was a spirit of gallantry which gave women a wholly new place in the imaginations of men. It was in part a reaction against the extreme austerity of the saints, and this reaction was much intensified after the cessation of the panic which had risen at the close of the tenth century about the approaching end of the world. It was in part produced by the softer and more epicurean civilisation which grew up in the country bordering on the Pyrenees. It was especially represented in the romances and poems of the Troubadours, and the new tendency even received some assistance from the Church when the Council of Clermont, which originated the Crusades, imposed on the knight the religious obligation of defending all widows and orphans.
The second element was an increased reverence for secular rank, which grew out of the feudal system, when a great hereditary aristocracy arose and all European society was moulded into a compact hierarchy, of which the serf was the basis and the emperor the apex. The principle of subordination and obedience ran through the whole edifice, and a respect for rank was universally diffused. Men came to associate their ideal of greatness with regal or noble authority, and they were therefore prepared to idealise any great sovereign who might arise. Such a sovereign appeared in Charlemagne, who exercised upon Christendom a fascination not less powerful than that which Alexander had once exercised upon Greece, and he accordingly soon became the centre of a whole literature of romance.
The third element was the fusion of religious enthusiasm with the military spirit. Christianity in its first phases was utterly opposed to the military spirit; but this opposition was naturally mitigated when the Church triumphed under Constantine and became associated with governments and armies. The hostility was still further qualified when many tribes of warlike barbarians embraced the faith, and the military obligation which was an essential element of feudalism acted in the same direction. But, above all, the rise and conquests of Mohammedanism awoke the military energies of Christendom and determined the direction it should take. In the Crusades the two great streams of military enthusiasm and of religious enthusiasm met, and the result was the formation of a new ideal which for a long period mainly governed the imagination of Christendom.
It for a time absorbed, eclipsed, and transformed all purely national ideals. No poet was ever more intensely English in his character and sympathies than Chaucer, and he wrote when the dazzling glories of Crécy and Poitiers were still very recent. Yet it is not on these fields, but in the long wars with the Moslems, that his pattern knight had won his renown. The military expeditions of Charlemagne were directed almost exclusively against the Saxons and against Slavonic tribes. With the Spanish Mohammedans he