The Continental Monthly, Vol I, Issue I, January 1862, page 19 by Various Authors
<< Return to Title Details & Download20
hundred people as would serve now for one mechanic. People of the highest rank slept naked to save night-clothes. If in Flanders or in Italy we find during their high prosperity some exceptions to this knightly and chivalric piggishness and penury, it is none the less true that they outbalanced it by sundry and peculiar vices. And yet, bad as life then was, it is impossible for us to guess at, or realize, all its foulness. We know it mostly from poets, and the poet and historian, like the artist, have in every age lived quite out of the actual, and with all the tact of repulsion avoided common facts.
But it is with the multitude that truth and common sense and humanity have to deal. And here, whether in Greece or in England, in Italy or in France, lies in the past an abyss of horror whose greatest wonder is, that we, who are only some three centuries distant, know so little of it. There is a favorite compensative theory that man is miraculously self-adaptive to all circumstances, and that deprived of modern comforts and luxuries he would only become more vigorous and independent--that in fact he was on the whole considerably happier under a feudal baron than he has been since. I will believe in this when I find that a man who has exchanged a stinging gout for a mere rheumatism finds himself entirely free from pain. No, the serfs of the Middle Ages were in no sense happy. Stifled moans of misery, a sense of their unutterable agonies, steal up from proverb and by-corners of history--we feel that they were more miserable than jail prisoners at the present day--for then, as now, man groaned at being an inferior, and he had much more than that to groan over in those days of strifes and dirt. And yet every one of those serfs was God's child, as well as the baron who enslaved him. To himself he was a world with an eternity, and of as much importance as all other men. Through what strange heresies and insurrections, based either on innate passion or religious conviction, do we not find Republicanism bursting out i