European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages [With a New introduction by Colin Burrow ed.] 9781400846153

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BOLLINGEN SERIES XXXVI

With a new introduction by colin burrow

princeton and oxford

copyright © 1953 by bollingen foundation, inc. copyright renewed © 1983 by princeton university press introduction to the 2013 edition copyright © 2013 by princeton university press published by princeton university press, 41 william street, princeton, new jersey 08540 in the united kingdom: princeton university press, 6 oxford street, woodstock, oxfordshire ox20 1tw press.princeton.edu cover art: ms 597/1424, fol.48. dante and virgil entering a fortress surmounted by owls, from “cantico del inferno” by dante alighieri (1265−1321) (vellum), italian school (14th century) / musée condé, chantilly, france / giraudon / the bridgeman art library. all rights reserved this book constitutes number thirty-six in the series of works sponsored by bollingen foundation published in harper torchbook edition, 1973 first princeton/bollingen paperback printing, 1973 paperback reissue, with a new introduction by colin burrow, 2013 library of congress control number 2012952561 isbn 978-0-691-15700-9 british library cataloging-in-publication data is available printed on acid-free paper.b printed in the united states of america 1  3  5  7  9  10  8  6  4  2

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION TO THE

,

2013 EDITION

Xl

TRANSLATOR S NOTE

XXI

NOTE OF ACKNOWLEDGMENT

XXll

AUTHOR'S FOREWORD TO THE ENGLISH TRANSLATION GUIDING PRINCIPLES

XXlll XXVlll

1: European Literature 2:

3

The Latin Middle Ages

17

1. DANTE AND THE ANTIQUE POETS,

MODERN WORLDS, 19. -

3.

17. - 2. ANTIQUE AND

THE MIDDLE AGES, 20.

5.

LATIN MIDDLE AGES, 24. -

ROMANIA,

- 4.

3: Literature and Education 1. THE LIBERAL ARTS,

36. -

IN THE MIDDLE AGES,

39· - 3.

THE

30

2. THE CONCEPT OF THE

Artes

36

42 . - 4. ANGLO45· - 5. CURRICULUM UNIVERSITIES, 54. - 7. Sententiae GRAMMAR,

SAXON AND CAROLINGIAN STUDIES,

Exempla, 57

48. - 6.

AUTHORS, AND

THE

62

4: Rhetoric 1. POSITION OF RHETORIC,

64. - 3.

MAN ANTIQUITY,

-7·

62. -

2. RHETORIC IN ANTIQUITY,

SYSTEM OF ANTIQUE RHETORIC,

71. - 5.

CASSIODORUS AND ISIDORE,

68. - 4- LATE RO6. AUGUSTINE, 73.

74· - 8. Ars dictaminis, 75. v

JEROME, 72 . -

Vl

CONTENTS

9.

WIBALD OF CORVEY AND JOHN OF SALISBURY,

RHETORIC, PAINTING, MUSIC,

77

76. -

10.

5: Topics 80. - 2. HISTORICAL TOPICS, 82. - 3. AFFECTED MODESTY, 83. - 4- TOPICS OF THE EXORDIUM, 85. - 5. TOPICS OF THE CONCLUSION, 89. 6. INVOCATION OF NATURE, 92. - 7. THE WORLD UPSIDEDOWN, 94. - 8. BOY AND OLD MAN, 98. - 9. OLD WOMAN AND GIRL, 101

79

1. TOPICS OF CONSOLATORY ORATORY,

106

6: The Goddess Natura 1. FROM OVID TO CLAUDIAN,

108. - 3.

SODOMY,

EROS AND MORALITY,

106. -

113· - 4-

122. - 6.

2. BERNARD SILVESTRIS,

ALAN OF LILLE,

117· - 5.

THE ROMANCE OF THE ROSE,

124

7: Metaphorics

128

1. NAUTICAL METAPHORS,

131. - 3.

128. -

2. PERSONAL METAPHORS,

ALIMENTARY METAPHORS,

METAPHORS,

136. - 5.

134· - 4.

THEATRICAL METAPHORS,

8: Poetry and Rhetoric 1. ANTIQUE POETICS, 145. -

CORPORAL

138

2. POETRY AND PROSE,

3. SYSTEM OF MEDIEVAL STYLES, 148. - 4-

147. -

145

JUDICIAL, POLITI-

OUTDOING,

154. 162. -

170. - 3.

VIRGIL,

CAL, AND PANEGYRICAL ORATORY IN MEDIEVAL POETRY,

- 5. INEXPRESSIBILITY TOPOl, 159. - 6. 7. EULOGY OF CONTEMPORARIES, 16 5

9: Heroes and Rulers 1. HEROISM,

167. - 2.

HOMERIC HEROES,

167

173. - 4· LATE ANTIQUITY AND THE MIDDLE AGES, 17+ 5. PRAISE OF RULERS, 176. - 6. ARMS AND STUDIES, 178. - 7. NOBILITY OF SOUL, 179. - 8. BEAUTY, 180 10: The Ideal Landscape 1. EXOTIC FAUNA AND FLORA,

- 3.

VmGIL,

190. - 4.

183. -

2. GREEK POETRY,

185.

RHETORICAL OCCASIONS FOR THE DE-

18 3

Vll

CONTElIITS SCRIPTION OF NATURE, PLEASANCE,

11:

195. - 7.

193. - 5. THE

194. - 6.

THE

200

Poetry and Philosophy 1. HOMER AND ALLEGORY,

PHY,

- 4. 12:

GROVE,

EPIC LANDSCAPE,

203. - 2.

POETRY AND PHILOSO-

207. - 3. PHILOSOPHY IN LATE PAGAN ANTIQUITY, 209. 211

PHILOSOPHY AND CHRISTIANITY,

Poetry and Theology 1. DANTE AND GIOVANNI DEL VIRGILIO, MUSSATO,

215. - 3.

214. - 2. ALBERTINO 221. - 4. PE-

DANTE'S SELF-EXEGESIS,

TRARCH AND BOCCACCIO,

225

13= The Muses J 4:

Classicism 247. - 2. THE 251. - 3. CANON FORMATION IN THE CHURCH, 256. - 4. MEDIEVAL CANON, 260. 5. MODERN CANON FORMATION, 264 1. GENRES, AND CATALOGUES OF AUTHORS,

"ANCIENTS" AND THE "MODERNS,"

15: Mannerism

273. - 2. RHETORIC AND 274. - 3. FORMAL MANNERISMS, 282. - 4. RECAPITULATION, 291. - 5. EPIGRAM AND THE STYLE OF pointes, 292. - 6. BALTASAR GRACIAN, 293 1. CLASSICISM AND MANNERISM,

MANNERISM,

16: The Book as Symbol 1. GOETHE ON TROPES, 302. - .2. GREECE, 304. - 3. ROME, 308. - 4. THE BIBLE, 310. - 5. EARLY MIDDLE AGES, 311. 6. HIGH MIDDLE AGES, 315. - 7. THE BOOK OF NATURE, 319. - 8. DANTE, 326. - 9. SHAKESPEARE, 332. - 10. WEST AND EAST, 340 17: Dante

Commedia

1. DANTE AS A CLASSIC,

- 3·

THE

~MPLARY FIGURES

348. - 2. DANTE AND LATINITY, 350. 357· - 4. IN THE Commedia, 362. - 5. THE

AND THE LITERARY GENRES,

CONTENTS

Vlll PERSONNEL OF THE ECY,

37:?-. - 7·

Commedia, 365. - 6.

