"Elegy written in a Country Churchyard"--knew nothing of the Exeter and
Vercelli Books, nothing of the Ruthwell Cross. But they were poets,
practitioners of our literature in the true line of descent, and they
knew certain things which all such artists know by instinct. So, before
our historians of thirty-odd years ago started to make Chaucer and
Beowulf one, these rude forefathers made them two. 'Nor am I confident
they erred.' Rather I am confident, and hope in succeeding lectures to
convince you, that, venerable as Anglo-Saxon is, and worthy to be studied
as the mother of our vernacular speech (as for a dozen other reasons
which my friend Professor Chadwick will give you), its value is
historical rather than literary, since from it our Literature
is not descended. Let me repeat it in words that admit of no
misunderstanding--_From Anglo-Saxon Prose, from Anglo-Saxon Poetry our
living Prose and Poetry have, save linguistically, no derivation_. I
shall attempt to demonstrate that, whether or not Anglo-Saxon
literature, such as it was, died of inherent weakness, die it did, and
of its collapse the "Vision of Piers Plowman" may be regarded as the
last dying spasm. I shall attempt to convince you that Chaucer did not
inherit any secret from Caedmon or Cynewulf, but deserves his old title,
'Father of English Poetry,' because through Dante, through Boccaccio,
through the lays and songs of Provence, he explored back to the
Mediterranean, and opened for Englishmen a commerce in the true
intellectual mart of Europe. I shall attempt to heap proof on you that
whatever the agency--whether through Wyat or Spenser, Marlowe or
Shakespeare, or Donne, or Milton, or Dryden, or Pope, or Johnson, or
even Wordsworth--always our literature has obeyed, however
unconsciously, the precept _Antiquam exquirite matrem_, 'Seek back to
the ancient mother'; always it has recreated itself, has kept itself
pure and strong, by harking back to bathe in those native--yes,
_native_--Mediterranean springs.
Do not presume me to be right in this. Rather, if you will, presume me to
be wrong until the evidence is laid out for your judgment. But at least
understand to-day how profoundly a man, holding that view, must deplore
the whole course of academical literary study during these thirty years
or so, and how distrust what he holds to be its basal fallacies.
For, literature being written in language, yet being something quite
distinct, and the development of our language having been fairly
continuous, while the literature of our nation exhibits a false start--a
break, silence, repentance, then a renewal on right glorious lines--our
students of literature have been drilled to follow the specious
continuance while ignoring the actual break, and so to commit the one
most fatal error in any study; that of mistaking the inessential for the
essential.
As I tried to persuade you in my Inaugural Lecture, our first duty to
Literature is to study it absolutely, to understand, in Aristotelian
phrase, its [Greek: to ti en einae]; what it _is_ and what it _means_. If
that be our quest, and the height of it be realised, it is nothing to
us--or almost nothing--to know of a certain alleged poet of the fifteenth
century, that he helped us over a local or temporary disturbance in our
vowel-endings. It is everything to have acquired and to possess such a
norm of Poetry within us that we know whether or not what he wrote was
POETRY.
Do not think this easy. The study of right literary criticism is much
more difficult than the false path usually trodden; so difficult, indeed,
that you may easily count the men who have attempted to grasp the great
rules and apply them to writing as an art to be practised. But the names
include some very great ones--Aristotle, Horace, Quintilian, Corneille,
Boileau, Dryden, Johnson, Lessing, Coleridge, Goethe, Sainte-Beuve,
Arnold: and the study, though it may not find its pattern in our time, is
not unworthy to be proposed for another attempt before a great
University.
LECTURE IX.
ON THE LINEAGE OF ENGLISH LITERATURE (II)
Wednesday, November 5
Some of you whose avocations call them, from time to time, to Newmarket
may have noted, at a little distance out from Cambridge, a by-road
advertised as leading to Quy and Swaffham. It also leads to the site of
an old Roman villa; but you need not interrupt your business to visit
this, since the best thing discovered there--a piece of tessellated
pavement--has been removed and deposited in the Geological Museum here in
Downing Street, where you may study it very conveniently. It is not at
all a first-class specimen of its kind: not to be compared, for example,
with the wonderful pavement at Dorchester, or with that (measuring 35
feet by 20) of the great villa unearthed, a hundred years ago, at
Stonesfield in Oxfordshire: but I take it as the handiest, and am going
to build a small conjecture upon it, or rather a small suggestion of a
guess. Remember there is no harm in guessing so long as we do not pretend
our guess-work to be something else.
