THE SCHOOLS OF CHARLES THE GREAT.* IT is one of
the mysteries of our literature, that although no figure in modern European history has so fascinated the imagination as that of the Great Charles, no worthy biography of him, written in English, has yet appeared. Some of us may know that the late Mr. G. P. R. James wrote a life of Charlemagne, and most of us have read with pleasure De Quincey's admirable essay com- paring him with Napoleon ; but our notions of him are, as a rule, obtained from English, and still more, from French historical works, and from translations—a new one has just been published, by the way—of Einhardi Vita Caroli Magni. One can hardly help regretting that Macaulay had not done for Charlemagne what he did for William III. There is no other monarch calculated in the same measure as the medimval Colossus to gratify such instincts as Macaulay's. After all, the Whig historian loved success, if he did not worship it,—and Charlemagne was, above all things, successful. Like Napo- leon, he built up a great empire ; but unlike him, he did not live to see it shattered to pieces. He resembled Cmsar in many respects, as De Quincey points oat; but then, he was not assassinated at the foot of any rival's statue. Like Frederick the Great, he was fond of literature and of controversy ; but he had sufficient good-sense not to attempt original work, but to confine himself to criticism. No soul was ever so fired by material splendour as Macaulay's, and if the Empire of Charlemagne did not boast of the storehouses choked with grain and the ports crowded with masts in which he delighted, none could have gloated more than he over that brilliant Court that sat at the feet of Alcuin, and tortured him with questions, such as that with which the child Epicurus puzzled his tutor,—and himself. Macaulay was enthusiastic for enlightenment and reform, and Charlemagne, in this, as in everything, profonde'ment Allemagne, not only thought of the well-being of his subjects, but took steps, by education and otherwise, for the amelioration of the condition of their successors. Then, again, Macaulay is nothing if not sternly moral and strongly patriotic. How admirably, then, could he have given the dark side to the picture of Charlemagne, and shown that if there was an Elizabeth-Villiers episode in the life of Dutch William, there were dark stains on the character of the Great Charles, which it must have gone sadly against the conscience of Aleuin to condone ; and that those coroiiate columbfe, his daughters, if it was not in their power to act towards their father as Goueril and Regan did towards Lear, were such that their brother Lewis the Pious found that the best thing he could do with them was to pack them to a nunnery. Then who like Macaulay would have depicted the enormous influence of British intellect in the time and in the empire of Charlemagne and his successors,—the educa- tional revival begun by Moulin of York, and carried on, or rather into another groove, by Clement of Ireland, and both succeeded by John Scotus Erigena, whose answer to the question of Charles the Bold,—Quid distat inter sottum ct Scottum? is the best mot of the middle-ages? Is it too late to hope that some really valuable biography of Charlemagne in English and by an Englishman may yet be written ? Mr. Mullinger, who won the Kaye Prize for 1875, with a "Dis- sertation" which as published is now before us, has little preten- sions to such a style as Macaulay's, and indeed we like him least when he becomes eloquent. Thus the passage (p. 72) in which he describes the adult pupils on the benches of the School of the Palace bears a considerable resemblance to the celebrated passage in the essay on Warren Hastings in which Macaulay describes the appearance of the Court which tried the great proconsul. Yet we cannot say that we are much thrilled by this sentence, which, being the last in the description, should by the ordinary laws of rhetoric, be the most effective :—" There, too, were, Riculfaus, destined ere long to fill the chair of St. Boniface, and rule the great see of Mayence ; Einhard, the royal biographer, the Classic of the ninth century ; and Fredegis, Alcuin's youthful countryman, poet and philo- sopher, not always faithful to his master's teaching." As a rule, however, Mr. Mellinger writes an easy and, in the proper sense of the word, flowing style, and his account of the education sought to be implanted by Charles and his successors, and the perhaps more valuable educational impulses given by them, is very pleasant reading. It is still more important, however, for the information it gives in a compact form, and the suggestions, appropriate to the present time, which it inevitably prompts.