MYTH AND PROPH-

DANTE AND THE MIDDLE AGES,

378

18: Epilogue

380. - 2. THE BEGINNINGS OF THE VERNACU383. - 3. MIND AND FORM, 388. - 4. 391, - 5. IMITATION AND CREATION, 397

1. RETROSPECT,

LAR LITERATURES, CONTINUITY,

EXCURSUSES I: II: III:

IV:

Misunderstandings of Antiquity in the Middle Ages 405 Devotional Formula and Humility

Grammatical and Rhetorical Technical Terms as Metaphors 414 Jest and Earnest in Medieval Literature 1. LATE ANTIQUITY,

420. - 3. 422 . - 4·

417

2. THE CHURCH AND LAUGHTER,

JEST IN HAGIOGRAPHY,

Ridicula, 431

429. - 6.

425. - 5.

COMIC ELE-

KITCHEN HUMOR AND OTHER

Late Antique Literary Studies 436. 443

1. QUINTILIAN,

MACROBIUS,

VI:

417. -

JEST AND EARNEST IN THE EULOGY OF RULERS,

MENTS IN THE EPIC,

V:

407

2. LATE ROMAN GRAMMAR,

436 438. - 3.

Early Christian and Medieval Literary Studies

446

446. - 2. CASSIODORUS, 448. - 3. ISIDORE, 450. - 4· ALDHELM, 457· - 5· EARLY CHRISTIAN POETRY, 45 8. - 6. NOTKER BALBULUS, 463. - 7. AIMERIC, 464. - 8. LIT-

1. JEROME,

ERARY STUDIES IN THE TWELFTH AND THIRTEENTH CENTURIES,

465

The Mode of Existence of the Medieval Poet

468

The Poet's Divine Frenzy

474

Poetry as Perpetuation

476

x: Poetry as Entertainment

478

Poetry and Scholasticism

480

The Poet's Pride

485

VII:

VIII: IX:

XI: XII:

CONTENTS

XIII:

Brevity as an Ideal of Style

XIV:

Etymology as a Category of Thought

ix

xv: Numerical Composition XVI: XVII:

XVIII: XIX:

Numerical Apothegms Mention of the Author's Name in Medieval Literature

515

The "Chivalric System of the Virtues"

519

The Ape as Metaphor

538

xx: Spain's Cultural "Belatedness" XXI: XXII:

XXIII: XXIV:

541

God as Maker

544

Theological Art-Theory in the Spanish Literature of the Seventeenth Century

547

Calder6n's Theory of Art and the Artes Liberales

Montesquieu, Ovid, and Virgil

xxv: Diderot and Horace APPENDIX:

The Medieval Bases of Western Thought

Abbreviations

559 571 573

587 599

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

600

INDEX

603

introduction to the 2013 edition colin burrow

In my first year as an undergraduate one of my lungs collapsed. This limited my future career options. Becoming a trumpeter or a professional footballer was clearly no longer on the cards—not that I was much good at kicking a ball or blowing a trumpet anyway. It had the more immediate consequence that I had to spend a week in Papworth Hospital in Cambridgeshire, where they had recently performed the first successful heart-lung transplant. In order to avoid meeting the eye of surgical staff on the lookout for further opportunities for medical innovation, I decided to bury my head in a big fat book. So I took with me the fattest book on my shelves: E. R. Curtius’s European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. Very soon I was lost. I was also, perhaps, slightly high, since I was breathing oxygen in case the lung collapsed again. But as I worked through this amazing book, with its gloriously rich descriptions of rhetorical figures and topoi, its learned miscellany of excursuses, and its unifying passion for an idea of Western literature that ran on at least up until Goethe, I realized that there were better things to do with life than kick balls or blow trumpets. What Curtius presents is not just a piece of literary criticism, or a literary history, or a survey of medieval literature. He enables his readers to see how Western literature is held together by a series of interconnections across time—roughly from Virgil to Diderot—and across Europe, from Naples in the South to Stratford-upon-Avon in the North, and from the Iberian peninsula in the West to the Rhine, and possibly even as far as the Elbe, in the East. Curtius shows how the Latin writing of

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antiquity and late antiquity spread through Western Europe, flickered through the vernacular romances of France, shaped the work of what he saw as its greatest figures, Dante and Goethe, and even extended to the benighted northern climate of England. His defiance of national boundaries issues in some splendidly counterintuitive claims (“Paris is the literary capital of England,” p. 35; “A community of great authors throughout the centuries must be maintained if a kingdom of the mind is to exist at all,” p. 397). His principal thesis is that the classical tradition spread and sustained itself through the study of rhetoric, and that the chief way in which that continuity was manifested was through the recurrence of “topoi,” or rhetorical commonplaces. These included notions that could be digested into a single phrase, such as the puer senex, the prematurely aged youth (a topos that particularly appealed to me as I lay on my hospital bed), or which could be treated variously and at length, such as the notion that the whole world was a book. This particular book certainly is a world. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages belongs with Frank Kermode’s Sense of an Ending and Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis as one of the three most inspiring works of literary criticism written in the twentieth century. All three of these works demonstrate a kind of literary criticism that involves looking for the large patterns and histories behind a wide range of texts, and which requires the critic to work across large swathes of time and national boundaries. All three books also combine that breadth of vision with the philologist’s microscopic concern for detail. Like Auerbach, Curtius was trained in German traditions of romance philology in the very early twentieth century. Because Auerbach (1892−1957) was Jewish, he was forced to leave his university post at Marburg in 1935, and composed Mimesis in exile in Istanbul.1 His rapid-fire study of the history of European realism, through a series of vividly analyzed instances from books that happened to be available in Istanbul, is very different from the long slow burn of Curtius’s survey of topoi, which diffuse from Statius, through Alan of Lille and the Archpoet, into Shakespeare and Calderòn. But Mimesis and European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages share one key attribute: they both show why literary study matters, and why it is intellectually, and perhaps also politically, important for the critic not to be bound to a single place or time. Why politically? Both of these German scholars were attempting to take stock of the Western literary canon after the large-scale de 1  See Jan N. Bremmer, “Erich Auerbach and His Mimesis,” Poetics Today (1999), 3−10.

