The personal history of this bard is given in the taste of the age.
Caedmon was a herdsman who had never read a single poem. Sitting in his
"beership," whenever the circling harp, that "Wood of Joy!" as the Saxon
gleemen have called it, was offered to his hand, all unskilled, the
peasant, stung with shame, would hurry homewards. Already past the
middle of life, never had the peasant dreamt that he was a sublime poet,
or at least a poet composing on sublime themes, incapable as he was even
of reading his own Saxon.
As once he lay slumbering in a stall, the apparition of a strange man
thus familiarly greeted him:--"Caedmon, sing some song to me!" The
cowherd modestly urged that he was mute and unmusical:--"Nevertheless
thou shalt sing!" retorted the benignant apparition. "What shall I
sing?" rejoined the minstrel, who had never sung. "Sing the origin of
things!" The peasant, amazed, found his tongue loosened, and listened to
his own voice; a voice which was to reach posterity!
He flew in the morning to the town-reeve to announce a wonder, that he
had become a poet in the course of a single night. He recited the poem,
which, however--for we possess it--only proves that between sleeping and
waking eighteen lines of dreamy periphrasis may express a single idea.
Venerable Bede held this effusion as a pure inspiration: the modern
historian of the Anglo-Saxons indulgently discovers three ideas:
Conybeare, more critical, acknowledges that "the eighteen lines expand
the mere proposition of 'Let us praise God, the maker of heaven and
earth.'" But this was only the first attempt of a great enterprise--it
was a thing to be magnified for the neighbouring monastery of Whitby,
who gladly received such a new brother.
For a poet who had never written a verse, it was only necessary to open
his vein: a poet who could not read only required to be read to. The
whole monkery came down with the canonical books; they informed him of
all things, from "Genesis" down to "the doctrine of the apostles." "The
good man listened," as saith Venerable Bede, "like a clean animal
ruminating; and his song and his verse were so winsome to hear, that his
teachers wrote them down, and learned from his mouth." These teachers
could not have learned more than they themselves had taught. We can only
draw out of a cistern the waters which we have poured into it. Every
succeeding day, however, swelled the Caedmonian Poem; assuredly they
wanted neither zeal nor hands--for the glory of the monastery of Whitby!
Such is a literary anecdote of the seventh century conveyed to us by
ancient Bede. The dream of the apparition's inspiration of this
unlettered monk was one more miracle among many in honour of the
monastery; and it was to be told in the customary way, for never yet in
a holy brotherhood was found a recusant.
Even to this day we ourselves dream grotesque adventures; but in the
days of monachism visions were not merely a mere vivid and lengthened
dream, a slight delirium, for they usually announced something
important. A dream was a prognostic or a prelude. The garrulous
chroniclers, and saintly Bede himself, that primeval gossiper, afford
abundant evidence of such secret revelations. Whenever some great act
was designed, or some awful secret was to be divulged, a dream announced
it to the world. Was a king to be converted to Christianity, the people
were enlightened by the vision which the sovereign revealed to them; was
a maiden to take the vow of virginity, or a monastery to be built, an
angelical vision hovered, and sometimes specified the very spot. Was a
crime of blood to be divulged by some penitent accessory, somebody had a
dream, and the criminal has stood convicted by the grave-side, which
gave up the fatal witness in his victim. In those ages of simplicity and
pious frauds, a dream was an admirable expedient by which important
events were carried on, and mystification satisfactorily explained the
incomprehensible.
