Page:The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages.djvu/309

 IX] TRANSITION TO MEDLEVAL POETRY 291 appear to have been an influence in the subsequent mediaeval development of either liturgical or comic plays. The antique drama was dead before the rise of Christian Latin Literature, and there seems to be no connection between it and mediaeval plays.^ Naturally Christian Latin poems reflect classic phrase and pagan commonplace and reminiscence. Plagiarism has been frowned on only in modern times. Classic Latin poets borrowed from the Greeks or from each other. The habit passed to Christian writers. A man seeking to express what he has created or what he has felt and made his own with power, is likely to say it in his own words. Thus it was with some of the early devotional productions of Christian poets ; there is no borrowed phrase or definite classi- cal reminiscence in the hymns of Ambrose. But it was otherwise when a Christian came to reset the Gospel story in hexameters, or, like Paulinus of Nola, occupied his pious leisure writing folios of elegiac verse. The words and phrases of the great poets who 1 That is to say, the antique drama is not connected with the origin of Easter and Christmas plays or " Mysteries " or mediiuval pantomime. See Petit de Julleville, Hist, de la Langue et de la Lit. Fraru;ai8e, Vol. II, pp. 399-445; ib., Les Mysteres; Froning, Das Drama des Mittelalters ; Ebert, op. cit., Ill, 314-329. The Middle Ages even lost the original meaning of the words "comedy" and " tragedy " ; by comedy was understood a poetic narrative begin- ning in horrors and ending joyfally, and using lowly language, while tragedy begins quietly and ends in horror, and uses sublime language,— BO Dante thinks in the letter to Can Grande, Dante's Ep., X, 10. The definition in this letter was taken from Ugoccione da Pisa, see Tojmbee, Dante*» Obligationn to the Magnae Deriva^ tionet of Uguccione da PUa, Romania, XXVI (1897), S37. For post- roediasval Aristotelean conceptions of the drama, see Splngarn, Literary Criticism in the lienaifsanre, p. GO et seq.