The Schools of Charles the Great and the Restoration of Education in the Ninth Century. By J. Bass Mullinger, ,at. John's Collor, Cambridge. London Longlou no, Green, and Co 1877. One of the most interesting chapters in the book is the intro- ductory one, relating the struggles between Paganism and Christ- ianity in Gaul, or to use its subsequent and more proper desig- nation, Frankland, for supremacy in education, and the temporary eclipse of learning of all sorts under the more than barbaric Mesa- vingians. The history during this period of that Gaul which had become more Roman than Rome itself is neither more nor less i than an exemplification of the truth that whatever is of the light must in the end prevail. The Fathers, in their hatred of Paganism, denounced what is good in it—its philosophy, its learning, I its then unsurpassed educational method—they cried out imperatively, "Refrain from all the writings of the heathen." The Emperor Julian retaliated by expelling Christians from the office of public instructors. In the struggle the Christ- ians were victorious ; Jerome in a dream hears a voice ad- dressing him, " Ciceronianus es, non Christianus,—ubi,
thesaurus tuns eat cos tuum 1" closes his Cicero and Plautus and lives to ask exultingly,—" How many now read Aristotle ? How many know even the names of Plato's writings ? Here and there, in some retired nook, old ago recons them at its leisure ; while our rustics and fishermen are the talk of all, and the whole world echoes with their discourse." And yet, according to the law of the irony of history, the Christianity of the time had to fall back upon ancient Pagan culture to oppose modern Pagan force, as represented by the Frank invaders of Gaul. Apollinarius, "the last gentleman-bishop of the Church," boasted that he had pressed Pagan classics and philosophy into the service of the Church. In one sense, all this was of no avail ; in another, it was of great service. Roman Gaul fell before Clovis at Soissons ; but Clovis, in turn, bowed before Roman Christianity, and was baptised at Rheims. Yet for a time it seemed to be all over with learning in Gaul generally. In the wreck of things, the old municipal schools of Roman Gaul virtually disappeared, and literature and learning were kept alive in the monasteries and monastic schools, identified with the name of Cassian. Cassian, indeed, planted Pagan learning, and in his eyes the monastery was nothing more than a school for heaven. But the monastic seminaries, not at first subject to episcopal power, increased and flourished for a time. Again political confusion threatened to put out the light ; in the wars between Austrasia and Neustria, theological learning
declined. Bishops and priests fell into immoral courses ; such was the Merovingian disrespect for the Church, that Chilperie I. drew up a new Confession of Faith, in which he suppressed the distinctions of the Three Persons in the Trinity, and enjoined the addition of seven letters to the alphabet. Piety and learning fled, from Frankland, and found shelter in Britain and Ireland, in York and Canterbury, Lindisfarn and the IIoly Isle, and thither the eye of the great Carlovingian monarch turned, when he had a breathing-time in the work of conquest and reconstitution. In the year 781, Charles, then little over forty, met at Parma the York sokolustieus Alcuin, who was engaged in conveying the pallium from Pope Adrian to his friend Eanbald, the newly-created Archbishop of York. Aleuin had an unbounded admiration for Charles ; Charles wished to re- introduce learning into Frankland, by what was then the ortho- dox method. A bargain was struck between the two ; Alcuin left York for Aachen, to open and superintend the school of the Palace.
