The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory | Page 5

their finished
literature; it supplied their vocabulary; it furnished models for all their
first conscious literary efforts of the more deliberate kind, and it
conditioned those which were more or less spontaneous.
But, even if we had room, it would profit us little to busy ourselves
with diplomatic Latin or with the Latin of chronicles, with the Latin of
such scientific treatises as were written or with the Latin of theology.
All these except, for obvious reasons, the first, tended away from Latin
into the vernaculars as time went on, and were but of lesser literary
moment, even while they continued to be written in Latin. Nor in belles
lettres proper were such serious performances as continued to be

written well into our period of capital importance. Such a book, for
instance, as the well-known Trojan War of Joseph of Exeter,[2] though
it really deserves much of the praise which it used to receive,[3] can
never be anything much better than a large prize poem, such as those
which still receive and sometimes deserve the medals and the
gift-books of schools and universities. Every now and then a man of
irrepressible literary talent, having no vernacular or no public in the
vernacular ready to his hand, will write in Latin a book like the De
Nugis Curialium,[4] which is good literature though bad Latin. But on
the whole it is a fatal law of such things that the better the Latin the
worse must the literature be.
[Footnote 2: Included with Dictys and Dares in a volume of Valpy's
Delphin Classics.]
[Footnote 3: Cf. Warton, History of English Poetry. Ed. Hazlitt, i.
226-292.]
[Footnote 4: Gualteri Mapes, De Nugis Curialium Distinctiones
Quinque. Ed. T. Wright: Camden Society, 1850.]
[Sidenote: Excepted divisions.]
We may, however, with advantage select three divisions of the Latin
literature of our section of the Middle Ages, which have in all cases no
small literary importance and interest, and in some not a little literary
achievement. And these are the comic and burlesque Latin writings,
especially in verse; the Hymns; and the great body of philosophical
writing which goes by the general title of Scholastic Philosophy, and
which was at its palmiest time in the later portion of our own special
period.
[Sidenote: Comic Latin literature.]
It may not be absolutely obvious, but it does not require much thought
to discover, why the comic and burlesque Latin writing, especially in
verse, of the earlier Middle Ages holds such a position. But if we
compare such things as the Carmina Burana, or as the Goliardic poems

attributed to or connected with Walter Map,[5] with the early fabliaux,
we shall perceive that while the latter, excellently written as they
sometimes are, depend for their comedy chiefly on matter and incident,
not indulging much in play on words or subtle adjustment of phrase and
cadence, the reverse is the case with the former. A language must have
reached some considerable pitch of development, must have been used
for a great length of time seriously, and on a large variety of serious
subjects, before it is possible for anything short of supreme genius to
use it well for comic purposes. Much indeed of this comic use turns on
the existence and degradation of recognised serious writing. There was
little or no opportunity for any such use or misuse in the infant
vernaculars; there was abundant opportunity in literary Latin.
Accordingly we find, and should expect to find, very early parodies of
the offices and documents of the Church,--things not unnaturally
shocking to piety, but not perhaps to be justly set down to any profane,
much less to any specifically blasphemous, intention. When the quarrel
arose between Reformers and "Papists," intentional ribaldry no doubt
began. But such a thing as, for example, the "Missa de Potatoribus"[6]
is much more significant of an unquestioning familiarity than of
deliberate insult. It is an instance of the same bent of the human mind
which has made very learned and conscientious lawyers burlesque law,
and which induces schoolboys and undergraduates to parody the
classics, not at all because they hate them, but because they are their
most familiar literature.
[Footnote 5: Carmina Burana, Stuttgart, 1847; Political Songs of
England (1839), and Latin Poems attributed to Walter Mapes (1841),
both edited for the Camden Society by T. Wright.]
[Footnote 6: Wright and Halliwell's Reliquiæ Antiquæ (London, 1845),
ii. 208.]
At the same time this comic degradation, as may be seen in its earliest
and perhaps its greatest practitioner Aristophanes--no bad citizen or
innovating misbeliever--leads naturally to elaborate and ingenious
exercises in style, to a thorough familiarity with the capacities of
language, metre, rhyme. And expertness in all these things, acquired in

the Latin, was certain sooner or later to be transferred to the vernacular.
No one can read the Latin