Historical Summary. Literary Characteristics. Poets of the Victorian Age.
Alfred Tennyson. Robert Browning. Minor Poets of the Victorian Age.
Elizabeth Barrett. Rossetti. Morris. Swinburne. Novelists of the Victorian
Age. Charles Dickens. William Makepeace Thackeray. George Eliot. Minor
Novelists of the Victorian Age. Charles Reade. Anthony Trollope. Charlotte
Brontë. Bulwer Lytton. Charles Kingsley. Mrs. Gaskell. Blackmore. Meredith.
Hardy. Stevenson. Essayists of the Victorian Age. Macaulay. Carlyle.
Ruskin. Matthew Arnold. Newman. The Spirit of Modern Literature. Summary.
Bibliography. Questions. Chronology.
GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
* * * * *
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION--THE MEANING OF LITERATURE
Hold the hye wey, and lat thy gost thee lede.
Chaucer's _Truth_
On, on, you noblest English, ...
Follow your spirit.
Shakespeare's _Henry V_
THE SHELL AND THE BOOK. A child and a man were one day walking on the
seashore when the child found a little shell and held it to his ear.
Suddenly he heard sounds,--strange, low, melodious sounds, as if the shell
were remembering and repeating to itself the murmurs of its ocean home. The
child's face filled with wonder as he listened. Here in the little shell,
apparently, was a voice from another world, and he listened with delight to
its mystery and music. Then came the man, explaining that the child heard
nothing strange; that the pearly curves of the shell simply caught a
multitude of sounds too faint for human ears, and filled the glimmering
hollows with the murmur of innumerable echoes. It was not a new world, but
only the unnoticed harmony of the old that had aroused the child's wonder.
Some such experience as this awaits us when we begin the study of
literature, which has always two aspects, one of simple enjoyment and
appreciation, the other of analysis and exact description. Let a little
song appeal to the ear, or a noble book to the heart, and for the moment,
at least, we discover a new world, a world so different from our own that
it seems a place of dreams and magic. To enter and enjoy this new world, to
love good books for their own sake, is the chief thing; to analyze and
explain them is a less joyous but still an important matter. Behind every
book is a man; behind the man is the race; and behind the race are the
natural and social environments whose influence is unconsciously reflected.
These also we must know, if the book is to speak its whole message. In a
word, we have now reached a point where we wish to understand as well as to
enjoy literature; and the first step, since exact definition is impossible,
is to determine some of its essential qualities.
QUALITIES OF LITERATURE. The first significant thing is the essentially
artistic quality of all literature. All art is the expression of life in
forms of truth and beauty; or rather, it is the reflection of some truth
and beauty which are in the world, but which remain unnoticed until brought
to our attention by some sensitive human soul, just as the delicate curves
of the shell reflect sounds and harmonies too faint to be otherwise
noticed. A hundred men may pass a hayfield and see only the sweaty toil and
the windrows of dried grass; but here is one who pauses by a Roumanian
meadow, where girls are making hay and singing as they work. He looks
deeper, sees truth and beauty where we see only dead grass, and he reflects
what he sees in a little poem in which the hay tells its own story:
Yesterday's flowers am I,
And I have drunk my last sweet draught of dew.
Young maidens came and sang me to my death;
The moon looks down and sees me in my shroud,
The shroud of my last dew.
Yesterday's flowers that are yet in me
Must needs make way for all to-morrow's flowers.
The maidens, too, that sang me to my death
Must even so make way for all the maids
That are to come.
And as my soul, so too their soul will be
Laden with fragrance of the days gone by.
The maidens that to-morrow come this way
Will not remember that I once did bloom,
For they will only see the new-born flowers.
Yet will my perfume-laden soul bring back,
As a sweet memory, to women's hearts
Their days of maidenhood.
And then they will be sorry that they came
To sing me to my death;
And all the butterflies will mourn for me.
I bear away with me
The sunshine's dear remembrance, and the low
Soft murmurs of the spring.
My breath is sweet as children's prattle is;
I drank in all the whole earth's fruitfulness,
To make of it the fragrance of my soul
That shall outlive my death.[1]
One who reads only that first exquisite line, "Yesterday's flowers am I,"
can never again see hay without recalling the beauty that was hidden from
his eyes until the poet found it.