I will ask you to consider first that in these pavements, laid bare for
us as 'the whistling rustic tends his plough,' we have work dating
somewhere between the first and fifth centuries, work of unchallengeable
beauty, work of a beauty certainly not rivalled until we come to the
Norman builders of five or six hundred years later. I want you to let
your minds dwell on these long stretches of time--four hundred years or
so of Roman occupation (counting, not from Cæsar's raids, but from the
serious invasion of 43 A.D. under Aulus Plautius, say to some while after
the famous letter of Honorius, calling home the legions). You may safely
put it at four hundred years, and then count six hundred as the space
before the Normans arrive--a thousand years altogether, or but a
fraction--one short generation--less than the interval of time that
separates us from King Alfred. In the great Cathedral of Winchester
(where sleep, by the way, two gentle writers specially beloved, Isaak
Walton and Jane Austen) above the choir-screen to the south, you may see
a line of painted chests, of which the inscription on one tells you that
it holds what was mortal of King Canute.
Here are sands, ignoble things,
Dropp'd from the ruin'd sides of Kings.
But if you walk around to the north of the altar you will find yourself
treading on tiles not so very far short of twice that antiquity.
Gentlemen, do not think that I would ever speak lightly of our lineage:
only let us make as certain as we may what that lineage is.
I want you to-day to understand just what such a pavement as that
preserved for your inspection in Downing Street meant to the man who saw
it laid and owned it these fifteen hundred years--more or less--ago. _Ubi
Romanus vicit, ibi habitat_--'where the Roman has conquered, there he
settles': but whether he conquered or settled he carried these small
tiles, these _tessellæ_, as religiously as ever Rachel stole her
teraphin. 'Wherever his feet went there went the tessellated pavement for
them to stand on. Even generals on foreign service carried in panniers on
muleback the little coloured cubes or _tessellæ_ for laying down a
pavement in each camping-place, to be taken up again when they moved
forward. In England the same sweet emblems of the younger gods of poetic
legend, of love, youth, plenty, and all their happy naturalism, are found
constantly repeated.'[1] I am quoting these sentences from a local
historian, but you see how these relics have a knack of inspiring prose
at once scholarly and imaginative, as (for a more famous instance) the
urns disinterred at Walsingham once inspired Sir Thomas Browne's. To
continue and adapt the quotation--
Bacchus with his wild rout, Orpheus playing to a spell-bound audience,
Apollo singing to the lyre, Venus in Mars' embrace, Neptune with a host
of seamen, scollops, and trumpets, Narcissus by the fountain, Jove and
Ganymede, Leda and the swan, wood-nymphs and naiads, satyrs and fauns,
masks, hautboys, cornucopiæ, flowers and baskets of golden fruit--what
touches of home they must have seemed to these old dwellers in the
Cambridgeshire wilds!
Yes, touches of home! For the owner of this villa (you may conceive) is
the grandson or even great-great-grandson of the colonist who first built
it, following in the wake of the legionaries. The family has prospered
and our man is now a considerable landowner. He was born in Britain: his
children have been born here: and here he lives a comfortable,
well-to-do, out-of-door life, in its essentials I daresay not so very
unlike the life of an English country squire to-day. Instead of chasing
foxes or hares he hunts the wolf and the wild boar; but the sport is
good and he returns with an appetite. He has added a summer parlour to
the house, with a northern aspect and no heating-flues: for the old
parlour he has enlarged the præfurnium, and through the long winter
evenings sits far better warmed than many a master of a modern
country-house. A belt of trees on the brow of the rise protects him from
the worst winds, and to the south his daughters have planted violet-beds
which will breathe odorously in the spring. He has rebuilt and enlarged
the slave-quarters and outhouses, replaced the stucco pillars around the
atrium with a colonnade of polished stone, and, where stucco remains,
has repainted it in fresh colours. He knows that there are no gaps or
weak spots in his stockade fence--wood is always cheap. In a word he has
improved the estate; is modestly proud of it; and will be content, like
the old Athenian, to leave his patrimony not worse but something better
than he found it.
Sensible men--and the Romans were eminently that--as a rule contrive to
live decently, or, at least, tolerably. What struck Arthur Young more
than anything else in his travels through France on the very eve of the
Revolution seems to have been the general good-tempered happiness of the
French gentry on their estates. We may moralise of the Roman colonists as
of the French proprietors that 'unconscious of their doom the little
victims played'; but we have no right to throw back on them the shadow of
what was to come or to cloud the picture of a useful, peaceable, maybe
more than moderately happy life, with our later knowledge of disaster
mercifully hidden from it.
