The Universities, then, sprang out of medieval life, out of the medieval mind; and the medieval mind had for centuries been taught to abominate literature. I would not exaggerate or darken the Dark Ages for you by throwing too much bitumen into the picture. I know that at the beginning there had been a school of Origen which advocated the study of Greek poetry and philosophy, as well as the school of Tertullian which condemned it. There is evidence that the “humanities” were cultivated here and there and after a fashion behind Gregory’s august back. I grant that, while in Alcuin’s cloister (and Alcuin, remember, became a sort of Imperial Director of Studies in Charlemagne’s court) the wretched monk who loved Virgil had to study him with an illicit candle, to copy him with numbed fingers in a corner of the bitter-cold cloister, on the other hand many beautiful manuscripts preserved to us bear witness of cloisters where literature was tolerated if not officially honoured. I would not have you so uncritical as to blame the Church or its clergy for what happened; as I would have you remember that if the Church killed literature, she—and, one may say, she alone—kept it alive.
Yet, and after all these reservations, it remains true that Literature had gone down disastrously. Even philosophy, unless you count the pale work of Boethius—real philosophy had so nearly perished that men possessed no more of Aristotle than a fragment of his Logic, and “the Philosopher” had to creep back into Western Europe through translations from the Arabic! But this is the point I wish to make clear.—Philosophy came back in the great intellectual revival of the twelfth century; Literature did not. Literature’s hour had not come. Men had to catch up on a dreadful leeway of ignorance. The form did not matter as yet: they wanted science—to know. I should say, rather, that as yet form seemed not to matter: for in fact form always matters: the personal always matters: and you cannot explain the vast crowds Abelard drew to Paris save by the fascination in the man, the fire communicated by the living voice. Moreover (as in a previous lecture I tried to prove) you cannot divorce accurate thought from accurate speech; but for accuracy, even for hairsplitting accuracy, of speech the Universities had the definitions of the Schoolmen. In literature they had yet to discover a concern. Literature was a thing of the past, inanimate. Nowhere in Europe could it be felt even to breathe. To borrow a beautiful phrase of Wordsworth’s, men numbered it among “things silently gone out of mind or things violently destroyed.”
Nobody quite knows how these Universities began. Least of all can anybody tell how Oxford and Cambridge began. In Bede, for instance—that is, in England as the eighth century opens—we see scholarship already moving towards the thing, treading with sure instinct towards the light. Though a hundred historians have quoted it, I doubt if a feeling man who loves scholarship can read the famous letter of Cuthbert describing Bede’s end and not come nigh to tears.
And Bede’s story contains no less wonder than beauty, when you consider how the fame of this holy and humble man of heart, who never left his cloisters at Jarrow, spread over Europe, so that, though it sound incredible, our Northumbria narrowly missed in its day to become the polestar of Western culture. But he was a disinterested genius, and his pupil, Alcuin, a pushing dull man and a born reactionary; so that, while Alcuin scored the personal success and went off to teach in the court of Charlemagne, the great chance was lost.
No one knows when the great Universities were founded, or precisely out of what schools they grew; and you may derive amusement from the historians when they start to explain how Oxford and Cambridge in particular came to be chosen for sites. My own conjecture, that they were chosen for the extraordinary salubrity of their climates, has met (I regret to say) with derision, and may be set down to the caprice of one who ever inclines to think the weather good where he is happy. Our own learned historian, indeed—Mr. J. Bass Mullinger—devotes some closely reasoned pages to proving that Cambridge was chosen as the unlikeliest spot in the world, and is driven to quote the learned Poggio’s opinion that the unhealthiness of a locality recommended it as a place of education for youth; as Plato, knowing naught of Christianity, but gifted with a soul naturally Christian, “had selected a noisome spot for his Academe, in order that the mind might be strengthened by the weakness of the body.” So difficult still it is for the modern mind to interpret the medieval!
Most likely these Universities grew as a tree grows from a seed blown by chance of the wind. It seems easy enough to understand why Paris, that great city, should have possessed a great University; yet I surmise the processes at Oxford and Cambridge to have been only a little less fortuitous. The schools of Remigius and of William of Champeaux (we will say) have given Paris a certain prestige, when Abelard, a pupil of William’s, springs into fame and draws a horde of students from all over Europe to sit at his feet. These “nations” of young men have to be organised, brought under some sort of discipline, if only to make the citizens’ lives endurable: and lo! the thing is done. In like manner Irnerius at Bologna, Vacarius at Oxford, and at Cambridge some innominate teacher, “of importance,” as Browning would put it, “in his day,” possibly set the ball rolling; or again it is suggested that a body of scholars dissatisfied with Oxford (such dissatisfaction has been known