In the same pleasing, surprising way, all artistic work must be a kind of
revelation. Thus architecture is probably the oldest of the arts; yet we
still have many builders but few architects, that is, men whose work in
wood or stone suggests some hidden truth and beauty to the human senses. So
in literature, which is the art that expresses life in words that appeal to
our own sense of the beautiful, we have many writers but few artists. In
the broadest sense, perhaps, literature means simply the written records of
the race, including all its history and sciences, as well as its poems and
novels; in the narrower sense literature is the artistic record of life,
and most of our writing is excluded from it, just as the mass of our
buildings, mere shelters from storm and from cold, are excluded from
architecture. A history or a work of science may be and sometimes is
literature, but only as we forget the subject-matter and the presentation
of facts in the simple beauty of its expression.
The second quality of literature is its suggestiveness, its appeal to our
emotions and imagination rather than to our intellect. It is not so much
what it says as what it awakens in us that constitutes its charm. When
Milton makes Satan say, "Myself am Hell," he does not state any fact, but
rather opens up in these three tremendous words a whole world of
speculation and imagination. When Faustus in the presence of Helen asks,
"Was this the face that launched a thousand ships?" he does not state a
fact or expect an answer. He opens a door through which our imagination
enters a new world, a world of music, love, beauty, heroism,--the whole
splendid world of Greek literature. Such magic is in words. When
Shakespeare describes the young Biron as speaking
In such apt and gracious words
That aged ears play truant at his tales,
he has unconsciously given not only an excellent description of himself,
but the measure of all literature, which makes us play truant with the
present world and run away to live awhile in the pleasant realm of fancy.
The province of all art is not to instruct but to delight; and only as
literature delights us, causing each reader to build in his own soul that
"lordly pleasure house" of which Tennyson dreamed in his "Palace of Art,"
is it worthy of its name.
The third characteristic of literature, arising directly from the other
two, is its permanence. The world does not live by bread alone.
Notwithstanding its hurry and bustle and apparent absorption in material
things, it does not willingly let any beautiful thing perish. This is even
more true of its songs than of its painting and sculpture; though
permanence is a quality we should hardly expect in the present deluge of
books and magazines pouring day and night from our presses in the name of
literature. But this problem of too many books is not modern, as we
suppose. It has been a problem ever since Caxton brought the first printing
press from Flanders, four hundred years ago, and in the shadow of
Westminster Abbey opened his little shop and advertised his wares as "good
and chepe." Even earlier, a thousand years before Caxton and his printing
press, the busy scholars of the great library of Alexandria found that the
number of parchments was much too great for them to handle; and now, when
we print more in a week than all the Alexandrian scholars could copy in a
century, it would seem impossible that any production could be permanent;
that any song or story could live to give delight in future ages. But
literature is like a river in flood, which gradually purifies itself in two
ways,--the mud settles to the bottom, and the scum rises to the top. When
we examine the writings that by common consent constitute our literature,
the clear stream purified of its dross, we find at least two more
qualities, which we call the tests of literature, and which determine its
permanence.
TESTS OF LITERATURE. The first of these is universality, that is, the
appeal to the widest human interests and the simplest human emotions.
Though we speak of national and race literatures, like the Greek or
Teutonic, and though each has certain superficial marks arising out of the
peculiarities of its own people, it is nevertheless true that good
literature knows no nationality, nor any bounds save those of humanity. It
is occupied chiefly with elementary passions and emotions,--love and hate,
joy and sorrow, fear and faith,--which are an essential part of our human
nature; and the more it reflects these emotions the more surely does it
awaken a response in men of every race. Every father must respond to the
parable of the prodigal son; wherever men are heroic, they will acknowledge
the mastery of Homer; wherever a man thinks on the strange phenomenon of
evil in the world, he will find his own thoughts in the Book of Job; in
whatever place men love their children, their hearts must be stirred by the
tragic sorrow of _Oedipus_ and _King Lear_. All these are but shining
examples of the law that only as a book or a little song appeals to
universal human interest does it become permanent.