Although our colonist and his family have all been born in Britain, are
happy enough here on the whole, and talk without more than half meaning
it, and to amuse themselves with speculations half-wistful, of daring the
tremendous journey and setting eyes on Rome some day, their pride is to
belong to her, to Rome, the imperial City, the city afar: their windows
open back towards her as Daniel's did towards Jerusalem--_Urbs quam
dicunt Roman--the_ City. Along the great road, hard by, her imperial writ
runs. They have never subscribed to the vow of Ruth, 'Thy people shall be
my people and thy God my God.' They dwell under the Pax Romana, not
merely protected by it but as _citizens_. Theirs are the ancestral
deities portrayed on that unfading pavement in the very centre of the
villa--Apollo and Daphne, Bacchus and Ariadne--
For ever warm and still to be enjoyed,
For ever panting, and for ever young.
Parcels come to them, forwarded from the near military station; come by
those trade-routes, mysterious to us, concerning which a most
illuminating book waits to be written by somebody. There are parcels of
seeds--useful vegetables and potherbs, helichryse (marigold as we call
them now) for the flower garden, for the colonnade even roses with real
Italian earth damp about their roots. There are parcels of books,
too--rolls rather, or tablets--wherein the family reads about Rome; of
its wealth, the uproar of its traffic, the innumerable chimneys smoking,
_fumum et opes strepitumque_. For they are always reading of Rome;
feeling themselves, as they read, to belong to it, to be neither savage
nor even rustic, but by birthright _of the city_, urbane; and what these
exiles read is of how Horace met a bore on the Sacred Road (which would
correspond, more or less, with our Piccadilly)--
Along the Sacred Road I strolled one day
Deep in some bagatelle (you know my way)
When up comes one whose face I scarcely knew--
'The dearest of dear fellows! how d'ye do?'
--He grasped my hand. 'Well, thanks! The same to you?'
--or of how Horace apologises for protracting a summer jaunt to his
country seat:--
Five days I told you at my farm I'd stay,
And lo! the whole of August I'm away.
Well but, Maecenas, you would have me live,
And, were I sick, my absence you'd forgive.
So let me crave indulgence for the fear
Of falling ill at this bad time of year.
When, thanks to early figs and sultry heat,
The undertaker figures with his suite;
When fathers all and fond mammas grow pale
At what may happen to their young heirs male,
And courts and levees, town-bred mortals' ills,
Bring fevers on, and break the seals of wills.
(Conington's translation.)
Consider those lines; then consider how long it took the inhabitants
of this island--the cultured ones who count as readers or
writers--to recapture just that note of urbanity. Other things
our forefathers --Britons, Saxons, Normans, Dutch or French
refugees--discovered by the way; worthier things if you will; but not
until the eighteenth century do you find just that note recaptured; the
note of easy confidence that our London had become what Rome had been,
the Capital city. You begin to meet it in Dryden; with Addison it is
fairly established. Pass a few years, and with Samuel Johnson it is
taken for granted. His _London_ is Juvenal's Rome, and the same satire
applies to one as applied to the other. But against the urbane lines
written by one Horace some while before Juvenal let us set a passage
from another Horace--Horace Walpole, seventeen hundred years later and
some little while ahead of Johnson. He, like our Roman colonist, is a
settler in a new country, Twickenham; and like Flaccus he loves to
escape from town life.
TWICKENHAM, June 8th, 1747.
To the Hon. H. S. CONWAY.
You perceive by my date that I am got into a new camp, and have left
my tub at Windsor. It is a little plaything-house that I got out of
Mrs Chevenix's shop, and the prettiest bauble you ever saw. It is set
in enamelled meadows with filagree hedges:
A small Euphrates through the place is roll'd,
And little finches wave their wings of gold.
Two delightful roads; that you would call dusty, supply me continually
with coaches and chaises: barges as solemn as Barons of the Exchequer
move under my window; Richmond Hill and Ham Walks bound my prospect;
but, thank God! the Thames is between me and the Duchess of
Queensberry. Dowagers as plenty as flounders inhabit all around, and
Pope's ghost is just now skimming under my window by the most poetical
moonlight.... The Chevenixes had tricked it out for themselves; up two
pairs of stairs is what they call Mr Chevenix's library, furnished
with three maps, one shelf, a bust of Sir Isaac Newton and a lame
telescope without any glasses. Lord John Sackville _predeceased_ me
here and instituted certain games called _cricketalia_, which has been
celebrated this very evening in honour of him in a neighbouring
meadow.
