The new religion may have contributed new hope and erected new
standards, but it also contributed exaggerations, contradictions, and
new uncertainties. The life of logic began to be displaced by the life
of feeling.
The change and turmoil of the times that attended and followed the
crumbling of the Roman world were favorable neither to the production of
letters nor to the enjoyment of a literary heritage. Goth, Byzantine,
Lombard, Frank, German, Saracen, and Norman made free of the soil of
Italy. If men were not without leisure, they were without the leisure of
peaceful and careful contemplation, and lacked the buoyant heart without
which assimilation of art is hardly less possible than creation.
Ignorance had descended upon the world, and gross darkness covered the
people. The classical authors were solid, the meat of vigorous minds.
Their language, never the facile language of the people and the
partially disciplined, now became a resisting medium that was foreign to
the general run of men. Their syntax was archaic and crabbed, their
metres forgotten. Their substance, never grasped without effort, was now
not only difficult, but became the abstruse matter of another people and
another age.
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