ondition like
asceticism must leave unbiassed all such minds as are incapable of
feeling it; but a social institution like feudalism walls in the life of
every individual, and forces his intellectual movements into given
paths; nor is there any escape, excepting in places where, as in Italy
and in the free towns of the North, the feudal conditions are wholly or
partially unknown. To feudalism, therefore, would I ascribe this, which
appears at first so purely aesthetic, as opposed to social, a
characteristic of the Middle Ages. Ever since Schiller, in his "Gods of
Greece," spoke for the first time of undivinized Nature (_die
entgoetterte Natur_), it has been the fashion among certain critics to
fall foul of Christianity for having robbed the fields and woods of
their gods, and reduced to mere manured clods the things which had been
held sacred by antiquity. Desecrated in those long mediaeval centuries
Nature may truly have been, but not by the holy water of Christian
priests. Desecrated because out of the fields and meadows was driven a
divinity greater than Pales or Vertumnus or mighty Pan, the divinity
called _Man_. For in the terrible times when civilization was at its
lowest, the things of the world had been newly allotted; and by this new
allotment, man--the man who thinks and loves and hopes and strives, man
who fights and sings--was shut out from the fields and meadows,
forbidden the labour, nay, almost the sight, of the earth; and to the
tending of kine, and sowing of crops, to all those occupations which
antiquity had associated with piety and righteousness, had deemed worthy
of the gods themselves, was assigned, or rather condemned, a creature
whom every advancing year untaught to think or love, or hope, or fight,
or strive; but taught most utterly to suffer and to despair. For a man
it is difficult to call him, this mediaeval serf, this lump of earth
detached from the field and wrought into a semblance of manhood, merely
that the soil of which it is part should be delved and sown, and then
manured with its carcass or its blood; nor as a man did the Middle Ages
conceive it. The serf was not even allowed human progenitors: his foul
breed had originated in an obscene miracle; his stupidity and ferocity
were as those of the beasts; his cunning was demoniac; he was born under
God's curse; no words could paint his wickedness, no persecutions could
exceed his deserts; the whole world turned pale at his crime, for he it