An Enquiry into the Life and Legend of Michael Scot. J. Wood Brown
manuscript sources for the life of Scot than I might otherwise have thought necessary, and has proved thus perhaps rather of advantage. It is inevitable indeed that a work of this kind, undertaken several ages too late, should be comparatively barren in those dates and intimate details which are so satisfactory to our curiosity when we can fall upon them. In the absence of these, however, our attention is naturally fixed, and not, as it seems to me, unprofitably, on what is after all of higher or more enduring importance. The mind is free to take a wider range, and in place of losing itself in the lesser facts of an individual life, studies the intellectual movements and gauges the progress of what was certainly a remarkable epoch in philosophy, science, and literature. The almost exact reproduction in Spain during the thirteenth century of the Alexandrian school of thought and science and even superstition; the part played by the Arab race in this curious transference, and the close relation it holds to our modern intellectual life—if the volume now published be found to throw light on subjects so little understood, yet so worthy of study, I shall feel more than rewarded for the pains and care spent in its preparation.
In the course of researches among the libraries of Scotland and Italy, of England and France, of Spain and Germany, I have received much kindness from the learned men who direct these institutions. I therefore gladly avail myself of this opportunity to express my thanks in general to all those who have so kindly come to my help, and in particular to Signor Comm. G. Biagi, and Signor Prof. E. Rostagno of the Laurentian Library; to Signore L. Licini of the Riccardian Library; to the Rev. Padre Ehrle of the Vatican Library; to Signor Cav. Giorgi, and the Conte Passerini of the Casanatense; to Signor Prof. Menghini of the Vittorio Emanuele Library, Rome; and to Signor Comm. Cugnoni of the Chigi Library. I am also much indebted to the kindness of Professor R. Foerster of Breslau; of Mr. W. M. Lindsay, Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford, and the Rev. R. Langton Douglas of New College, who have furnished me with valuable notes from the libraries of that university, and, not least of all, to the interest taken in my work by Mr. Charles Godfrey Leland, who has been good enough to read it in manuscript, and to favour me with curious material and valuable suggestions.
If the result of my studies should prove somewhat disappointing to the reader, I can but plead the excuse with which Pliny furnishes me, it is one having peculiar application to such a task as is here attempted: ‘Res ardua,’ he says, ‘vetustis novitatem dare, novis auctoritatem, obsoletis nitorem, obscuris lucem, fastiditis gratiam, dubiis fidem, omnibus vero naturam, et naturae suae omnia.’
17 Via Montebello,
Florence, November 17th, 1896.
CHAPTER I
BIRTHPLACE AND EARLY STUDIES OF MICHAEL SCOT
In the Borders of Scotland it is well known that any piece of hill pasture, if it be fenced in but for a little from the constant cropping of the sheep, will soon show springing shoots of forest trees indigenous to the soil, whose roots remain wherever the plough has not passed too deeply. Centuries ago, when nature had her way and was unrestrained, the whole south-eastern part of the country was covered with dense forests and filled with forest-dwellers; the wild creatures that form the prey of the snare and the quarry of the chase. In the deep valleys, and by the streams of Tweed and Teviot, and many another river of that well-watered land, stood the great ranks and masses of the oak and beech as captains and patriarchs of the forest, mingled with the humbler whitethorn which made a dense undergrowth wherever the sun could reach. On the heights grew the sombre firs; their gnarled and ruddy branches crowned with masses of bluish-green foliage, while the alders followed the water-courses, and, aided by the shelter of these secret valleys, all but reached the last summits of the hills, which alone, in many a varied slope and peak and swelling breast, rose eminent and commanding over these dark and almost unbroken woodlands.
Such was south-eastern Scotland in the twelfth century: a country fitted to be the home of men of action rather than of thought; men whose joy should lie in the chase and the conflict with nature as yet unsubdued, who could track the savage creatures of the forest to their dens, and clear the land where it pleased them, and build, and dwell, and beget children in their own likeness, till by the labours of generations that country should become pastoral, peaceful, and fit for fertile tillage as we see it now.
Already, at the early time of which we speak, something of this work had been begun. There were gaps in the high forest where it lay well to the sun: little clearings marked by the ridge and furrow of a rude agriculture. Here and there a baron’s lonely tower raised its grey horn on high, sheltering a troop of men-at-arms who made it their business to guard the land in war, and in peace to rid it of the savage forest-creatures that hindered the hind and herd in their labour and their hope. In the main valleys more than one great monastery was rising, or already built, by the waters of Tweed and Teviot. The inmates of these religious houses took their share in the whole duty of peaceful Scottish men by following trades at home or superintending the labours of an army of hinds who broke in and made profitable the wide abbey lands scattered here and there over many a lowland county. All was energy, action, and progress: a form of life which left but little room for the enterprises of the mind, the conflicts and conquests which can alone be known and won in the world of thought within.
These conditions we know to have reared and trained generations of men well fitted to follow the pursuits of hardy and active life, yet they cannot have been so constraining as to hinder the birth of some at least who possessed an altogether different temper of mind and body. The lowland Scots were even then of a mixed race: the ancestry which tends more than any other to the production of life-eddies, where thought rather than activity naturally forms and dwells, while the current of the main stream sweeps past in its ordinary course. Grant the appearance of such natures here and there in these early times, and it is easy to see much in the only life then possible that was fit to foster their natural tendencies. The deep woodlands were not only scenes of labour where sturdy arms found constant employment, they were homes of mystery in which the young imagination loved to dwell; peopling them with half-human shapes more graceful than their stateliest trees, and half-brutal monsters more terrible than the fiercest wolf or bear. The distant sun and stars were more than a heavenly horologe set to mark the hours for labour or vigil, they were an unexplored scene of wonder which patient and brooding thought alone could reach and interpret. The trivial flight and annual return of birds, tracing like the wild geese a mysterious wedge against the sky of winter, gave more than a signal for the chase, which was all that ordinary men saw in it. To these finer natures it brought the awakening which those know who have learned to ask the mighty questions—Why? Whence? and Whither? demands which will not be denied till they have touched the heights and fathomed the depths of human life itself. Our life is a bird, said one in these early ages, which flies by night, and, entering lighted hall at one end, swiftly passeth out at the other. So come we, who knoweth whence, and so pass we, who knoweth whither? From the darkness we come and to the darkness we go, and the brief light that is meanwhile ours cannot make the mystery plain.
But though the nature of this primitive life in early Scottish days could not hinder the appearance of men of thought, and even helped their development as soon as they began to show the movements of active intellect, yet on the other hand Scotland had not reached that culture which affords such natures their due and full opportunity. Centuries were yet to pass before the foundation of St. Andrews as the first Scottish university. The grammar-schools of the country[2] were but a step to the studies of some foreign seat of learning. The churchmen who filled considerable positions at home were either Italians, or had at least been trained abroad, so that everything in those days pointed to that path of foreign study which has since been trodden by so many generations of Scottish students. The bright example of Scotus Erigena, who had reached such a high place in France under Charles the Bald, was an incitement to the northern world of letters. Young men of parts and promise naturally sought their opportunity to go abroad in the hope of finding like honourable employment, or, better still, of returning crowned with the honours of the schools to occupy some distinguished ecclesiastical position in their native country.
This