Page:Illustrations of the history of medieval thought and learning.djvu/123

Rh A competitive system such as that John refers to, was a natural result of the i intellectual restlessness of the time. The aim of the school of Chartres was directly opposed to this. Grammar, according to Bernard, was not to be treated as a mere technical study, as an instrument to be used in philosophy or theology: it was an end in itself. In a word he endeavoured according to his lights to substitute for grammar philology in the large sense. The level to which he attained may appear to us very imperfect; but we have at least this testimony to his success, that John of Salisbury, who followed his method, wrote indisputably the purest, if not the most graceful, Latin of the middle ages. He has a taste in style and a breadth of reading for which no previous period has prepared us. The idea of learning which he reveals is something quite different from what we meet with in the preceding centuries, whether in the eleventh, in the verbose inanities of k Anselm the Peripatetic, or even at the close of the ninth, in the childish unconsciousness of saint Notker Balbulus, himself an inmate of the renowned monastery of Saint Gall. The latter, after discoursing at length l Of the famous Men who have expounded the holy Scriptures, thinks it necessary to say a word about secular literature. For the rest, he says (he is writing to Solomon, afterwards bishop of Constance), ''if thou desirest to know also the authors of the gentiles, read Priscian. Moreover, the histories of Josephus the Jew and of our Hegesippus should be read. And I set an end to my book. Amen.''

From what has been said of Bernard's conservative temper, and of the way in which he held aloof from the popular wrangle of dialectical controversies, it may fairly be surmised that his school did not attract so great a number of pupils as some other schools which had sprung up with the dialectical movement, and which devoted themselves to the novel vogue. Such, as we shall see, were those of Melun, and of Saint Geneviève and the Petit Pont at Paris. At the same time we may reasonably infer that Chartres attracted a distinctly higher class