e present writer at
least has no doubt at all, while even those who deny this can hardly
deny the positive literary achievement of the best mediaeval hymns.
They stand by themselves. Latin--which, despite its constant
colloquial life, still even in the Middle Ages had in profane use many
of the drawbacks of a dead language, being either slipshod or
stiff,--here, owing to the millennium and more during which it had
been throughout Western Europe the living language and the sole living
language of the Church Universal, shakes off at once all artificial
and all doggerel character. It is thoroughly alive: it comes from the
writers' hearts as easily as from their pens. They have in the fullest
sense proved it; they know exactly what they can do, and in this
particular sphere there is hardly anything that they cannot do.

[Sidenote: _Scholastic Philosophy._]

The far-famed and almost more abused than famed Scholastic
Philosophy[11] cannot be said to have added to positive literature any
such masterpieces in prose as the hymn-writers (who were very commonly
themselves Scholastics) produced in verse. With the exception of
Abelard, whose interest is rather biographical than strictly literary,
and perhaps Anselm, the heroes of mediaeval dialectic, the Doctors
Subtle and Invincible, Irrefragable and Angelic, have left nothing
which even on the widest interpretation of pure literature can be
included within it, or even any names that figure in any but the
least select of literary histories. Yet they cannot but receive some
notice here in a history, however condensed, of the literature of the
period of their chief flourishing. This is not because of their
philosophical importance, although at last, after much bandying of not
always well-informed argument, that importance is pretty generally
allowed by the competent. It has, fortunately, ceased to be
fashionable to regard the dispute about Universals as proper only to
amuse childhood or beguile dotage, and the quarrels of Scotists and
Thomists as mere reductions of barren logomachy to the flatly absurd.
Still, this importance, though real, though great, is not directly
literary. The claim which makes it impossible to pass them over here
is that excellently put in the two passages from Condorcet and
Hamilton which John Stuart Mill (not often a scholastically minded
philosopher) set in the forefront of his _Logic_, that, in the
Scottish philosopher's words, "it is to the schoolmen th