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struction of central Europe in World War II. This gives to both their books an urgency that very few critics have achieved since. It also means that both works are attempts by literary critics to think beyond their times. This in turn means that to understand European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages in a way that does justice both to its limitations and to its great strengths, it helps to know a little about the life of its author and the context in which it was written.2 Ernst Robert Curtius (1886−1956) was the grandson of Ernst Curtius, the great classical scholar and archaeologist who excavated Olympia. His great-uncle was also a celebrated classical philologist. Curtius was brought up in Alsace, where he was born in 1886, only sixteen years after the region had been ceded to Germany at the conclusion of the Franco-Prussian War. His father was president of the Church of the Augsburg Confession in Strasbourg from 1903 to 1914. Curtius consequently grew up in an environment that mingled German Lutherans and largely Catholic French speakers. His background was both classical and polyglot, and was about as middleEuropean as it’s possible to be. His experience of religious and linguistic diversity in Strasbourg is one of the foundations of European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. Curtius was trained in classical philology at the University of Strasbourg by the highly systematic Romance philologist Gustav Gröber (1844−1911), to whom he dedicated three of his books, including this one.3 His academic career began with an edition of an Old French text (Li quatre livres des Reis, 1911). Three years later he published a book about the recently deceased French critic Ferdinand Brunetière (1849–1906). He galloped on to write about Balzac (1923), following that study with a book about modern French literature in a style that won him popular acclaim. It also (no hard task) succeeded in putting up the backs of the German professoriat, and established him as one of the foremost critics of French literature in the Weimar Republic.4 He wrote about Proust and André Gide (with whom he had a lengthy correspondence),5 and completed an overview of The 2   The fullest biography in English is Arthur R. Evans, “Ernst Robert Curtius,” in On Four Modern Humanists: Hofmannsthal, Gundolf, Curtius, Kantorowicz, ed. Arthur R. Evans (Princeton, 1970), pp. 85−145; for bibliography up to 1983, see Earl Jeffrey Richards, Modernism, Medievalism, and Humanism: A Research Bibliography on the Reception of the Works of Ernst Robert Curtius (Tübingen, 1983). 3   See Peter Dronke, “Curtius as Medievalist and Modernist,” Times Literary Supplement (1980), 1103−6. 4   Stephen Spender, “Rhineland Journal,” Horizon (1945), pp. 394−412, esp. p. 397. 5   Herbert Dieckmann and Jane M. Dieckmann, Deutsch-franzœsische Gespräche 1920−1950: la correspondance de Ernst Robert Curtius avec André Gide, Charles Du Bos et Valery Larbaud (Frankfurt am Main, 1980).

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Civilization of France (1930). He was one of very few early-twentiethcentury critics in the German-speaking world to value T. S. Eliot and James Joyce.6 As professor at Marburg (1920−24), then Heidelberg (1924−29), and finally Bonn, Curtius was in the early decades of the twentieth century a modernist, and not just in the academic sense that he was a critic of modern literature. He was a modernist in a similar mold to T. S. Eliot, whose chief interest in the 1920s lay in reviving “a Europe of the mind.”7 Sensing a kindred spirit, Eliot persuaded Curtius to write for The Criterion in 1922, and was later to describe him (perhaps with the invisible curl of the lip that is one hallmark of Eliot’s prose style) as “one of the best Germans.”8 Curtius and Eliot continued to correspond through the 1920s, and Curtius translated The Waste Land into German (for which edition he wrote an extremely perceptive introduction) in 1927. This may sound like an odd intellectual background for the author of a book on European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. Curtius himself, in an essay originally intended as an introduction to this book, presented his movement away from the study of recent French writing into the Middle Ages as a personal journey along the “road to Rome . . . in other words in a sense that transcended history, the holy city.”9 It’s likely that his literary interests moved back in time for more mundane reasons. Hitler’s struggles to oust Hindenburg in 1932 prompted Curtius to write Deutscher Geist in Gefahr (“The German Spirit in Crisis”), which “pleaded for Germany to recover and build upon the ideals of Goethean humanism,”10 and appealed to the “illustrious founders of our Western civilization from Augustine to Dante.”11 The work, published the year before Hitler became chancellor, aligned mass mobilization and mass education with Nazi barbarism. It was, for obvious political reasons, the last monograph Curtius published before European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages sixteen years later. Many of the subjects of Curtius’s earlier work—Proust, a homosexual Jew; and Gide, a homosexual communist—were not exactly central to the Nazi literary curriculum.

6   William Calin, The Twentieth-Century Humanist Critics: from Spitzer to Frye (Toronto and London, 2007), p. 32. 7   Ernst Robert Curtius, Essays on European Literature (Princeton, 1973), p. 170. 8   T. S. Eliot, The Letters of T. S. Eliot, 2 vols., ed. Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton (London, 2009), 1.705. See also Dronke, “Curtius as Medievalist and Modernist.” 9  Curtius, Essays on European Literature, p. 498. 10   Evans, “Ernst Robert Curtius,” p. 111. 11  Curtius, Essays on European Literature, p. 500.

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Curtius kept his head down during the war, although he and a colleague helped to shelter a Jewish university administrator.12 Stephen Spender sought him out in 1945, and in his “Rhineland Journal” describes “Professor C—” living in a flat that had been requisitioned by the American army, which contained little furniture and few books. Curtius was trying to sell the books that remained in order to feed himself and his wife. Spender, ever the ingénu, records asking “Professor C—” why the German people did not actively resist Hitler. Curtius replied “The trouble with the Germans is that they have no experience of political freedom.”13 He complained of the isolation of Germany from any contact with ideas from outside the country through the years of the war: “I have felt an increasing and indescribable disgust for this people. I have no faith in them at all.”14 This was the immediate context of European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. Perhaps symbolically, the book was first published not in Germany but in Bern in Switzerland, by the same press that had issued Auerbach’s Mimesis two years before.15 Some early reviewers regarded it as a betrayal of Curtius’s earlier critical interests. Leo Spitzer (who was, like Auerbach, a Jewish scholar who had been forced to leave his post at Cologne in 1933) assessed the book from the relative comfort of a chair in Johns Hopkins, and described it as “an abandonment of all aesthetic, philosophic and modernistic tendencies.”16 Spitzer went on: “Before the forces of barbarism that encircle us, Curtius has found an escape by immersing himself in the necropolis of a past that was alive as late as the eighteenth cen­ tury.”17 Spender had prefixed his account of his meeting with “Professor C—” with a description of the wreckage of Cologne, whose inhabitants he depicted as “a tribe of wanderers who have discovered a ruined city in a desert and are camping there, living in the cellars and hunting amongst the ruins for the booty, relics of a dead civilization. . . . The destruction is serious in more senses than one. It is the climax of deliberate effort, an achievement of our civilization, 12  Hans Reiss, “Ernst Robert Curtius (1886−1956): Some Reflections on the Occasion of the Fortieth Anniversary of His Death,” Modern Language Review (1996),” pp. 647−54, esp. p. 650. 13   Spender, “Rhineland Journal,” 400. 14  Ibid., 409. 15   The Francke press published a wide range of literary works in French, Italian, and English. See A. Francke A.G. Bern, 125 Jahre Francke Verlag Bern (Bern, 1957). 16  Leo Spitzer, “Review of Europaische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter by Ernst Robert Curtius,” American Journal of Philology (1949), pp. 425−31, esp. p. 426. For Spitzer’s life, see René Wellek, “Leo Spitzer (1887−1960),” Comparative Literature (1960), pp. 310−34. 17   Spitzer, “Review of ELLMA,” p. 428.

