e now study! Between it and us, except
these memorials, nothing survives to-day but the dreadful temptation to
learn, the dreadful instinct in men, as they grow older and wiser, to
trust learning after all and endow it--that, and the confidence of a
steady stream of youth.

The Universities, then, sprang out of mediaeval life, out of the
mediaeval mind; and the mediaeval 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 cann