The second test is a purely personal one, and may be expressed in the
indefinite word "style." It is only in a mechanical sense that style is
"the adequate expression of thought," or "the peculiar manner of expressing
thought," or any other of the definitions that are found in the rhetorics.
In a deeper sense, style is the man, that is, the unconscious expression of
the writer's own personality. It is the very soul of one man reflecting, as
in a glass, the thoughts and feelings of humanity. As no glass is
colorless, but tinges more or less deeply the reflections from its surface,
so no author can interpret human life without unconsciously giving to it
the native hue of his own soul. It is this intensely personal element that
constitutes style. Every permanent book has more or less of these two
elements, the objective and the subjective, the universal and the personal,
the deep thought and feeling of the race reflected and colored by the
writer's own life and experience.
THE OBJECT IN STUDYING LITERATURE. Aside from the pleasure of reading, of
entering into a new world and having our imagination quickened, the study
of literature has one definite object, and that is to know men. Now man is
ever a dual creature; he has an outward and an inner nature; he is not only
a doer of deeds, but a dreamer of dreams; and to know him, the man of any
age, we must search deeper than his history. History records his deeds, his
outward acts largely; but every great act springs from an ideal, and to
understand this we must read his literature, where we find his ideals
recorded. When we read a history of the Anglo-Saxons, for instance, we
learn that they were sea rovers, pirates, explorers, great eaters and
drinkers; and we know something of their hovels and habits, and the lands
which they harried and plundered. All that is interesting; but it does not
tell us what most we want to know about these old ancestors of ours,--not
only what they did, but what they thought and felt; how they looked on life
and death; what they loved, what they feared, and what they reverenced in
God and man. Then we turn from history to the literature which they
themselves produced, and instantly we become acquainted. These hardy people
were not simply fighters and freebooters; they were men like ourselves;
their emotions awaken instant response in the souls of their descendants.
At the words of their gleemen we thrill again to their wild love of freedom
and the open sea; we grow tender at their love of home, and patriotic at
their deathless loyalty to their chief, whom they chose for themselves and
hoisted on their shields in symbol of his leadership. Once more we grow
respectful in the presence of pure womanhood, or melancholy before the
sorrows and problems of life, or humbly confident, looking up to the God
whom they dared to call the Allfather. All these and many more intensely
real emotions pass through our souls as we read the few shining fragments
of verses that the jealous ages have left us.
It is so with any age or people. To understand them we must read not simply
their history, which records their deeds, but their literature, which
records the dreams that made their deeds possible. So Aristotle was
profoundly right when he said that "poetry is more serious and
philosophical than history"; and Goethe, when he explained literature as
"the humanization of the whole world."
IMPORTANCE OF LITERATURE. It is a curious and prevalent opinion that
literature, like all art, is a mere play of imagination, pleasing enough,
like a new novel, but without any serious or practical importance. Nothing
could be farther from the truth. Literature preserves the ideals of a
people; and ideals--love, faith, duty, friendship, freedom, reverence--are
the part of human life most worthy of preservation. The Greeks were a
marvelous people; yet of all their mighty works we cherish only a few
ideals,--ideals of beauty in perishable stone, and ideals of truth in
imperishable prose and poetry. It was simply the ideals of the Greeks and
Hebrews and Romans, preserved in their literature, which made them what
they were, and which determined their value to future generations. Our
democracy, the boast of all English-speaking nations, is a dream; not the
doubtful and sometimes disheartening spectacle presented in our legislative
halls, but the lovely and immortal ideal of a free and equal manhood,
preserved as a most precious heritage in every great literature from the
Greeks to the Anglo-Saxons. All our arts, our sciences, even our inventions
are founded squarely upon ideals; for under every invention is still the
dream of _Beowulf_, that man may overcome the forces of nature; and the
foundation of all our sciences and discoveries is the immortal dream that
men "shall be as gods, knowing good and evil."
In a word, our whole civilization, our freedom, our progress, our homes,
our religion, rest solidly upon ideals for their foundation. Nothing but an
ideal ever endures upon earth. It is therefore impossible to overestimate
the practical importance of literature, which preserves these ideals from
fathers to sons, while men, cities, governments, civilizations, vanish from
the face of the earth. It is only when we remember this that we appreciate
the action of the devout Mussulman, who picks up and carefully preserves
every scrap of paper on which words are written, because the scrap may
perchance contain the name of Allah, and the ideal is too enormously
important to be neglected or lost.
