th
century! Then somebody called the attention of the Church to the
unmistakable fact that Amicus and Amelius were merely inventions of some
mediaeval romancer. Then the Church made investigation, and greatly
shocked, withdrew from the list of its saints those long-loved names of
Amicus and Amelius--a reform in which I cannot help thinking the Church
made a very serious mistake. What matter whether those shadowy figures
represented original human lives or only human dreams? They were
beautiful, and belief in them made men think beautiful thoughts, and the
imagined help from them had comforted many thousands of hearts. It would
have been better to have left them alone; for that matter, how many of the
existent lives of saints are really true? Nevertheless the friends are not
dead, though expelled from the heaven of the Church. They still live in
romance; and everybody who reads about them feels a little better for
their acquaintance.

What I read to you was from the French version--that is much the more
beautiful of the two. You will find some extracts from the English version
in the pages of Ten Brink. But as that great German scholar pointed out,
the English story is much rougher than the French. For example, in the
English story, the knight rushes out of his castle to beat the leper at
the gate, and to accuse him of having stolen the cup. And he does beat him
ferociously, and abuses him with very violent terms. In fact, the English
writer reflected too much of mediaeval English character, in trying to
cover, or to improve upon, the French story, which was the first. In the
French story all is knightly smooth, refined as well as simple and strong.
And where did the mediaeval imagination get its material for the story?
Partly, perhaps, from the story of Joseph in the Bible, partly from the
story of Abraham; but the scriptural material is so admirably worked over
that the whole thing appears deliciously original. That was the great art
of the Middle Ages--to make old, old things quite new by the magic of
spiritual imagination. Men then lived in a world of dreams. And that world
still attracts us, for the simple reason that happiness chiefly consists
in dreams. Exact science may help us a great deal no doubt, but
mathematics do not make us any happier. Dreams do, if we can believe them.
The Middle Ages could believe them; we, at the best, can only try.

CHAPTER XIV

"IONICA"

I am going now to talk about a ver