Romance | Page 4

are nearest to the centre
of rest. Wit and sense, which are raised by one age into the very
essentials of good poetry, are denied the name of poetry by the next;
sentiment, the virtue of one age, is the exploded vice of another; and
Romance comes in and goes out with secular regularity.
The meaning of Romance will never come home to him who seeks for
it in modern controversies. The name Romance is itself a memorial of
the conquest of Europe by the Romans. They imposed their language
on half Europe, and profoundly influenced the other half. The
dialectical, provincial Latin, of various kinds, spoken by the conquered
peoples, became the Romance speech; and Romance literature was the
new literature which grew up among these peoples from the ninth
century onwards,--or from an earlier time, if the fringe of Celtic
peoples, who kept their language but felt the full influence of
Christianity, be taken into the account. The chief thing to be noted
concerning Romance literature is that it was a Christian literature,
finding its background and inspiration in the ideas to which the
Christian Church gave currency. While Rome spread her conquests
over Europe, at the very heart of her empire Christianity took root, and
by slow process transformed that empire. During the Middle Ages the
Bishops of Rome sat in the seat of the Roman Emperors. This startling
change possessed Gibbon's imagination, and is the theme of his great
work. But the whole of Gibbon's history was anticipated and condensed
by Hobbes in a single sentence--"If a man considers the original of this
great ecclesiastical dominion, he will easily perceive that the Papacy is
no other than the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned
upon the grave thereof. For so did the Papacy start up on a sudden out
of the ruins of that heathen power."
Here, then, is the answer to a question which at once suggests itself.
How do we get this famous opposition between the older Latin
literature and the literature of those countries which had inherited or
accepted the Latin tradition? Why did not the Romans hand over their
literature and teach it, as they handed over and taught their law? They
did teach it in their schools; grammar and rhetoric, two of the chief

subjects of a liberal education, were purely literary studies, based on
the work of the literary masters of Rome. Never was there an education
so completely literary as the organized education of Rome and of her
provinces. How came it that there was any breach between the old and
the new?
A question of this kind, involving centuries of history, does not admit
of a perfectly simple answer. It may be very reasonably maintained that
in Rome education killed literature. A carefully organized, universal
system of education, which takes for its material the work of great
poets and orators, is certain to breed a whole army of slaves. The
teachers, employed by the machine to expound ideas not their own,
soon erect systems of pedantic dogma, under which the living part of
literature is buried. The experience of ancient Rome is being repeated
in the England of to-day. The officials responsible for education,
whatever they may uneasily pretend, are forced by the necessities of
their work to encourage uniformity, and national education becomes a
warehouse of second-hand goods, presided over by men who cheerfully
explain the mind of Burke or of Shakespeare, adjusting the place of
each, and balancing faults against merits. But Roman education
throughout the Empire had further difficulties to encounter. To
understand these it must be remembered what Latin literature was. The
Latins, when we first discern them in the dim light of the past, were a
small, strenuous, political people, with a passion for government and
war. They first subdued Italy, and no very serious culture-problem
resulted from that conquest. The Etruscans certainly contributed much
to Latin civilization, but their separate history is lost. No one knows
what the Etruscans thought. The Romans do not seem to have cared.
They welded Italy together, and thereafter came into contact with the
older, richer civilizations of the Mediterranean shores. The chief of
these, in its influence, was the Greek civilization, as it had developed in
that famous group of free city states, fostered by the sun and air, and
addicted to life. In Athens, at the time of her glory, life was not a habit,
but an experiment. Even the conservative Romans were infected. They
fell under the sway of Greek thought. When a practical man of business
becomes intimate with an artist, he is never the same man again. The
thought of that disinterested mode of life haunts his dreams. So Rome,

though she had paid little regard to the other ancient peoples with