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CHAPTER I.




This series is intended to survey and illustrate the development of
the vernacular literatures of mediæval and Europe; and for that
purpose it is unnecessary to busy ourselves with more than a part of
the Latin writing which, in a steadily decreasing but--until the end
of the last century--an always considerable proportion, served as the
vehicle of literary expression. But with a part of it we are as
necessarily concerned as we are necessarily compelled to decline the
whole. For not only was Latin for centuries the universal means of
communication between educated men of different languages, the medium
through which such men received their education, the court-language,
so to speak, of religion, and the vehicle of all the literature of
knowledge which did not directly stoop to the comprehension of the
unlearned; but it was indirectly as well as directly, unconsciously as
well as consciously, a schoolmaster to bring the vernacular languages
to literary accomplishment. They could not have helped imitating it,
if they would; and they did not think of avoiding imitation of it, if
they could. It modified, to a very large extent, their grammar; it
influenced, to an extent almost impossible to overestimate, the
prosody of their finished literature; it supplied their vocabulary; it
furnished models for all their first conscious literary efforts of the
more deliberate kind, and it conditioned those which were more or less
spontaneous.

But, even if we had room, it would profit us little to busy ourselves
with diplomatic Latin or with the Latin of chronicles, with the Latin
of such scientific treatises as were written or with the Latin of
theology. All these except, for obvious reasons, the first, tended
away from Latin into the vernaculars as time went on, and were but of
lesser literary moment, even while they continued to be written in
Latin. Nor in _belles lettres_ proper were such serious performances
as continued to be written well into our period of capital
importance. Such a book, for instance, as the well-known _Trojan War_
of Joseph of Exeter,[2] though it really deserves much of the praise
which it used to receive,[3] can never be anything much better than a
large prize poem, such as those which still receive and sometimes
deserve the medals and the gift-books of schools and universities.
Every now and then a man of irrepressible literary talent, having no
vernacular or no public in the vernacular ready to his hand, will
write in Latin a book like the _De Nugis Curialium_,[4] which is good
literature though bad Latin. But on the whole it is a fatal law of
such things that the better the Latin the worse must the literature
be.
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