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the most striking result of co-operation between nations in the twentieth century.”18 Spitzer cruelly turned that vision of retreat into literal cellars into a cultural retreat into the catacombs of the literary tradition. It was perhaps inevitable that a Jewish émigré such as Spitzer would have had equivocal attitudes toward Curtius, a non-Jewish scholar who remained in Germany and in his university post throughout the war—although Auerbach (whose career followed very similar lines to Spitzer’s) greeted Curtius’s book with qualified enthusiasm.19 Spitzer got the book wrong. The main purpose of European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages was not to retreat from present horrors into the poetry of late antiquity and the Latin Middle Ages. Its principal aim was to insist that the geographical center of the Western literary tradition lay west of the Rhine, and that Euro­ pean cultural unity was a possibility, even if it lay in the past. Throughout the volume literary developments in France are contrasted with their relatively poor equivalents in Germany, “which remained as good as cut off from the great intellectual movements of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries” (p. 57). That observation is strikingly similar to Curtius’s comments to Spender in 1945 about the intellectual isolation of Germany in the twentieth century. It reflected a long-standing belief: even in the 1920s Curtius had complained to Eliot about the difficulty of obtaining British books in Germany. Curtius’s largely negative remarks on the Nibelungenleid, on Parzival, and on Hitler’s favorite Wagner (p. 242) show that the author of European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages was not simply cowering in the catacombs of history. He was indeed harking back to the traditions of German Romance philology before World War I—and perhaps before the publication of Germanophile literary histories such as Josef Nadler’s Literary History of the German Tribes and Regions (1912−18). But he was primarily trying to show why a literary historian should value Latinate and Romance works over Germanic literary texts, and he was doing so in order to affirm the possibility of European cultural reconstruction after the war. Rome (where Curtius was to die during a visit in 1956) became for him the ultimate historical origin of Western literature. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages still often figures on reading lists for students of medieval literature. It’s more of  Spender, “Rhineland Journal,” p. 396.   Erich Auerbach, “Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter. By Ernst Robert Curtius,” Modern Language Notes (1950), pp. 348−51, described it as a “monument of powerful, passionate and obstinate energy.” 18 19

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ten mined as a reference work than read through. This is a shame, since it aspires to be a totality. Professional medievalists tend to give rather guarded replies when asked what they think of it. The chief objections to it are that its focus on topoi diminishes the role of individuality in medieval Latin poetry;20 that it concentrates on elite and university culture at the expense of oral and popular culture; that it is insufficiently concerned about the mechanisms by which learning was disseminated and transformed; that its conception of a “topos” lacks theoretical rigor; and that its canon (and its account of the genesis of the literary canon, and of the idea of a literary canon, p. 259) is distorted by its focus on Latin materials. It is sometimes also criticized for being unduly Eurocentric, and for not extending its gaze eastward into the Slavonic world or beyond. None of these criticisms is entirely fair, although it’s easy to see why most of them have arisen. Curtius’s word “topos” encompasses a much wider array of phenomena than the “common places” of the rhetorical tradition, and the boundaries of the concept are sometimes as a result unclear. Sometimes the topoi are presented as rhetorical building blocks of composition, but from time to time they are presented as atemporal truths, or even connected to Carl Jung’s archetypes. Curtius was interested in comparative history, particularly the work of A. J. Toynbee, whose survey of recurrent patterns of rise and decline in transnational civilizations provides much of the historiographical superstructure of his early chapters. He also read works of anthropology and comparative religion. Eliot indeed offered to send him a copy of Frazer’s Golden Bough in the 1920s (he scrupulously protested that he could only afford to send the abbreviated one-volume edition).21 Curtius’s idea of “European literature” is consequently held together by several conceptually distinct forces. The first is the idea that the mind of Europe through the Middle Ages was united by an educational elite, who preserved and disseminated a rhetorical and classical heritage through a range of different topoi and rhetorical conventions. The second is the very different notion that European literature might be held together by quasiarchetypal concerns, which recur because they are archetypal rather than because they are directly transmitted from one generation to the next. The presence of this second line of argument is partly why critics of European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages have sometimes objected to the narrowness of its geographical scope: if 20   Peter Dronke, Poetic Individuality in the Middle Ages: New Departures in Poetry, 1000−1150 (Oxford, 1970), pp. 1−22. 21  Eliot, The Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. 2, p. 603.

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the goddess Natura is, as Curtius suggests (p. 122), a manifestation of the Jungean anima, then what is the justification for not exploring further examples of this apparently transhistorical topos in Polish or Indian or even in Chinese literature? This is, though, not a serious objection. The words “Latin” and “European” in the title of this book should give most reasonable readers grounds to expect that India and China will be marginal to its concerns. The neglect of the eastern perimeter of European Latin culture is a limitation, however. It can only be explained by Curtius’s desire in the aftermath of the war to look principally westward and southward. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages is energized by several internal contradictions, which are largely the product of the circumstances in which it was written. It is driven by a belief in the unity of European literary traditions, which culminate in and are most fully articulated by Dante, to whom Curtius devotes his final chapter. This unified vision is articulated, however, in an increasingly fragmentary form. As the excursuses on different topoi and particular literary relationships multiply at the end of the volume—and they make up almost a third of its overall length—Curtius seems to fall victim to his own ambition to understand everything. To see Europe as a whole means accumulating large numbers of fragments, and those fragments do not always cohere. This again has parallels with the careers of other modernists born in the 1880s. As Ezra Pound famously declared toward the end of The Cantos, in which he tried to reconfigure the epic tradition, to explore the relationship between East and West in new ways, to account for the rise of usury, and to tie all of this back in to Occitan poetry, “I am not a demi-god / I cannot make it cohere.”22 Curtius’s intellectual trajectory had more in common with Eliot’s than with Pound’s (although by the 1940s there were substantial differences between the two men, particularly in their attitudes to the church).23 Like Eliot, Curtius can substitute an idea of “tradition” for history, and he is also prone to assume that there is an inverse relationship between the value of literary culture and the number of people who possess it. He can even give the impression that culture is a static treasure to be protected and handed down through the generations like an imperial crown: “The bases of Western thought are classical antiquity and Christianity. The function of the Middle Ages was to receive that deposit, to transmit   Ezra Pound, The Cantos (London, 1975), p. 796.   Curtius in 1949 described Eliot’s Anglo-Catholicism as “illogical to Continental thinking” and said that the “open-minded Europeanism of 1920 remained an unfulfilled promise.” Curtius, Essays on European Literature, pp. 383 and 397. 22 23

