Constitutional History.
634
[chap.
General ence to a deadly disease. All else is languishing : literature
literature has reached the lowest depths of dulness ; religion, so far as its
and religion. ,
chief results are traceable, has sunk, on the one hand into a
dogma fenced about with walls which its defenders cannot pass
either inward or outward, on the other hand into a mere war-
cry of the cause of destruction. Between the two lies a narrow
borderland of pious and cultivated mysticism, far too fastidious
to do much for the world around. Yet here, as everywhere
else, the dawn is approaching. Here, as everywhere else, the
evil is destroying itself, and the remaining good, lying deep
clown and having yet to wait long before it reaches the surface,
is already striving toward the sunlight that is to come. The
good is to come out of the evil ; the evil is to compel its own
remedy ; the good does not spring from it, but is drawn up
through it. In the history of nations, as of men, every good
and perfect gift is from above ; the new life strikes down in the
old root ; there is no generation from corruption.
Charm of 499. So we turn our back on the age of chivalry, of ideal
medieval , . 1
history. heroism, of picturesque castles and. glorious churches and
pageants, camps, and tournaments, lovely charity and. gallant
self-sacrifice, with their dark shadows of dynastic faction, bloody
conquest, grievous misgovernance, local tyrannies, plagues and
famines unhelped and unaverted, hollowness of pomp, disease
and dissolution. The charm which the relics of medieval art
have woven around the later middle ages must be resolutely,
Featnresof ruthlessly, broken. The attenuated life of the later middle
a gradual . .
transition, ages is in thorough discrepancy with the grand conceptions of
the earlier times. The thread of national life is not to he
broken, but the earlier strands are to be sought out and bound
together and strengthened with threefold union for the new
work. But it will be a work of time ; the forces newly
liberated by the shock of the Reformation will not at once
cast off the foulness of the strata through which they have
passed before they reached the higher air ; much will be
destroyed that might well have been conserved, and some new
growths will be encouraged that ought to have been checked.
In the new world, as in the old, the tares are mingled with the
XXi.] Age of Transilion. 635
wheat. In the destruction and in the growth alike will be seen
the great features of difference between the old and the new.
The printing press is an apt emblem or embodiment of the π⅛sir∏tio∏
change. Hitherto men have spent their labour on a few books, printing
t ɪ press.
written by the few for the few, with elaborately chosen
material, in consummately beautiful penmanship, painted and
emblazoned as if each one were a distinct labour of love, each
manuscript unique, precious, the result of most careful indi-
vidual training, and destined for the complete enjoyment of
a reader educated up to the point at which he can appreciate
its beauty. Henceforth books are to be common things. For
a time the sanctity of the older forms will hang about the
printing press; the magnificent volumes of Fust and Colard
Mansion will still recall the beauty of the manuscript, and art
will lavish its treasures on the embellishment of the libraries of
the great. Before long printing will be cheap, and the unique
or special beauty of the early presses will have departed ; but
light will have come into every house, and that which was the
luxury of the few will have become the indispensable requisite
of every family.
With the multiplication of books comes the rapid extension ∏tastratfon
ɪ # ∙l from Iitera-
and awakening of mental activity. As it is with the form so ture.
with the matter. The men of the decadence, not less than the
men of the renaissance, were giants of learning : they read and
assimilated the contents of every known book ; down to the
very close of the era the able theologian would press into the
service of his commentary or his summa every preceding com- Transition
mentary or summa with gigantic labour, and with an acuteness
which, notwithstanding that it was ill-trained and misdirected,
is in the eyes of the desultory reader of modern times little less
than miraculous : the books were rare, but the accomplished
scholar had worked through them all. Outside his little world
all was comparatively dark. Here too the change was coming.
Scholarship was to take a new form ; intensity of critical
power, devoted to that which was worth criticising, was to
be substituted as the characteristic of a learned man for the
indiscriminating voracity of the earlier learning. The multi-