The banning of all literature you will find harder to understand; nay impossible, I believe, unless you accept the explanation I gave you. Yet there it is, an historical fact. “What hath it profited posterity—quid posteritas emolumenti tulit,” wrote Sulpicius Severus, about 400 AD, “to read of Hector’s fighting or Socrates’ philosophising?” Pope Gregory the Great—St. Gregory, who sent us the Roman missionaries—made no bones about it at all. “Quoniam non cognovi literaturam,” he quoted approvingly from the 70th Psalm, “introibo in potentias Domini”: “Because I know nothing of literature I shall enter into the strength of the Lord.” “The praises of Christ cannot be uttered in the same tongue as those of Jove,” writes this same Gregory to Desiderius, Archbishop of Vienne, who had been rash enough to introduce some of his young men to the ancient authors, with no worse purpose than to teach them a little grammar. Yet no one was prouder than this Pope of the historical Rome which he had inherited. Alcuin, again, forbade the reading of Virgil in the monastery over which he presided: it would sully his disciples’ imagination. “How is this, Virgilian!” he cried out upon one taken in the damnable act—“that without my knowledge and against my order thou hast taken to studying Virgil?” To put a stop to this unhallowed indulgence the clergy solemnly taught that Virgil was a wizard.
To us, long used as we are to the innocent gaieties of the Classical Tripos, these measures to discourage the study of Virgil may appear drastic, as the mental attitude of Gregory and Alcuin towards the Latin hexameter (so closely resembling that of Byron towards the waltz) not far removed from foolishness. But there you have in its quiddity the medieval mind: and the point I now put to you is, that out of this soil our Universities grew.
We, who claim Oxford and Cambridge for our nursing mothers, have of all men least excuse to forget it. A man of Leyden, of Louvain, of Liepzig, of Berlin, may be pardoned that he passes it by. More than a hundred years ago Salamanca had the most of her stones torn down to make defences against Wellington’s cannon. Paris, greatest of all, has kept her renown; but you shall search the slums of the Latin Quarter in vain for the sixty or seventy Colleges that, before the close of the fifteenth century, had arisen to adorn her, the intellectual Queen of Europe. In Bologna, the ancient and stately, almost alone among the continental Universities, survive a few relics of the old collegiate system—the College of Spain, harbouring some five or six students, and a little house founded for Flemings in 1650: and in Bologna the system never attained to real importance.
But in England where, great as London is, the national mind has always harked to the country for the graces of life, so that we seem by instinct to see it as only desirable in a green setting, our Universities, planted by the same instinct on lawns watered by pastoral streams, have suffered so little and received as much from the years that now we can hardly conceive of Oxford or Cambridge as ruined save by “the unimaginable touch of Time.” Of all the secular Colleges bequeathed to Oxford, she has lost not one; while Cambridge (I believe) has parted only with Cavendish. Some have been subsumed into newer foundations; but always the process has been one of merging, of blending, of justifying the new bottle by the old wine. The vengeance of civil war—always very much of a family affair in England—has dealt tenderly with Oxford and Cambridge; the more calculating malignity of Royal Commissions not harshly on the whole. University reformers may accuse both Oxford and Cambridge of
Annihilating all that’s made
To a green thought in a green shade:
but with those sour men we have nothing here to do: like Isaak Walton’s milkmaid we will not “load our minds with any fears of many things that will never be.”
But, as they stand, Oxford and Cambridge—so amazingly alike while they play at differences, and both so amazingly unlike anything else in the wide world—do by a hundred daily reminders connect us with the Middle Age, or, if you prefer Arnold’s phrase, whisper its lost enchantments. The cloister, the grave grace in hall, the chapel bell, the men hurrying into their surplices or to lectures “with the wind in their gowns,” the staircase, the nest of chambers within the oak—all these softly reverberate over our life here, as from belfries, the medieval mind.
And that medieval mind actively hated (of partial acquaintance or by anticipation) almost everything we now study! Between it and us, except
