Page:The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages.djvu/22

 M( 4 THE CLASSICAL HERITAGE [chap. / From the third to the fifth century the Grseco- Roman world presents conditions of decadence. Mili- tary courage, civic devotion, intellectual energy, are jj/V^ declining. Decay shows itself in literature and art The phenomena of this pagan decadence present anal ogies in the various provinces of philosophy, ethics law, rhetoric, and grammar, as well as in art and poetry Philosophy and ethics are eclectic: organic princi pies which give consistency are frequently ignored while inconsistent sources are drawn from, and there is a tendency to summarize. In law the tendency is to conserve and compile, then to epitomize ; the crea- tive energy to make an organic system is lacking. In rhetoric, grammar, mathematics, there is merely an arranging of the old and trite examples and a sum- marizing. Consequently resemblances will appear ''throughout the decadent forms in which these vari- ous branches of culture pass over into the Middle Ages. In poetry and art there was not the same palpable summarizing of previous works ; yet the failure of cre- ative faculty appears in the mediocrity of poetic com- positions, in their lack of freshness, their insipid use of borrowed phrase and trite image. The openly pagan poetry of the fourth and fifth centuries was not as cur- rent in the Middle Ages as the semi-pagan verse written by Christians. In this there was some modification of pagan elements, and it may be said generally, as to the paganism carried over into the Middle Ages in Christian writings, that the Christian spirit altered whatever it drew from paganism ; and Christian modi- fications of borrowed pagan elements show analogies among themselves, whether the pagan element happens