able inwardness — that, and not any "artistic" fancifulness. Every man knew the world to be peopled with angel and devil troops. The light-encircled angels of Fra Angelico and the early Rhenish masters, and the grimacing things on the portals of the great cathedrals, really filled the air. Men saw them, felt their presence everywhere. To-day we simply no longer know what a myth is; for it is no mere æsthetically pleasing mode of representing something to oneself, but a piece of the most lively actuality that mines every corner of the waking-consciousness and shakes the innermost structure of being. These creatures were about one all the time. They were glimpsed without being seen. They were believed in with a faith that felt the very thought of proof as a desecration. What we call myth nowadays, our littérateur's and connoisseur's taste for Gothic colour, is nothing but Alexandrinism. In the old days men did not "enjoy" it — behind it stood Death.[1]
For the Devil gained possession of human souls and seduced them into heresy, lechery, and black arts. It was war that was waged against him on earth,[2] and waged with fire and sword upon those who had given themselves up to him. It is easy enough for us to-day to think ourselves out of such notions, but if we eliminate this appalling reality from Gothic, all that remains is mere romanticism. It was not only the love-glowing hymns to Mary, but the cries of countless pyres as well that rose up to heaven. Hard by the Cathedral were the gallows and the wheel. Every man lived in those days in the consciousness of an immense danger, and it was hell, not the hangman, that he feared. Unnumbered thousands of witches genuinely imagined themselves to be so; they denounced themselves, prayed for absolution, and in pure love of truth confessed their night rides and bargains with the Evil One. Inquisitors, in tears and compassion for the fallen wretches, doomed them to the rack in order to save their souls. That is the Gothic myth, out of which came the cathedral, the crusader, the deep and spiritual painting, the mysticism. In its shadow flowered that profound Gothic blissfulness of which to-day we cannot even form an idea.
In Carolingian times, all this was still strange and far. Charlemagne in the first Saxon Capitulary (787) put a ban on the ancient Germanic belief in werewolves and night-gangers (strigæ), and as late as 1120 it was condemned as an error in the decree of Burkard of Worms. But twenty years later it was only in a dilute form that the anathema reappeared in the Decretum Gratiani. Cæsarius of Heisterbach, already, was familiar with the whole devil-legend and in the Legenda Aurea it is just as actual and as effective as the Mary-legends. In 1233, when the Cathedrals of Mainz and Speyer were being vaulted, appeared the bull Vox in Rama, by which the belief in Devil and witch was made canonical.
- ↑ So also in the Classical, the Homeric figures were for educated people of Hellenistic times nothing but literature, representation, artistic motive. Even for Plato's period they were little more than this. But in 1100 B.C, Demeter and Dionysus were a fearful actuality before which men collapsed.
- ↑ The stern object of Roger Bacon's science; see p. 502, foot-note. — Tr.