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it, and to adapt it” (p. 593). It is not surprising that the preservation of these treasures sometimes seems to matter more to Curtius than their adaptation or their transformation. He had seen Cologne burning on the horizon, and he had lived through the hyperinflation of the Weimar period. This inclined him to see literary culture as a kind of gold standard (“that deposit”), which the Middle Ages preserved and later ages squandered. This gives rise to the most tantalizing aspect of European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, and to the most significant of the criticisms that can be leveled against it by those who live in more fortunate times. Its surveys of literary topoi do offer enormous riches. Anyone interested in the idea of literary immortality, in the notion of inexpressibility, the invocation of the muses, the rhetorical methods for arousing passion, or in any of a dozen more recurrent literary themes will find the best starting point for further research in these pages. But Curtius shows relatively little interest in the process by which these topoi were disseminated, or how they were absorbed and transformed by later readers. His pan-Europeanism also means that he is reluctant to dwell on the changes that can result from transmitting particular topoi from one environment to another, be that a different nation or a different institution. The content and character of what is known, like the social composition of those who know it, do not seem so far as he is concerned to alter a great deal between the fourth and fourteenth centuries, or from the Tiber to the Rhine. The topoi recur and live on. The “deposit” of learning is preserved rather than diversified. Curtius had clearly reflected on these questions, but his overall desire to describe and praise acts of cultural preservation finally triumphed over his interest in transmission and transformation. The short excursus on “The Ape as Metaphor” (pp. 538−40) from John of Salisbury to Shakespeare is one of a number of oblique recognitions that cultural transmission without change might become simple repetition or mimicry, since this excursus is about writers who “ape” other writers, and simply reproduce either nature or their reading without transforming it. His concluding discussion of how ideas of literary imitation are transmuted into notions of inspiration in Lon­ ginus (pp. 398−401) also acknowledges that the Latin culture of the Middle Ages needed to be actively reinvigorated in order to remain alive, and that simply treasuring it in the bank vault of the mind was not enough. But readers are left without a clear formulation of how one writer changes or transforms what he or she reads. The topoi do sometimes seem to be a super-personal repository of universal wisdom.

xx 

introduction to the 2013 edition

So what then can be taken from this book? What makes it more than a historical curiosity? The first answer to these questions is that the historical position of its author actually makes European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages more rather than less interesting. It is not just a great book about the Middle Ages. It is also a book that reveals a huge amount about twentieth-century literature. It shows a former Weimar modernist attempting to construct a vision of European literature after the war. It is emphatically a book about European literature and the Latin Middle Ages, rather than just European literature in the Latin Middle Ages, since it indirectly addresses Curtius’s present as much as the past. As well as providing a mass of leads for thinking about how Dante grew from Virgil, or about the significance of Alan of Lille or Bernardus Silvestris, this book still shows a great critic rethinking literary history in response to a cultural catastrophe. Its emphasis on the continuity of classical and rhetorical learning through the Middle Ages also makes it permanently valuable. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages stands as a monumental refutation of the Renaissance humanists’ mythology that Latin literary culture was heroically recovered in the fifteenth century after centuries of darkness. The Middle Ages described here are not at all dark. They are effectively a long series of renaissances and enlightenments that run on until the eighteenth century, after which the real dark ages begin. But the main quality that makes European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages a great book is its breadth of vision. Critics are today prone to bury their noses in one corner of time and space. Few readers are willing to take a wide view across centuries or across national and linguistic boundaries. There is for Curtius no excuse for not knowing or not reading any work; there is no excuse for not trying to see how every literary text fits into a larger European picture. Even if finally he found that the larger picture he wanted to create fragmented into a series of brilliantly detailed excurses—something that history may well show to be a recurrent tendency within all aspirations to pan-European unity—he would never have seen many of those details if he had not had the ambition to see European literature as a whole.

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE

Though I set out with the intention of avoiding the ubiquitous "translator's footnote," additional notes proved, in a few instances, to be a necessary evil. They are distinguished by being excluded from the numeration and enclosed in square brackets. Partly because, in the case of many of the passages cited in the text, previous translations either did not exist or were unsatisfactory, a t least for the purposes of this book; partly for the sake of homogeneity; but chiefly because I have always regarded the rendering of poetry as the translator's greatest challenge and his greatest reward, I have, wherever my linguistic equipment permitted, made my own translations. throughout. The few exceptions (preponderantly citations from Creek) are indicated, and the renderings credited, where they occur. I welcome this opportunity to express my gratitude to my friend Dr. Alexander Code v. Asch, who has unreservedly put his time and his vast philological erudition at my disposal for the discussion of crucial problems. I am also indebted to The Edward MacDowell Association for granting me residence at the MacDowell Colony during two periods when I was working on this translation.

September, 1952

W. R. T.

NOTE OF ACKNOWLEDGMENT

Grateful acknowledgment is herewith made to the following publishers for permission to quote as indicated: the University of North Carolina Press, for material from P. S. Allen and H. M. Jones, The Romanesque Lyric; the Harvard University Press, for several lines from two volumes of the Loeb Classical Library, Minor Latin Poets, translated by J. Wight Duff and Arnold M. Duff, and the Dionysica of Nonnos, translated by W. H. D. Rouse; and William Heinemann, Ltd., London, and Mr. Alister Kershaw for material from Richard Aldington, Medallions in Clay. The Henry Regnery Company, Chicago, has kindly granted permission to reprint the essay "The Medieval Bases of Western Thought," which was published in its Goethe and the Modern Age, edited by Arnold Bergstraesser.

AUTHOR'S FOREWORD TO THE ENGLISH TRANSLATION

For the English edition of this book a few words of explanation will perhaps be welcomed. My central field of study is the Romance languages and literatures. After the war of 1914-18 I saw it as my task to make modern France understood in Germany through studies of Rolland, Gide, Claude!, Peguy (Die literarischen Wegbereiter des neuen Frankreich [1919]); of Barres (1922) and Balzac (1923); of Proust, Valery, Larbaud (Franzosischer Geist im neuen Europa [1925]). This cycle was closed with a study of French culture (Einfiihrung in die franzosische Kultur [1930]). By that time I had already begun studying English and American authors. An essay on T. S. Eliot (with a translation of The Waste Land) appeared in 1927, a study of James Joyce in 1929. Studies published during the last twenty-five years are collected in my Kritische Essays zur europiiischen Literatur (1950).* This contains essays on Virgil, Goethe, Friedrich Schlegel, Emerson, Stefan George, Hofmannsthal, Unamu~o, Ortega y Gasset, Eliot, Toynbee. Virgil and Dante have long had a place in the mnermost circle of my admiration. What were the roads that led from the one to the other? This question increasingly preoccupied me. The answer could not but be found in the Latin continuity of the Middle Ages. And that in turn was a portion of the European tradition, which has Homer at its beginning and at its end, as we see today, Goethe. This tradition of thought and art was severely shaken by the war of 1914-18 and its aftermath, especially in Germany. In 1932 I published my polemical pamphlet Deutscher Geist in Gefahr. It attacked the barbarization of education and the nationalistic frenzy which were the forerunners of the Nazi regime. In it I pleaded for a new

* Translated by Michael Kowal as Essays on European Literature (Princeton University Press, 1973). xxiii