You will think I have removed my philosophy from Windsor with my
tea-things hither; for I am writing to you in all tranquility while a
Parliament is bursting about my ears. You know it is going to be
dissolved.... They say the Prince has taken up two hundred thousand
pounds, to carry elections which he won't carry--he had much better
have saved it to buy the Parliament after it is chosen.
There you have Horatio Walpole, the man-about-town, almost precisely
echoing Horatius Flaccus, the man-about-town; and this (if you will bring
your minds to it) is just the sort of passage a Roman colonist in Britain
would open upon, out of his parcel of new books, and read, _and
understand_, some eighteen hundred years ago.
What became of it all?--of that easy colonial life, of the men and women
who trod those tessellated pavements? 'Wiped out,' say the historians,
knowing nothing, merely guessing: for you may with small trouble assure
yourselves that the fifth and sixth centuries in the story of this island
are a blind spot, concerning which one man's guess may be as good as
another's. 'Wiped out,' they will commonly agree; for while, as I warned
you in another lecture, the pedantic mind, faced with a difficulty, tends
to remove it conveniently into a category to which it does not belong,
still more prone is the pedantic mind to remove it out of existence
altogether. So 'wiped out' is the theory; and upon it a sympathetic
imagination can invent what sorrowful pictures it will of departing
legions, the last little cloud of dust down the highway, the lovers by
the gate watching it, not comprehending; the peaceful homestead in the
background, ripe for doom--and what-not.
Or, stay! There is another theory to which the late Professor Freeman
inclined (if so sturdy a figure could be said to incline), laying stress
on a passage in Gildas, that the Romans in Britain, faced by the Saxon
invader, got together their money, and bolted away into Gaul. 'The Romans
that were in Britain gathered together their gold-hoard, hid part in the
ground and carried the rest over to Gaul,' writes Gildas. 'The hiding in
the ground,' says Freeman, 'is of course a guess to explain the frequent
finding of Roman coins'--which indeed it _does_ explain better than the
guess that they were carried away, and perhaps better than the
schoolboy's suggestion that during their occupation of Britain the Romans
spent most of their time in dropping money about. Likely enough, large
numbers of the colonists did gather up what they could and flee before
the approaching storm; but by no means all, I think. For (since, where
all is uncertain, we must reason from what is probable of human nature)
in the first place men with large estates do not behave in that way
before a danger which creeps upon them little by little, as this Saxon
danger did. These colonists could not dig up their fields and carry them
over to Gaul. They did not keep banking accounts; and in the course of
four hundred years their main wealth had certainly been sunk in the land.
They could not carry away their villas. We know that many of them did not
carry away the _tessellæ_ for which (as we have seen) they had so
peculiar a veneration; for these remain. Secondly, if the colonists left
Britain in a mass, when in the middle of the sixth century we find
Belisarius offering the Goths to trade Britain for Sicily, as being 'much
larger and this long time subservient to Roman rule,'[2] we must suppose
either (as Freeman appears to suppose) that Belisarius did not know what
he was offering, or that he was attempting a gigantic 'bluff,' or lastly
that he really was offering an exchange not flatly derisory; of which
three possible suppositions I prefer the last as the likeliest. Nor am I
the less inclined to choose it, because these very English historians go
on to clear the ground in a like convenient way of the Celtic
inhabitants, exterminating them as they exterminated the Romans,
with a wave of the hand, quite in the fashion of Mr Podsnap. 'This is
un-English: therefore for me it merely ceases to exist.'
'_Probable extirpation of the Celtic inhabitants_' jots down Freeman in
his margin, and proceeds to write:
In short, though the literal extirpation of a nation is an
impossibility, there is every reason to believe that the Celtic
inhabitants of those parts of Britain which had become English at the
end of the sixth century had been as nearly extinguished as a nation
could be. The women doubtless would be largely spared, but as far as
the male sex is concerned we may feel sure that death, emigration, or
personal slavery were the only alternatives which the vanquished found
at the hands of our fathers.
