THE LEGACY OF THE GREEKS 151 



It is with a melancholy interest that we reflect that this 

 exquisite flowering of the human intellect was to pass utterly 

 away and to be forgotten for a thousand years ; that a craven 

 and baseless superstition was to come in the stead of this 

 civilisation of beauty and of light ; that the empire of life 

 and mind was to be given over to venal and licentious monsters 

 robed as the vicars of the Most High ; that the race should be 

 despoiled of its fairest attainments ; that art should wither 

 and literature decay ; that freedom of thought should become 

 a crime ; that noble souls should rot in dungeons or agonise 

 in flames ; that grown men should scream with the torture of 

 the rack ; that whole peoples should be butchered ; that the 

 riches of classical times should be piled in heaps and burned 

 as impious. 



But the spectacle of history seems like that of nature. After 

 a period of fruitfulness the field must lie fallow. A mighty 

 creative effort is ofttimes followed by a long period of exhaustion 

 and recuperation. Sometimes the human mind will spend all 

 its energies in one splendid burst. So it seems to have been 

 with Newton in the production of the Principia. One might 

 imagine that the same thing might be true of the mind of the 

 world. We shall perhaps not go wrong in believing that the 

 period of Hellenic fructification came as a sort of climax to ten 

 thousand groping years. As if the earth had borne too heavily, 

 the seasons came, and with them the generation of men, empty- 

 handed and without fruit, through a thousand or fifteen hundred 

 sterile years. 



It is only in this vague wise, apparently, that we may picture 

 the extraordinary eclipse which seemed to come over not merely 

 the whole of Europe, but the whole of Western civilisation. 

 It would be a mistake to suppose that this was merely the re- 

 crudescence of paganism, or, again, that it was due merely to 

 a triumph of religious fanaticism. The new faith of Europe 

 was, it is true, but little more than a revival, with some addi- 

 tions, of the old pagan cult. But in some sense the period of 

 darkness had set in before the Church had gained its hold. 

 Nero and the monsters of the purple preceded St. Augustine 

 and the fathers. Imperial Rome was the penumbra ; Christian 

 Rome was the full shadow. 



There has been in recent years a tendency to revive some- 

 what the accepted picture of the Interregnum, to discover that 