SUMMARY OF THE SUBJECT. We are now ready, if not to define, at least to
understand a little more clearly the object of our present study.
Literature is the expression of life in words of truth and beauty; it is
the written record of man's spirit, of his thoughts, emotions, aspirations;
it is the history, and the only history, of the human soul. It is
characterized by its artistic, its suggestive, its permanent qualities. Its
two tests are its universal interest and its personal style. Its object,
aside from the delight it gives us, is to know man, that is, the soul of
man rather than his actions; and since it preserves to the race the ideals
upon which all our civilization is founded, it is one of the most important
and delightful subjects that can occupy the human mind.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. (NOTE. Each chapter in this book includes a special
bibliography of historical and literary works, selections for reading,
chronology, etc.; and a general bibliography of texts, helps, and reference
books will be found at the end. The following books, which are among the
best of their kind, are intended to help the student to a better
appreciation of literature and to a better knowledge of literary
criticism.)
_GENERAL WORKS_. Woodberry's Appreciation of Literature (Baker & Taylor
Co.); Gates's Studies in Appreciation (Macmillan); Bates's Talks on the
Study of Literature (Houghton, Mifflin); Worsfold's On the Exercise of
Judgment in Literature (Dent); Harrison's The Choice of Books (Macmillan);
Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies, Part I; Matthew Arnold's Essays in Criticism.
_ESSAYS_. Emerson's Books, in Society and Solitude; Dowden's The
Interpretation of Literature, in Transcripts and Studies (Kegan Paul &
Co.), and The Teaching of English Literature, in New Studies in Literature
(Houghton, Mifflin); The Study of Literature, Essays by Morley, Nicolls,
and L. Stephen, edited by A.F. Blaisdell (Willard Small).
_CRITICISM_. Gayley and Scott's An Introduction to the Methods and
Materials of Literary Criticism (Ginn and Company); Winchester's Principles
of Literary Criticism (Macmillan); Worsfold's Principles of Criticism
(Longmans); Johnson's Elements of Literary Criticism (American Book
Company); Saintsbury's History of Criticism (Dodd, Mead).
_POETRY_. Gummere's Handbook of Poetics (Ginn and Company); Stedman's The
Nature and Elements of Poetry (Houghton, Mifflin); Johnson's The Forms of
English Poetry (American Book Company); Alden's Specimens of English Verse
(Holt); Gummere's The Beginnings of Poetry (Macmillan); Saintsbury's
History of English Prosody (Macmillan).
_THE DRAMA_. Caffin's Appreciation of the Drama (Baker & Taylor Co.).
_THE NOVEL_. Raleigh's The English Novel (Scribner); Hamilton's The
Materials and Methods of Fiction (Baker & Taylor Co.).
* * * * *
CHAPTER II
THE ANGLO-SAXON OR OLD-ENGLISH PERIOD (450-1050)
I. OUR FIRST POETRY
BEOWULF. Here is the story of Beowulf, the earliest and the greatest epic,
or heroic poem, in our literature. It begins with a prologue, which is not
an essential part of the story, but which we review gladly for the sake of
the splendid poetical conception that produced Scyld, king of the Spear
Danes.[2]
At a time when the Spear Danes were without a king, a ship came sailing
into their harbor. It was filled with treasures and weapons of war; and in
the midst of these warlike things was a baby sleeping. No man sailed the
ship; it came of itself, bringing the child, whose name was Scyld.
Now Scyld grew and became a mighty warrior, and led the Spear Danes for
many years, and was their king. When his son Beowulf[3] had become strong
and wise enough to rule, then Wyrd (Fate), who speaks but once to any man,
came and stood at hand; and it was time for Scyld to go. This is how they
buried him:
Then Scyld departed, at word of Wyrd spoken,
The hero to go to the home of the gods.
Sadly they bore him to brink of the ocean,
Comrades, still heeding his word of command.
There rode in the harbor the prince's ship, ready,
With prow curving proudly and shining sails set.
Shipward they bore him, their hero beloved;
The mighty they laid at the foot of the mast.