Mr. Mulliuger's account of Alcuin's two schools—the school of the Palace at Aachen, and the school of the monastery at Tours, to which he retired—will not raise the reputation of the York ecclesiastic for anything but virtue, amiability, and practicality. He was at the best a grammarian and a theologian, and in everything utterly subservient to Rome. Charles, indeed, who was possessed of a keen, inquiring spirit, probably sought the services of Alcuin simply on account of his unquestioning ortho- doxy. Before his time, there had been in Frankland a short struggle between the spirit of obedience to Rome, as represented by the British Boniface, and the spirit of resistance, as repre- sented by the Celtic Columban. Bonifaco had triumphed, had consecrated Pepin-le-Bref at Rheims, and had been martyred ;
and so it was necessary for Charles not to offend Rome in its day of power. Yet Alcuin had no originality. In ecclesiastical politics he simply followed in the steps of Gregory the Great ; his learning and theology, such as they were, were the echoes of the Venerable Bede. In logic, rhetoric, and metaphysic, he was nowhere ; in theo- logy, he pushed the analogical method to sheer fatuity ; when finally pressed by the inquisitive Charles to show the difference between a Christian and a Pagan philosopher whose maxims were virtually identical with those of Christianity, he had simply to fall back upon "faith and baptism." Of .Alcuin's scientific knowledge, this is a specimen :—
"In arithmetic we find him attributing a mysterious power to the numbers 3 and 6, which he speaks of as containn the lkeys of nature.' A treatise which he compiled on music is o illoonger extant. In astronomy, fancy, Or arbitrary hypothesis, supplied place of observa- tion; tion ; while the ray of light Ilia flashed from the page of Capella upon the dark system of Ptolemy appears never even to have arrested his attention. In the month of July, 797, the planet Mars disappeared from the heavens, and was not again visible until the following July. Charles, whose interest in astronomical questions was singularly active, inquired eagerly of Aleuin the cause of this portentous phenomenon ; and was mot by the facetious reply that the sun had detained the planet in its course, but had at last again reloased it, through fear of the Neninsan lien I" When worn out with the hard work of answering the inquiries of the robust minds of the Palace—many of them much superior in nearly all important respects to his own—and scandalised by the lax morals of the Court, he retired to the wealthy Abbey of Tours, with its thousands of serfs, the school of the monastery which he founded meant nothing more than hatred of every form of innovation, and a proscription of pagan learning. The chief thing to be said for Alcuin as an educational reformer is that he urged Charles to spread the blessings of education through his. empire, and had a hand in the celebrated capitulary of 787,. which, with a view to this spreading of education, Charles addressed to the bishops and abbots throughout the empire, and which, with pardonable exaggeration, Ampere has called the "charter of modern thought." Mr. Mullinger rightly says of this capitulary that "the stipulation with respect to what may be termed the political element, as essential to success in teaching— in the requirement that the instructor shall be desirous of im- parting knowledge—points to one of the best features in the monastic theory of education." The movement was well followed up, so far as instructions were concerned. Two years: after this great capitulary came another, ordaining that every monastery and abbey "have its school, where boys may be taught the Psalms, the system of musical notation, singing, arithmetic,. and grammar." This was succeeded in 797 by a capitulary addressed by Theodulfus, Bishop of Orleans, to the clergy of his diocese, requiring them "to open schools in every town and village, and to receive the children of the faithful for instruction,. demanding in return no payment." So was Laid the foundation of the parish-school education of the past, perhaps of the free' schools of the future.
Charles survived Alcuin ten years, but the two other schools of which Mr. Mullinger treats, the School of Fulda and the Irish School, flourished in the times of his son and grandson, Lewis the Pius and Charles the Bald. Even in Alcuin's life-time, Charles, although he never failed in respect to his ,old instructor, had alarmed him much by placing at the head of the Palatian School a representative of Columban theology, in the person of Clement of Ireland. It is more than probable, however, that Charles favoured Clement not so much because his theology was different from Alcuin's, as because he was strong where Alcuin was weak,—in astronomy. The baleful tendencies which Alcuin sought to check developed themselves in pupils of his own. One of these, Itabanus, Abbot of Fulda, and not less conspicuous than Alcuin for zeal as a founder of schools and monasteries, com- bated many of the superstitions regarding natural phenomena which his master had cherished as bulwarks of the faith, and as Mr. Mullinger says, "not only enlarged the whole conception of monastic and ecclesiastical culture, but also brought to bear upon each subject of instruction somewhat of novelty of treatment and independence of judgment," Lupus Servatus, of Ferrieres, pupil of Rabanus, threw himself into the work of reviving the study of the Classics—of all things most detested and feared by Alcuin—and the account of his services to culture in a turbulent time forms one of the most enjoyable chapters in this book. Finally, at the Court of Charles the Bald, the Celtic or inquiring spirit in theology triumphed for a period in the person of John Scotus Erigena, with his eternal quid distal? his rejection of all authority unless it appears supported by reason, and his denial of the personality of the principle of evil, and of the eternity of future punishment. Thus it is that the ninth century, beginning in darkness, lea.cle up to light,—to the era of Universities, the Renaissance, and the Reformation.
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