ABSTRACT
In the middle of the fourteenth century the millennial reign of faith, to which we give the collective name of the Middle Ages, became quite suddenly the Past. Its most representative creations —Scholasticism, Gothic architecture, erotic — the things which formed its glory and its life-essence, became shrivelled, parched, and calcified. The Romanticism of the Middle Ages is the most striking and the one most familiar to our consciousness. The picture that the Middle Ages offer us is full of contradictions. The mediæval soul lies before us, therefore, as a clear, silvery pool, but at the bottom there is agitation: a perpetual seeking without finding; a brewing, a bubbling, a reaching and fumbling. A tragic culture is making way for a bourgeois culture, a chaotic for an organic, finally even for a mechanical one. The world is thenceforward no God-inspired mystery, but a man-made rationality.