The marvellous incident on which the history of Caedmon revolves may only
veil a fact which has nothing extraordinary in itself when freed from
the invention which disguises it. Legends like the present one were
often borrowed by one monastery from another, and an exact counterpart
of the dream and history of our Saxon bard, in a similar personage and a
like result, has been pointed out as occurring in Gaul. A vernacular or
popular version of the Scriptures being required, it was supplied by a
_peasant wholly ignorant of the poetic art till he had been instructed
in a_ DREAM.[1]
Scriptural themes were common with the poets of the monastery.[2] The
present enterprise, judging from the variety of its fragments from both
Testaments and from the Apocrypha, in its complete state would have
formed a chronological poem of the main incidents of the Scriptures in
the vernacular Saxon. This was a burden of magnitude which no single
shoulder could have steadily carried, and probably was supported by
several besides "the Dreamer." Critical Saxonists, indeed, have detected
a variation in the style, and great inequalities in the work; such
discordances indicate that the paraphrase was occasionally resumed by
some successor, as idling monks at a later period were often the
continuators of voluminous romances. I would class the Caedmonian poem
among the many attempts of the monachal genius to familiarize the people
with the miraculous and the religious narratives in the Scriptures, by a
paraphrase in the vernacular idiom. The poem may be deemed as equivocal
as the poet; the text has been impeached; interpolations and omissions
are acknowledged by the learned in Saxon lore. The poem is said to have
been written in the seventh century, and the earliest manuscript we
possess is of the tenth, suffering in that course of time all the
corruptions or variations of the scribes, while the ruder northern
dialect has been changed into the more polished southern. If we may
confide in a learned conjecture, it may happen that Caedmon is no name at
all, but merely a word or a phrase; and thus the entity of the Dreamer
of the Monastery of Whitby may vanish in the wind of two Chaldaic
syllables![3] Be this as it may, for us the poem is an entity, whatever
becomes of the pretended Dreamer.
It has become an arduous inquiry whether MILTON has not drawn largely
from the obscurity of this monkish Ennius? "In reading Caedmon," says
SHARON TURNER, "we are reminded of Milton--of a 'Paradise Lost' in rude
miniature." Conybeare advances, "the pride, rebellion, and punishments
of Satan and his princes have a resemblance to Milton so remarkable that
_much of this portion might be almost literally translated by a cento of
lines from the great poet_."[4] A recent Saxonist, in noticing "the
creation of Caedmon as beautiful," adds, "it is still more interesting
from _its singular correspondence even in expression with 'Paradise
Lost_.'"
The ancient, as well as the modern, of these scriptural poets has
adopted a narrative which is not found in the Scriptures. The rebellion
of Satan before the creation of man, and his precipitation with the
apostate angels into a dungeon-gulf of flame, and ice, and darkness,
though an incident familiar to us as a gospel text, remains nothing more
than a legend unhallowed by sacred writ.
Where are we, then, to seek for the origin of a notion universal
throughout Christendom? I long imagined that this revolt in heaven had
been one of the traditions hammered in the old rabbinical forge; and in
the Talmudical lore there are tales of the fallen angels; but I am
assured by a learned professor in these studies, that the Talmud
contains no narrative of "the Rebellion of Satan." The Hebrews, in their
sojourn in Babylon, had imbibed many Chaldean fables, and some fanciful
inventions. At this obscure period did this singular episode in sacred
history steal into their popular creed? Did it issue from that awful
cradle of monstrous imaginings, of demons, of spirits, and of terrifying
deities, Persia and India? In the Brahminical Shasters we find a
rebellion of the angels before the creation, and their precipitation
from light into darkness; their restoration by the clemency of the
Creator, however, occurs after their probationary state, during millions
of years in their metamorphoses on earth. But this seems only the veil
of an allegory designed to explain their dark doctrine of the
metempsychosis. The rebellion of the angels, as we have been taught it,
is associated with their everlasting chains and eternal fire; how the
legend became universally received may baffle inquiry.[5]
But the coincidence of the Caedmonian with the Miltonian poem in having
adopted the same peculiar subject of the revolt of Satan and the
expulsion of the angels, is not the most remarkable one in the two
works. The same awful narrative is pursued, and we are startled at the
opening of the Pandemonium by discovering the same scene and the same
actors. When we scrutinise into minuter parts, we are occasionally
struck by some extraordinary similarities.
Caedmon, to convey a notion of the ejection from heaven to hell, tells
that "the Fiend, with all his comrades, fell from heaven above, through
as long as _three nights and days_." Milton awfully describes Satan
"confounded, though immortal," rolling in the fiery gulf--
_Nine times the space that measures day and night_
To mortal men.
Caedmon describes the Deity having cast the evil angel into that "House
of perdition, down on that new bed; after, gave him a _name_ that the
highest (of the devils which they had now become) should be called
_Satan_ thenceforwards." Milton has preserved the same notice of the
origin of _the name_, thus--
To whom the _Arch-Enemy_,
And thence in heaven called _Satan_--