XXIV

FOREWORD

Humanism, which should integrate the Middle Ages, from Augustine to Dante. I had undergone the influence of a great American book: Founders of the Middle Ages, by Edward Kennard Rand (1871-1945). When the German catastrophe came, I decided to serve the idea of a medievalistic Humanism by studying the Latin literature of the Middle Ages. These studies occupied me for fifteen years. The result of them is the present book. It appeared in 1948. I put it forth with trepidation, for I did not believe that I could count upon its arousing any response. It was not in line with any of the scientific, scholarly, or philosophic trends which governed contemporary thought. That it nevertheless aroused attention and sympathy was a gratifying surprise to me. What I have said will have made it clear that my book is not the product of purely scholarly interests, that it grew out of a concern for the preservation of Western culture. It seeks to serve an understanding of the Western cultural tradition in so far as it is manifested in literature. It attempts to illuminate the unity of that tradition in space.and time by the application of new methods. In the intellectual chaos of the present it has become necessary, and happily not impossible, to demonstrate that unity. But the demonstration can only be made from a universal standpoint. Such a standpoint is afforded by Latinity. Latin was the language of the educated during the thirteen centuries which lie between Virgil and Dante. Without this Latin background, the vernacular literatures of the Middle Ages are incomprehensible. Some of my critics have objected that important phenomena of medieval literature (e.g., the Song of Roland, the troubadours, the drama) do not appear in my book. Perhaps these critics did not read its title. It treats of the Latin Middle Ages, not of the Middle Ages in general. There is no lack of good books on the vernacular literatures of France, Germany, Italy, Spain. My book does not undertake to compete with them, but to provide what they do not provide. The Latin Middle Ages is one focus of the ellipse here under consideration. The other focus is European literature. Hence much will be said concerning Greek and Roman Antiquity, together with much concerning schools and works of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I venture to hope that even specialists in these periods will find something useful in my book. My book, however, is not addressed to scholars, but to lovers of literature, that is, to those who are interested in literature as literature. In the preface to his History of Criticism George Saintsbury says: "A friend who is at once friendly, most competent, and of a different complexion in critical thought, objected to me that 'I treat literature as something by itself.' I hastened to admit the impeachment, and to declare that this is the very postu-

FOREWORD

xxv

late of my book." Of course literature cannot be absolutely isolated, as Saintsbury well knew. In my book there will also be found things which I could not have seen without C. G. Jung; problems in the history of civilization and in the history of philosophy will also be touched upon; something is said about the seven liberal arts, the universities, and so on. But the spotlight of observation is always upon literature; its themes, its techniques, its biology, its sociology. The reader can find information here on where the word literature comes from and what meaning it had originally; what a canon of writers is; how the concept of the classic author was formed and how it developed. The recurrent or constant phenomena of literary biology are investigated; the opposition between "ancients" and "moderns"; the anticlassical trends which are today called Baroque and for which I prefer the name Mannerism. Poetry is investigated in its relation to philosophy and theology. The question is raised by what means it has idealized human life (the hero, the shepherd) and nature (description of landscape), and what fixed types it has developed for the purpose. All these and other questions are prolegomena to what I should like to call a phenomenology of literature. This appears to me something different from literary history, comparative literature, and "Literaturwissenschaft" as they are practiced today. Contemporary archaeology has made surprising discoveries by means of aerial photography at great altitudes. Through this technique it has succeeded, for example, in recognizing for the first time the late Roman system of defense works in North Africa. A person standing on the ground before a heap of ruins cannot see the whole that the aerial photograph reveals. But the next step is to enlarge the aerial photograph and compare it with a detailed map. There is a certain analogy to this procedure in the technique of literary investigation here employed. If we attempt to embrace two or two and a half millenniums of Western literature in one view, we can make discoveries which are impossible from a church steeple. Yet we can do so only when the parochialism of the specialists has provided careful detailed studies. All too often, to be sure, such studies are lacking, and from a more elevated standpoint we see tasks which would promise a rich yield to individual research. The historical disciplines wi11 progress wherever specialization and contemplation of the whole are combined and interpenetrate. The two require each other and stand in a complementary relation. Specialization without nniversalism is blind. Universalism without specialization is inane. But as far as viewing the whole in the field of literature is concerned, Saintsbury's axiom is valid: "Ancient without Modern is a stumbling block, Modern without Ancient is foolishness utter and irremediable."

XXVI

FOREWORD

My book, as I said, is not the product of purely scholarly interests.

It grew out of vital urges and under the pressure of a concrete historical

situation. But in order to convince, I had to use the scientific technique which is the foundation of all historical investigation: philology. For the intellectual sciences it has the same significance as mathematics has for the natural sciences. As Leibniz taught, there are two kinds of truths: on the one hand, those which are only arrived at by reason and which neither need nor are capable of empirical confirmation; on the other hand, those which are recognized through experience and which are logically indemonstrable; necessary truths and accidental truths, or, as Leibniz also puts it, verites eternelles et verites de fait. The accidental truths of fact can only be established by philology. Philology is the handmaid of the historical disciplines. I have attempted to employ it with something of the precision with which the natural sciences employ their methods. Geometry demonstrates with figures, philology with texts. But philology too ought to give results which are verifiable. But if the subject of this book is approached through philological technique, it is nevertheless clear, I hope, that philology is not an end in itself. What we are dealing with is literature-that is, the great intellectual and spiritual tradition of Western culture as given form in language. It contains imperishable treasures of beauty, greatness, faith. It is a reservoir of spiritual energies through which we can flavor and ennoble our present-day life. I attempted some suggestions in this direction in 1949 at Aspen, Colorado, where, on the occasion of the Goethe Bicentennial Convocation, I spoke on "The Medieval Bases of Western Thought." This lecture supplements my book and hence, with the publisher's permission, is here included as an appendix. E.R.C.

GUSTAV GRoBER ( 1844- 19 11 )

and

ABY WARBURG (1866-19 2 9) IN MEMORIAM

GUIDING PRINCIPLES

1.

?raXaL OE

TO.

KaXo. av6pW?rOLIH E~EVP1'/TaL,

EK TWV j.l.aV6aVELV olio

HERODOTUS,

POLYBlUS,

I, ch. 8

XV, 4,

11

3. . . . neque concipere aut edere partum mens potest nisi ingenti flumine lit· terarum inundata PETRONlUS, ch. 118

4. Ne tu aliis faciendam trade, factam si quam rem cupis.

5. Guillames dist a ceus qui 0 lui erent: "Seignor," fet ii, "les bones uevres perent; Fesom aussi con cil qui bien ovrerent."

Proverb

Les Narbonnais

6. Vielleicht tiberzeugt man sich bald, dass es keine patriotische Kunst und patri· otische Wissenschaft gebe. Beide gehOren, wie alles Cute, der ganzen Welt all und konnen nur durch allgemeine freie Wechselwirkung aller zugleich Lebenden, in steter Rticksicht auf das, was uns vom Vergangenen ilbrig und bekannt ist, gefordert werden. GOETHE, Fliichtige Vbersicht tiber die Kunst in Deutschland (1801) 7. Auch die Zeiten des Verfalls und Untergangs haben ihr heiliges Recht auf unser JACOB BURCKHARDT, Werke, XIV, 57 Mitgefilhl.

