ir money in order
to be succeeded by others. Hence, in the matter of civilization, the
Middle Ages ended in an extraordinary slow ruin, a bankruptcy like that
which overtook France before '89, and from which, as France was restored
by the bold seizure and breaking up of property of the revolution, the
world was restored by the bold breaking of feudal and spiritual
mortmain, the restoring of wasted energies to utility, of that great
double revolution, the Renaissance and the Reformation. Be this as it
may, mankind throughout the Middle Ages appears to have been in a
chronic condition of packing up and unpacking, and packing up again; one
after another a nation, a race, a philosophy, a political system came to
the front and was pushed back again into limbo: Germans and Kelts and
Latins, French civilization of the day of Abelard, Provencal
civilization of the days of the Raymonds, brilliant and evanescent
Hohenstauffen supremacy, papacy at Canossa and at Avignon, Templars
triumphant and Templars persecuted; scholasticism, mysticism, feudalism,
democracy, communism: influences all these perpetually rising up and
being trodden down, till they all rotted away in the great stagnation of
the fifteenth century; and only in one part of the world, where the
conflict was more speedily ended, where one set of tendencies early
triumphed, where stability was temporarily obtained, in Italy alone did
civilization continue to be nurtured and developed for the benefit of
all mankind. In such a state of affairs only such things could flourish
and mature as were safe from what I have called, for want of a better
expression, the perpetual unpacking and repacking, the perpetual being
on the move, of the Middle Ages; and among such things foremost was art,
the essential art of the times, architecture, which, belonging to the
small towns, to the infinite minority of the democracy, who worked and
made money and let the great changes pass over their heads, thrived
almost as something too insignificant for notice. But it was different
with literature. Cathedrals once built cannot so easily be changed; new
peoples, new ideas, must accept them. But poetry--the thing which every
nation insists upon having to suit its own taste, the thing which every
nation and every generation carries about with it hither and thither,
the thing which can be altered to suit every passing whim--poetry was,
of all the fluctuating things of the Middle Ages, perhaps the mos