Treasures were there from far and near gathered,
Byrnies of battle, armor and swords;
Never a keel sailed out of a harbor
So splendidly tricked with the trappings of war.
They heaped on his bosom a hoard of bright jewels
To fare with him forth on the flood's great breast.
No less gift they gave than the Unknown provided,
When alone, as a child, he came in from the mere.
High o'er his head waved a bright golden standard--
Now let the waves bear their wealth to the holm.
Sad-souled they gave back its gift to the ocean,
Mournful their mood as he sailed out to sea.[4]
"And no man," says the poet, "neither counselor nor hero, can tell who
received that lading."
One of Scyld's descendants was Hrothgar, king of the Danes; and with him
the story of our Beowulf begins. Hrothgar in his old age had built near the
sea a mead hall called Heorot, the most splendid hall in the whole world,
where the king and his thanes gathered nightly to feast and to listen to
the songs of his gleemen. One night, as they were all sleeping, a frightful
monster, Grendel, broke into the hall, killed thirty of the sleeping
warriors, and carried off their bodies to devour them in his lair under the
sea. The appalling visit was speedily repeated, and fear and death reigned
in the great hall. The warriors fought at first; but fled when they
discovered that no weapon could harm the monster. Heorot was left deserted
and silent. For twelve winters Grendel's horrible raids continued, and joy
was changed to mourning among the Spear Danes.
At last the rumor of Grendel crossed over the sea to the land of the Geats,
where a young hero dwelt in the house of his uncle, King Hygelac. Beowulf
was his name, a man of immense strength and courage, and a mighty swimmer
who had developed his powers fighting the "nickers," whales, walruses and
seals, in the icebound northern ocean. When he heard the story, Beowulf was
stirred to go and fight the monster and free the Danes, who were his
father's friends.
With fourteen companions he crosses the sea. There is an excellent bit of
ocean poetry here (ll. 210-224), and we get a vivid idea of the hospitality
of a brave people by following the poet's description of Beowulf's meeting
with King Hrothgar and Queen Wealhtheow, and of the joy and feasting and
story-telling in Heorot. The picture of Wealhtheow passing the mead cup to
the warriors with her own hand is a noble one, and plainly indicates the
reverence paid by these strong men to their wives and mothers. Night comes
on; the fear of Grendel is again upon the Danes, and all withdraw after the
king has warned Beowulf of the frightful danger of sleeping in the hall.
But Beowulf lies down with his warriors, saying proudly that, since weapons
will not avail against the monster, he will grapple with him bare handed
and trust to a warrior's strength.
Forth from the fens, from the misty moorlands,
Grendel came gliding--God's wrath[5] he bore--
Came under clouds, until he saw clearly,
Glittering with gold plates, the mead hall of men.
Down fell the door, though fastened with fire bands;
Open it sprang at the stroke of his paw.
Swollen with rage burst in the bale-bringer;
Flamed in his eyes a fierce light, likest fire.[6]
At the sight of men again sleeping in the hall, Grendel laughs in his
heart, thinking of his feast. He seizes the nearest sleeper, crushes his
"bone case" with a bite, tears him limb from limb, and swallows him. Then
he creeps to the couch of Beowulf and stretches out a claw, only to find it
clutched in a grip of steel. A sudden terror strikes the monster's heart.
He roars, struggles, tries to jerk his arm free; but Beowulf leaps to his
feet and grapples his enemy bare handed. To and fro they surge. Tables are
overturned; golden benches ripped from their fastenings; the whole building
quakes, and only its iron bands keep it from falling to pieces. Beowulf's
companions are on their feet now, hacking vainly at the monster with swords
and battle-axes, adding their shouts to the crashing of furniture and the
howling "war song" of Grendel. Outside in the town the Danes stand
shivering at the uproar. Slowly the monster struggles to the door, dragging
Beowulf, whose fingers crack with the strain, but who never relaxes his
first grip. Suddenly a wide wound opens in the monster's side; the sinews
snap; the whole arm is wrenched off at the shoulder; and Grendel escapes
shrieking across the moor, and plunges into the sea to die.