8. Absichtslose Wahrnehmung, unscheinbare Anfiinge gehen dem zielbewussten Suchen, dem allseitigen Erfassen des Cegenstandes voraus. 1m sprungweisen Durchmessen des Raumes hascht dann der Suchende nach dem Ziel. Mit einem Schema unfertiger Ansichten tiber iihnliche Cegenstiinde scheint er das Canze erfassen zu konnen, ehe Natur und Teile gekannt sind. Der vorschnellen Meinung folgt die Einsicht des 1rrtums, nur langsam der Entschluss, dem Cegenstand in kleinen und kleinsten Schritten nahe zu kommen, Teil und Teilchen zu beschauen und nicht zu when, bis die Uberzeugung gewonnen ist, dass sie nur so und nicht anders aufgefasst werden dilrfen. GUSTAV GROBER. Crundriss der romanischen Philologie, I (1888), 3

9. On aurait souhaite de n'etre pas technique. A l'essai, il est apparu que, si l'on voulait epargner au lecteur les details precis, il ne restait que des generalites vagues, et que toute demonstration manquait. ANTOINE MEILLET, Esquisse d'une histoire de la langue latine (1928) 10.

Un libro de ciencia tiene que ser de ciencia; pero tambien tiene que ser un libro. lOSE ORTEGA Y GAS SET, Obras (1932), 963

EUROPEAN LITERATURE AND THE LATIN MIDDLE AGES

1 European Literature

M

of nature has made greater advances since the nineteenth century than in all preceding epochs. Indeed, compared with earlier advances, they may be called incommensurable. They have changed the forms of existence and they open new possibilities whose range cannot be estimated. Less well known, because less perceptible, are the advances in historical knowledge. These alter, not the forms of life, but the forms of thought of those who share in them. They lead to a widening and a clarification of consciousness. In time, the operation of this process can be of significance in the solution of humanity's practical problems too. For the greatest enemy of moral and social advance is dullness and narrowness of consciousness, to which antisocial feelings of every kind contribute as powerfully as does indolence of thought, that is, the principle of the least possible expenditure of energy (vis inertiae). The advances in our knowledge of nature are verifiable. There are no differences of opinion concerning the periodicity of the chemical elements. The advance of historical knowledge, on the other hand, can be enjoyed only through voluntary participation. It has no useful economic effect, no calculably useful social effect. Hence it encounters indifference or even resistance from the interested egoism embodied in powerful agencies. 1 The protagonists of progress in historical understanding are always isolated individuals, who are led by such historical convulsions as wars and revolutions to put new questions. Thucydides was induced to AN'S KNOWLEDGE

1 It is perhaps not untimely to refer to a warning which dates from 1926. "The expansion of democracy," wrote Max Scheler, "once the ally of free scholarship and philosophy against the supremacy of the ecclesiastically restricted mind, is slowly becoming the greatest danger to intellectual freedom. The type of democracy which condemned Socrates and Anaxagoras in Athens is slowly reappearing in the West and perhaps in North America too. Only the struggling, predominantly liberal democracy of relatively 'small elites'-so the facts already teach us-is an ally of science and philosophy. The democracy now dominant, and finally extended to women and half-children, is not the friend but rather the enemy of reason and science." (Max Scheler, Die Wissensformen und die Gesellschaft [1926], 89)'

3

4

1.

EUROPEAN LITERATURE

undertake his history because he regarded the Peloponnesian War as the greatest war of all times. Augustine wrote his City of God under the impact of Alaric's conquest of Rome. Machiavelli's political and historical writings are his reaction to the French expeditions into Italy. The revolution of 1789 and the Napoleonic wars provoked Hegel's Philosophy of History. Upon the defeat of 1871 followed Taine's revision of French history, upon the establishment of the Hohenzollern empire, Nietzsche's "unseasonable" essay on the "Advantages and Disadvantages of History for Life"-a precursor of the modern discussions of "historism." The end of the first World War was responsible for the resonance Spengler's Decline of the West found in Germany. Deeper in intent and saturated with the entire yield of German philosophy, theology, and history was Ernst Troeltsch's unfinished work, Der Historismus und seine Probleme (1922). Here the evolution of the modern historical consciousness and its present problems are developed in a manner still unsurpassed. The historization of all traditional values had gone further in Germany than in other countries. In Ranke it was connected with the pleasure of aesthetic contemplation (Mitwissenschaft des Alls). It is also alive in Burckhardt, but corrected by an awareness of the deep shadows in the picture. The awareness inspired him with prophetic warnings of the abuses of the omnipotent state-warnings which were verified in the twentieth century. Through publication of sources and the excavations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries an immense amount of material accrued to history. From the caves of Perigord rose the culture of the paleolithic period, from the sands of Egypt the papyri. The Minoan and Hittite past of the Mediterranean basin, the remotest age of Egypt and Mesopotamia, together with exotic cultures such as those of the Mayas or of ancient India, became tangible. European culture stood in contrast to all these as an "intelligible unit" of unique cast, and Troeltsch's discussion of historism became a defining of the essence of "Europeanism." If in many quarters historism was deplored as an enervating relativism, or was skeptically tolerated, Troeltsch gave it the positive sign of a great task whose accomplishment will take generations: "The principle of construction is to go beyond history through history and clear the ground for new creations." The first World War had made the crisis of European culture obvious. How do cultures, and the historical entities which are their media, arise, grow, and decay? Only a comparative morphology of cultures with exact procedures can hope to answer these questions. It was Arnold J. Toynbee who undertook the task. His historical method can signify, for all the historical sciences, a revision of bases and an expansion of horizons which has its analogy in atomic physics. It differs from all earlier philosophies of history by breadth of view and by an empiricism which is in the best English tradition. It is free from dogmatic hypotheses deduced from a principle. What are the ultimate units of the course of history, upon which the historian must train his vision in order to obtain "intelligible

