So rough and common a life-picture of the Middle Age will, I am
afraid, whether faithful or not, be far from acceptable to those who
take their notions of that period principally from such exquisite
dreams as the fictions of Fouque, and of certain moderns whose
graceful minds, like some enchanted well,
In whose calm depths the pure and beautiful
Alone are mirrored,
are, on account of their very sweetness and simplicity, singularly
unfitted to convey any true likeness of the coarse and stormy Middle
Age. I have been already accused, by others than Romanists, of
profaning this whole subject--i.e. of telling the whole truth,
pleasant or not, about it. But really, time enough has been lost in
ignorant abuse of that period, and time enough also, lately, in
blind adoration of it. When shall we learn to see it as it was?--
the dawning manhood of Europe--rich with all the tenderness, the
simplicity, the enthusiasm of youth--but also darkened, alas! with
its full share of youth's precipitance and extravagance, fierce
passions and blind self-will--its virtues and its vices colossal,
and, for that very reason, always haunted by the twin-imp of the
colossal--the caricatured.
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