Beowulf first exults in his night's work; then he hangs the huge arm with
its terrible claws from a cross-beam over the king's seat, as one would
hang up a bear's skin after a hunt. At daylight came the Danes; and all day
long, in the intervals of singing, story-telling, speech making, and gift
giving, they return to wonder at the mighty "grip of Grendel" and to
rejoice in Beowulf's victory.
When night falls a great feast is spread in Heorot, and the Danes sleep
once more in the great hall. At midnight comes another monster, a horrible,
half-human creature,[7] mother of Grendel, raging to avenge her offspring.
She thunders at the door; the Danes leap up and grasp their weapons; but
the monster enters, seizes Aeschere, who is friend and adviser of the king,
and rushes away with him over the fens.
The old scenes of sorrow are reviewed in the morning; but Beowulf says
simply:
Sorrow not, wise man. It is better for each
That his friend he avenge than that he mourn much.
Each of us shall the end await
Of worldly life: let him who may gain
Honor ere death. That is for a warrior,
When he is dead, afterwards best.
Arise, kingdom's guardian! Let us quickly go
To view the track of Grendel's kinsman.
I promise it thee: he will not escape,
Nor in earth's bosom, nor in mountain-wood,
Nor in ocean's depths, go where he will.[8]
Then he girds himself for the new fight and follows the track of the second
enemy across the fens. Here is Hrothgar's description of the place where
live the monsters, "spirits of elsewhere," as he calls them:
They inhabit
The dim land that gives shelter to the wolf,
The windy headlands, perilous fen paths,
Where, under mountain mist, the stream flows down
And floods the ground. Not far hence, but a mile,
The mere stands, over which hang death-chill groves,
A wood fast-rooted overshades the flood;
There every night a ghastly miracle
Is seen, fire in the water. No man knows,
Not the most wise, the bottom of that mere.
The firm-horned heath-stalker, the hart, when pressed,
Wearied by hounds, and hunted from afar,
Will rather die of thirst upon its bank
Than bend his head to it. It is unholy.
Dark to the clouds its yeasty waves mount up
When wind stirs hateful tempest, till the air
Grows dreary, and the heavens pour down tears.[9]
Beowulf plunges into the horrible place, while his companions wait for him
oh the shore. For a long time he sinks through the flood; then, as he
reaches bottom, Grendel's mother rushes out upon him and drags him into a
cave, where sea monsters swarm at him from behind and gnash his armor with
their tusks. The edge of his sword is turned with the mighty blow he deals
the _merewif_; but it harms not the monster. Casting the weapon aside, he
grips her and tries to hurl her down, while her claws and teeth clash upon
his corslet but cannot penetrate the steel rings. She throws her bulk upon
him, crushes him down, draws a short sword and plunges it at him; but again
his splendid byrnie saves him. He is wearied now, and oppressed. Suddenly,
as his eye sweeps the cave, he catches sight of a magic sword, made by the
giants long ago, too heavy for warriors to wield. Struggling up he seizes
the weapon, whirls it and brings down a crashing blow upon the monster's
neck. It smashes through the ring bones; the _merewif_ falls, and the fight
is won.
The cave is full of treasures; but Beowulf heeds them not, for near him
lies Grendel, dead from the wound received the previous night. Again
Beowulf swings the great sword and strikes off his enemy's head; and lo, as
the venomous blood touches the sword blade, the steel melts like ice before
the fire, and only the hilt is left in Beowulf's hand. Taking the hilt and
the head, the hero enters the ocean and mounts up to the shore.
Only his own faithful band were waiting there; for the Danes, seeing the
ocean bubble with fresh blood, thought it was all over with the hero and
had gone home. And there they were, mourning in Heorot, when Beowulf
returned with the monstrous head of Grendel carried on a spear shaft by
four of his stoutest followers.
In the last part of the poem there is another great fight. Beowulf is now
an old man; he has reigned for fifty years, beloved by all his people. He
has overcome every enemy but one, a fire dragon keeping watch over an
enormous treasure hidden among the mountains. One day a wanderer stumbles
upon the enchanted cave and, entering, takes a jeweled cup while the
firedrake sleeps heavily. That same night the dragon, in a frightful rage,
belching forth fire and smoke, rushes down upon the nearest villages,
leaving a trail of death and terror behind him.