Upon this passage, if brought to me in an undergraduate essay, I should
have much to say. The style, with its abstract nouns ('the literal
extirpation of a nation is an impossibility'), its padding and
periphrasis ('there is every reason to believe' ... 'as far as the male
sex is concerned we may feel sure') betrays the loose thought. It begins
with 'in short' and proceeds to be long-winded. It commits what even
schoolboys know to be a solecism by inviting us to consider three
'alternatives'; and what can I say of 'the women doubtless would be
largely spared,' save that besides scanning in iambics it says what
Freeman never meant and what no-one outside of an Aristophanic comedy
could ever suggest? 'The women doubtless would be largely spared'! It
reminds me of the young lady in Cornwall who, asked by her vicar if she
had been confirmed, admitted blushingly that 'she had reason to believe,
partially so.'
'The women doubtless would be largely spared'!--But I thank the Professor
for teaching me that phrase, because it tries to convey just what I am
driving at. The Jutes, Angles, Saxons, did not extirpate the Britons,
whatever you may hold concerning the Romans. For, once again, men do not
behave in that way, and certainly will not when a live slave is worth
money. Secondly, the very horror with which men spoke, centuries after,
of Anderida quite plainly indicates that such a wholesale massacre was
exceptional, monstrous. If not exceptional, monstrous, why should this
particular slaughter have lingered so ineffaceably in their memories?
Finally,--and to be as curt as the question deserves--the Celtic Briton
in the island was not exterminated and never came near to being
exterminated: but on the contrary, remains equipollent with the Saxon in
our blood, and perhaps equipollent with that mysterious race we call
Iberian, which came before either and endures in this island to-day, as
anyone travelling it with eyes in his head can see. Pict, Dane, Norman,
Frisian, Huguenot French--these and others come in. If mixture of blood
be a shame, we have purchased at the price of that shame the glory of
catholicism; and I know of nothing more false in science or more actively
poisonous in politics or in the arts than the assumption that we belong
as a race to the Teutonic family.
Dane, Norman, Frisian, French Huguenot--they all come in. And will you
refuse a hearing when I claim that the Roman came in too? Bethink you how
deeply Rome engraved itself on this island and its features. Bethink you
that, as human nature is, no conquering race ever lived or could
live--even in garrison--among a tributary one without begetting children
on it. Bethink you yet further of Freeman's admission that in the
wholesale (and quite hypothetical) general massacre 'the women doubtless
would be largely spared'; and you advance nearer to my point. I see a
people which for four hundred years was permeated by Rome. If you insist
on its being a Teutonic people (which I flatly deny) then you have one
which _alone of Teutonic peoples_ has inherited the Roman gift of
consolidating conquest, of colonising in the wake of its armies; of
driving the road, bridging the ford, bringing the lawless under its
sense of law. I see that this nation of ours concurrently, when it seeks
back to what alone can inspire and glorify these activities, seeks back,
not to any supposed native North, but south to the Middle Sea of our
civilisation and steadily to Italy, which we understand far more easily
than France--though France has helped us times and again. Putting these
things together, I retort upon the ethnologists--for I come from the
West of England, where we suffer incredible things from them--_'Semper
ego auditor tantum?'_ I hazard that the most important thing in our
blood is that purple drop of the imperial murex we derive from Rome.
You must, of course, take this for nothing more than it pretends to be--a
conjecture, a suggestion. I will follow it up with two statements of
fact, neither doubtful nor disputable.
The first is, that when English poetry awoke, long after the Conquest
(or, as I should prefer to put it, after the Crusades) it awoke a new
thing; in its vocabulary as much like Anglo-Saxon poetry as ever you
will, but in metre, rhythm, lilt--and more, in style, feeling,
imaginative play--and yet more again, in knowledge of what it aimed to
be, in the essentials, in the qualities that make Poetry Poetry--as
different from Anglo-Saxon poetry as cheese is from chalk, and as much
more nutritious. Listen to this--
Bytuene Mershe ant Averil
When spray biginnith to spring,
The lutel foul hath hire wyl
On hire lud to synge:
Ich libbe in love-longinge
For semlokest of alle thynge,
He may me blisse bringe,
Icham in hire bandoun.
An hendy hap ichabbe y-hent,
Ichot from hevene it is me sent,
From alle wymmen my love is lent,
And lyht on Alisoun.
Here you have alliteration in plenty; you even have what some hold to be
the pattern of Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse (though in practice
disregarded, may be, as often as not), the chosen initial used twice in
the first line and once at least in the second:
From alle wymmen my _l_ove is _l_ent,
And _l_yht on A_l_isoun.