Page:The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages.djvu/315

 IX] TRANSITION TO MEDIiEVAL POETRY 297 On the other hand, the antique spirit ceases utterly ; it is replaced by the more completely Christianized genius of the Middle Ages. Speaking more particu- larly, the antique sense of form and proportion, the antique observance of the mean and avoidance of ex- travagance and excess, the antique dislike for the unlimited or the monstrous, the antique feeling for literary unity, and abstention from irrelevancy, the frank love for all that is beautiful or charming, for the beauty of the body and for everything connected with the joy of mortal life, the antique reticence as to hopes or fears of what was beyond the grave, the antique self-control and self-reliance, — these qualities cease in mediaeval Latin poetry. The analogy is clear between poetry and the arts of sculpture and painting ; in those also, antique theme and reference survived, as well as antique ornament and design ; but the antique spirit ceased and was superseded by the mediaeval genius, which within general lines of homogeneity showed itself so diversely according to the characters of the different peoples of the Middle Ages. The traits of the various peoples of Western Europe soon began to appear in their Latin verse and prose, as through a veil, in no wise as clearly as they were to show themselves in the vernacular literatures. Incip- ient French traits, for example, appear in the balance and moderation, the neatness or deftness of form, of the poems of Paulinus of Nola. In a different way they also appear in Gregory of Tours' Historia Fran- coTTim, a work in which the Latin is taking the French order of words and acquiring some of the vivacity and picturesqueness of Froissart. Again, we seem yaguely