Again Beowulf goes forth to champion his people. As he approaches the
dragon's cave, he has a presentiment that death lurks within:
Sat on the headland there the warrior king;
Farewell he said to hearth-companions true,
The gold-friend of the Geats; his mind was sad,
Death-ready, restless. And Wyrd was drawing nigh,
Who now must meet and touch the aged man,
To seek the treasure that his soul had saved
And separate his body from his life.[10]
There is a flash of illumination, like that which comes to a dying man, in
which his mind runs back over his long life and sees something of profound
meaning in the elemental sorrow moving side by side with magnificent
courage. Then follows the fight with the firedrake, in which Beowulf,
wrapped in fire and smoke, is helped by the heroism of Wiglaf, one of his
companions. The dragon is slain, but the fire has entered Beowulf's lungs
and he knows that Wyrd is at hand. This is his thought, while Wiglaf
removes his battered armor:
"One deep regret I have: that to a son
I may not give the armor I have worn,
To bear it after me. For fifty years
I ruled these people well, and not a king
Of those who dwell around me, dared oppress
Or meet me with his hosts. At home I waited
For the time that Wyrd controls. Mine own I kept,
Nor quarrels sought, nor ever falsely swore.
Now, wounded sore, I wait for joy to come."[11]
He sends Wiglaf into the firedrake's cave, who finds it filled with rare
treasures and, most wonderful of all, a golden banner from which light
proceeds and illumines all the darkness. But Wiglaf cares little for the
treasures; his mind is full of his dying chief. He fills his hands with
costly ornaments and hurries to throw them at his hero's feet. The old man
looks with sorrow at the gold, thanks the "Lord of all" that by death he
has gained more riches for his people, and tells his faithful thane how his
body shall be burned on the Whale ness, or headland:
"My life is well paid for this hoard; and now
Care for the people's needs. I may no more
Be with them. Bid the warriors raise a barrow
After the burning, on the ness by the sea,
On Hronesness, which shall rise high and be
For a remembrance to my people. Seafarers
Who from afar over the mists of waters
Drive foamy keels may call it Beowulf's Mount
Hereafter." Then the hero from his neck
Put off a golden collar; to his thane,
To the young warrior, gave it with his helm,
Armlet and corslet; bade him use them well.
"Thou art the last Waegmunding of our race,
For fate has swept my kinsmen all away.
Earls in their strength are to their Maker gone,
And I must follow them."[12]
Beowulf was still living when Wiglaf sent a messenger hurriedly to his
people; when they came they found him dead, and the huge dragon dead on the
sand beside him.
Then the Goth's people reared a mighty pile
With shields and armour hung, as he had asked,
And in the midst the warriors laid their lord,
Lamenting. Then the warriors on the mount
Kindled a mighty bale fire; the smoke rose
Black from the Swedish pine, the sound of flame
Mingled with sound of weeping; ... while smoke
Spread over heaven. Then upon the hill
The people of the Weders wrought a mound,
High, broad, and to be seen far out at sea.
In ten days they had built and walled it in
As the wise thought most worthy; placed in it
Rings, jewels, other treasures from the hoard.
They left the riches, golden joy of earls,
In dust, for earth to hold; where yet it lies,
Useless as ever. Then about the mound
The warriors rode, and raised a mournful song
For their dead king; exalted his brave deeds,
Holding it fit men honour their liege lord,
Praise him and love him when his soul is fled.
Thus the [Geat's] people, sharers of his hearth,
Mourned their chief's fall, praised him, of kings, of men
The mildest and the kindest, and to all
His people gentlest, yearning for their praise.[13]
One is tempted to linger over the details of the magnificent ending: the
unselfish heroism of Beowulf, the great prototype of King Alfred; the
generous grief of his people, ignoring gold and jewels in the thought of
the greater treasure they had lost; the memorial mound on the low cliff,
which would cause every returning mariner to steer a straight course to
harbor in the remembrance of his dead hero; and the pure poetry which marks
every noble line. But the epic is great enough and simple enough to speak
for itself. Search the literatures of the world, and you will find no other
such picture of a brave man's death.
Concerning the history of _Beowulf_ a whole library has been written, and
scholars still differ too radically for us to express a positive judgment.
