Honour to the Pedants
ON the west front of Chartres Cathedral, amongst innumerable other figures, you will find seven scrubby, resolute little men, crouching over writing desks, each of them with his pen-rack attached to the cell-wall suggested by the panel in which he is placed, If the sculptor had known how to represent ink-stains in bas relief he would, you feel, have done so. As compared with kings and queens, prophets, martyrs, saints and angels, shepherds of Bethlehem and the Three Wise Men, they make an unromantic impression. Your guide book will tell you that they represent Aristotle and Cicero, Euclid and Boethius, Ptolemy, Donatus and Pythagoras—the masters of the seven elements of mediaeval education, Dialectic, Rhetoric, Geo- metry, Arithmetic, Astronomy, Grammar and Music. With a pity- ing thought for the eternal schoolmaster and pedant you pass on.
Dr. Curtius has bestowed his patience and learning and unquench- able.joy in discovery on bringing to life the medieval schoolmasters and pedants typified by these seven sages, on showing that, without them, our cultural tradition would be an infinitely poorer thing, and that what we still recognise and appreciate as the great achievements of the middle ages would have been impossible. His book might indeed be described as the apology of pedants by a pedant—if we use the term in the light of his own defence of his medimval pre- decessors. Nowhere, surely, has the cloister-bred belief in the potentialities of sheer book-digging been maintained so keenly as in Germany. It has led to some of the greatest German follies, but Dr. Curtius himself is there to prove that it can, as he claims, be a source of light and life. He has his large share of the mannerisms of the German gelehrte, the love of learned nomenclature and the almost intolerable (though so praiseworthy) enthusiasm for reading dull works in the hope of finding faint scraps of enlightenment. But he does find the enlightenment and he never loses his sense of poetry and of the creative. His own record is significant. He first dis- tinguished himself after the 1914-18 war by his studies of contem- porary French literature, facilitating the understanding by his countrymen of Proust and Gide and Valery and younger men. He extended his attention to modern English and American literature. He was one of the most distinguished of the scholarly critics trying to maintain the tradition of a single interrelated European culture. It was when the modern forms of that culture were threatened in his own country by Nazi barbarism that he decided his contribution to its maintenance should be the study of the least known of the links between Greek civilisation and our own. In his own person he has used pedantry as a glorious means of defying barbarism and keeping civilisation alive.
Dr. Curtius argues with force and much learning that the Latin tradition of the middle ages has been considered too much as a succession of authors and too little as a slowly evolving intellectual training. It does not follow, he points out, that Dante is familiar with any given earlier author because he uses a phrase which seems to echo one in the latter's work, for both had been trained in the same schools of grammar and rhetoric. There was a time when 'common place' was no derogatory expression, but the technical name for images and turns of speech taught in school so as to enable anY educated man to express himself. There is a tendency to suppose that the flashes of light produced by contacts between the great minds of antiquity and those of the middle ages are due to the occasional escape of the land from the encumbrances of scholastic tradition, when in fact it was that tradition which made possible the contact : the complete change in environment, the profoundly-felt difficulty in combining Christian and pagan elements—even to the extent of conscience-qualms about appeals to the muses—made the perpetuation of the tradition, the mere maintenance of contact, an Herculean task.
It was Dr. Curtius points out, in France, the country where the medieval Latin 'literary tradition was most intensively cultivated, that European literature in the vulgar tongue really begins in the eleventh century. Italian Latin scholars had given pre-eminence to jurisprudence and medicine apart from theology and Italian liter- ature is therefore slow in starting. There were, of course, earlier literatures in the vulgar tongue—Anglo-Saxon, cut short by political causes, Celtic and, isolated in the North, kelandic. Both the first flourished against a background of intense monastic Latin culture which in turn revived the Latin culture of the continent. Undoubtedly, however, the French vernacular literature of the twelfth century influenced all later ones to such an extent that we would find it hard to imagine them without it. The earlier Celtic literature would Probably have never made its enormous contribution—how big, Monsieur Jean Marx has recently made clear—if it had not passed through the medium of medixval French romance. But the rela- tively late flowering of Italian and Spanish vernacular literatures—
or that matter of English—was not, as Dr. Curtius is careful to Point out, necessarily a drawback. Dante is there to prove it, Dante with whom creation once more triumphs over conservation and hesitation. But could Dante's genius ever have flowered, or Shakespeare's, or Goethe's, without the long dusty labours of the ink-stained little men on the façade of Chartres Cathedral? Honour to the pedants! Honour to Dr. Curtius!
Mr. Trask's translation is itself a fine example of scholarship and very readable.
I). R. GILLIE
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