was left, which, however, lasted a long time, until, in fact, Classicism had fallen before Christianity. Then after an interregnum of inferiority at once rude and timid, the new art began, influenced doubtless by the communication with the East. Finally, it becomes obvious to us in the buildings raised by Justinian, especially St. Sophia at Constanti

nople, which show a new creation, bearing with it indeed tokens of its birth out of classicism, but yet totally different even as to detail, both in form and spirit. The full weight of the causes which lay behind this transformation will be better appreciated when we come to deal with the art of the fully developed Middle Ages. It is enough here to say that a new style was created, that it only awaited the influence of the barbaric tribes to attain completeness, and that it developed step by step along with the development of the new society in complete accord with all its necessities and aspirations.

The broken fragments of the Roman Empire amidst all this overturn, had to

reckon with that element of the change which was at once most formidable on the surface and most potent for the reconstruction of society, to wit, the incursions of the northern barbarian tribes.

The political change was brought about in this way: Gaul and Spain, Northern Africa, Roman Germany, Britain, countries all populated by colonists and Romanised natives, and even part of Italy itself, fell under the domination of the Teutonic tribes, and the ancestral tribal leaders became their kings and governors, not seldom under the recognised Roman titles of Patrician, Comes, etc. The law of the countries so conquered was the Roman civil law, with the tribal customs grafted on to it. Whatever oral works of imagination they might have carried with them, their literature soon became that of Rome only; for the great epical and mythological poems of the race have been kept alive solely by those tribes who never crossed Roman civilisation.

Their tribal religion soon gave way, nominally at least, to the official religion of the Empire, but nevertheless they

impressed some of their customary traditions on the Medieval Church of the West, and took away some of its eastern character. Mediæval Catholicism retained in consequence a certain portion of the this-worldliness and the solidarity of barbarian society, and so shows on one side a communistic interest in the corporation, whether church, guild, parish, or even monastery, which is quite alien to the individualistic introspectivism of the Christianity of the decaying Empire; the latter appears, on the other hand, sporadically, throughout the Middle Ages, in later times gathering volume under the Lollards, and at last culminating in the Protestantism of the Reformation.

This interpenetration of progressive barbarism and decaying Roman civilisation, so essential to the life of the new epoch, began with the first invasion of Italy by the Goths (406), and went on through centuries of confused war and struggle, till the process of welding together the varying elements grew complete about the time of Charles the Great, who was crowned at Rome in the

year 800. Thus was created the phantom of the Holy Roman, really the German, Empire of the Middle Ages, which continued the legend of Roman domination after the feudal system itself had fallen, while Rome became merely a memory of past history, an ideal for men to look backward to in an age particularly prone to forming such ideals.

CHAPTER IV

MEDIEVAL SOCIETY-EARLY

WE

PERIOD

was

VE have now to deal with that Mediæval Society which based on the fusion of the ideas of tribal communism and Roman individualism and bureaucracy respectively.

The transition from the Pax Romana, the final establishment of the Roman Empire, the high-water mark of classical civilisation, to the apparent chaos which followed the successful inroads of the barbarian tribes in the 5th century is long and obscure. But the fact before hinted at of the corruption of the Empire into a mere centralised taxgathering machine is obvious enough to the careful student of history.