EUROPEAN LITERATURE

5

fields of study"? They are not states, but more comprehensive historical entities, which Toynbee calls "societies" and which we may call cultures. How many of them are there? Twenty-one-neither more nor less. A very small number, then-which, however, makes comparisons possible. Each of these historical entities, through its physical and historical environment and through its inner development, is faced with problems of which it must stand the test. They are challenges, in which it grows or fails. Whether and how it responds to them decides its destiny. In Europe, the old Greek citystates during the period from ca. 725 to ca. 325 afford examples of how different members of the same historical entity can behave in the face of the same situation. Their common problem was an increasing inadequacy of the food supply as a result of population growth. Certain states-such as Corinth and Chalcis-take the step of overseas colonization. Sparta satisfies her land hunger by conquering the neighboring state of Messene. She is thus forced into a total militarization of her forms of life, the consequence of which is cultural paralysis. Athens specializes her agriculture and her industrial products (pottery) for export and makes new political arrangements to give a share in power to the classes called into being by the new economic system. What challenges had Rome to undergo? The decisive one was the century-long struggle with Carthage. After the First Punic War Carthage conquers Spain, intending to make that country's natural resources compensate for her losses in the war. Rome opposes her here, which leads to the Second Punic War. After a hard-won victory, Rome is obliged not only to take possession of Spain but also to secure land communication thither, which finally results in Caesar's conquest of Gaul. Why do the Romans stop at the Rhine, instead of pressing on to the Vistula or the Dnieper? Because in the Augustan Age their vitality was exhausted by two centuries of wars and revolutions. The economic and social revolutions after the Second Punic War had obliged Rome to import great hordes of slaves from the East. These form an "inner proletariat," bring in Oriental religions, and provide the basis on which Christianity, in the form of a "universal church," will make its way into the organism of the Roman universal state. When after the "interregnum" of the barbarian migrations, the Greco-Roman historical entity, in which the Germanic peoples form an "outer proletariat," is replaced by the new Western historical entity, the latter crystallizes along the line Rome-northern Gaul, which had been drawn by Caesar. But the Germanic "barbarians" fall prey to the church, which had survived the universal-state end phase of antique culture. They thereby forego the possibility of bringing a positive intellectual contribution to the new historical entity. They fail in the situation which had gained the northern emigrants into the Balkan peninsula the victory over the CretoMycenaean culture. The "Achaeans" forced their Greek tongue upon the conquered territory, whereas the Germans learned Latin. More precisely: The Franks gave up their language on the soil of Romanized Gaul. These indications may perhaps give an impression of the fruitfulness of

6

1.

EUROPEAN LITERATURE

Toynbee's point of view. They contain some of its basic concepts. We shall say only what is strictly necessary for an understanding of these. According to Toynbee, the life curves of cultures do not follow a fatally predetermined course, as they do according to Spengler. Though their courses are analogous, every culture is unique because it has freedom of choice between different ways of behaving. Individual cultural movements may be independent of one another (for example, the Mayan and Minoan cultures), but they may also be connected genealogically, so that one is the daughter culture of another. Antiquity and the West stand in this relationship, as do the Old Syriac and Arabic cultures and so on. The individual cultural movements take their place in a general movement, which is not to be conceived as progress but as ascent. The cultural entities and their members are seen in the likeness of men climbing a steep cliff-some remain behind, others mount higher and higher. This ascent from the depths of subman and of stationary primitive man is a rhythm in the cosmic pulse beat of life. Within each culture there are guiding minorities who, by attraction and radiation, move the majorities to accompany them. If the creative vitality of these minorities is crippled, they lose their magic power over the uncreative masses. The creative minority then remains only a ruling minority. This condition leads to a secessio plebis, that is, to the rise of an inner and outer proletariat and thus to loss of social unity. These selected and isolated details cannot give even a remote idea of the richness and illuminating power of Toynbee's work-still less of the intellectual strictness of its structure and of the precise controls to which the material presented is subjected. I feel this objection. I can only offer in reply that it is better to give even an inadequate indication of the greatest intellectual accomplishment in the field of history in our day than to pass it over in silence. Such a silence in the face of a scientific discovery represents a concession to scientific intellectual inertia-the evasion, that is, of a "challenge" which breaks unseasonably into the routine of leisurely scholastic occupations. Toynbee's work represents such a challenge to our contemporary historical methods. But I have had another reason for referring to it: A historical concept of Europe is a presupposition for our investigation. Europe is merely a name, a "geographical term" (as Metternich said of Italy), if it is not a historical entity in our perception. But the old-fashioned history of our textbooks cannot be that. General European history does not exist for it; it sees merely a coexistence of unconnected histories of peoples and states. The history of today's or yesterday's "great powers" is taught in artificial isolation, from the standpoint of national myths and ideologies. Thus Europe is dismembered into geographical fragments. By the current division into Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Modern Period, it is also dismembered into chronological fragments. On pedagogical grounds, this twofold dismemberment is necessary to a certain extent (usually exceeded in practice) . But it is equally necessary on pedagogical grounds to offset it by superimposing a general

EUROPEAN LITERATURE

7

view upon it. To comprehend this, we need only glance at the curricula of our schools. The historical picture in the schools always faithfully mirrors academic teaching of history. But from 1864 history in Germany was under the influence of Bismarck and the Hohenzollern empire. All the electors of Brandenburg had to be learned by heart. Did the Weimar Republic drop them? I do not know. But on the basis of the Republic's curricula, I do know how medieval history (916s and designates one "who stood out above the masses through his intellectual abilities" (Kroll). 5 Rhetoric has often been reproached with this. Cf. the discussion in Quintilian, II, 16, 3 ff.

RHETORIC IN ANTIQUITY

rhetoric could pass over into the technique of conducting pleas. But the sophist also desires to be a molder of men, an educator of the nation. He serves paideia through the power of the word. A momentous innovation is next introduced by the Sicilian Gorgias, who comes to Athens as ambassador in 427: the conscious employment of rhyming words to achieve a musico-poetic effect. Thus the study of rhetoric becomes the study of style, a literary technique. "Symmetry between periods of parallel construction, reinforcement of antithesis by assonance and rhyme, abundant use of metaphors, and ingratiating delivery achieved effects, such as only poetry had previously attained." Eloquence entered into conscious competition with poetry. "Hardly anyone at the period was entirely uninfluenced by the new stylistic trend, and its procedures remained in use throughout Antiquity" (Paul Wendland). Gorgias is the first master of epideictic eloquence. In the course of the centuries it developed a rich variety of styles. Without a knowledge of its history, 6 ;;J.ntique literature is incomprehensible. Greek rhetoric, then, came into existence with and through Sophistic. Plato rejected both-just as he did poetry-on philosophical and pedagogical grounds. But Greece could not or would not sacrifice to philosophy the demonic power of artistic eloquence-that intoxicating discovery of the Sophists. And philosophy itself was soon able to comprehend as legitimate productions of the human spirit the artistic forms that Plato had rejected. This was the work of Aristotle. He included both poetry and rhetoric in his philosophical investigation of the arts. There is no doubt that in so doing, he wished to oppose the one-sidedness of Plato's judgment. His theory of the emotions (as in his Poetics), typology of characters, and detailed examination of style were a valuable contribution, an enrichment of rhetoric. His aim is to show that rhetoric is an equally legitimate counterpart to dialectics, which latter, according to Plato, was the crown of all the sciences. For the history of rhetoric, however, Aristotle's book, which came to be little read,7 was of much less significance than the long line of rhetorical textbooks 8 which begins about 340 with that of Anaximenes. In Attica political eloquence was even then attaining its highest dignity and power in Demosthenes (384-322), the leader of the resistance to the Macedonian menace. After the destruction of freedom, however, political eloquence could not but lose all meaning. Judicial oratory also declined, since there were no more state trials. Greek rhetoric took refuge in school exercises, among which the treatment of fictitious legal cases also figured. Beginning with the second century, Greek rhetoricians poured into Rome to teach. Rome's intense political life could not but give the art of oratory a strong stimulus. But contrary to what had been the case in Greece, its ends wer