This much, however, is clear,--that there existed, at the time the poem was
composed, various northern legends of Beowa, a half-divine hero, and the
monster Grendel. The latter has been interpreted in various
ways,--sometimes as a bear, and again as the malaria of the marsh lands.
For those interested in symbols the simplest interpretation of these myths
is to regard Beowulf's successive fights with the three dragons as the
overcoming, first, of the overwhelming danger of the sea, which was beaten
back by the dykes; second, the conquering of the sea itself, when men
learned to sail upon it; and third, the conflict with the hostile forces of
nature, which are overcome at last by man's indomitable will and
perseverance.
All this is purely mythical; but there are historical incidents to reckon
with. About the year 520 a certain northern chief, called by the chronicler
Chochilaicus (who is generally identified with the Hygelac of the epic),
led a huge plundering expedition up the Rhine. After a succession of
battles he was overcome by the Franks, but--and now we enter a legendary
region once more--not until a gigantic nephew of Hygelac had performed
heroic feats of valor, and had saved the remnants of the host by a
marvelous feat of swimming. The majority of scholars now hold that these
historical events and personages were celebrated in the epic; but some
still assert that the events which gave a foundation for _Beowulf_ occurred
wholly on English soil, where the poem itself was undoubtedly written.
The rhythm of _Beowulf_ and indeed of all our earliest poetry depended upon
accent and alliteration; that is, the beginning of two or more words in the
same line with the same sound or letter. The lines were made up of two
short halves, separated by a pause. No rime was used; but a musical effect
was produced by giving each half line two strongly accented syllables. Each
full line, therefore, had four accents, three of which (i.e. two in the
first half, and one in the second) usually began with the same sound or
letter. The musical effect was heightened by the harp with which the
gleeman accompanied his singing.. The poetical form will be seen clearly in
the following selection from the wonderfully realistic description of the
fens haunted by Grendel. It will need only one or two readings aloud to
show that many of these strange-looking words are practically the same as
those we still use, though many of the vowel sounds were pronounced
differently by our ancestors.
... Hie dygel lond
Warigeath, wulf-hleothu, windige næssas,
Frecne fen-gelad, thær fyrgen-stream
Under næssa genipu nither gewiteth,
Flod under foldan. Nis thæt feor heonon,
Mil-gemearces, thaet se mere standeth,
Ofer thæm hongiath hrinde bearwas
... They (a) darksome land
Ward (inhabit), wolf cliffs, windy nesses,
Frightful fen paths where mountain stream
Under nesses' mists nether (downward) wanders,
A flood under earth. It is not far hence,
By mile measure, that the mere stands,
Over which hang rimy groves.
WIDSITH. The poem "Widsith," the wide goer or wanderer, is in part, at
least, probably the oldest in our language. The author and the date of its
composition are unknown; but the personal account of the minstrel's life
belongs to the time before the Saxons first came to England.[14] It
expresses the wandering life of the gleeman, who goes forth into the world
to abide here or there, according as he is rewarded for his singing. From
the numerous references to rings and rewards, and from the praise given to
generous givers, it would seem that literature as a paying profession began
very early in our history, and also that the pay was barely sufficient to
hold soul and body together. Of all our modern poets, Goldsmith wandering
over Europe paying for his lodging with his songs is most suggestive of
this first recorded singer of our race. His last lines read:
Thus wandering, they who shape songs for men
Pass over many lands, and tell their need,
And speak their thanks, and ever, south or north,
Meet someone skilled in songs and free in gifts,
Who would be raised among his friends to fame
And do brave deeds till light and life are gone.
He who has thus wrought himself praise shall have
A settled glory underneath the stars.[15]
DEOR'S LAMENT. In "Deor" we have another picture of the Saxon scop, or
minstrel, not in glad wandering, but in manly sorrow. It seems that the
scop's living depended entirely upon his power to please his chief, and
that at any time he might be supplanted by a better poet. Deor had this
experience, and comforts himself in a grim way by recalling various
examples of men who have suffered more than himself. The poem is arranged
in strophes, each one telling of some afflicted hero and ending with the
same refrain: _His sorrow passed away; so will mine_. "Deor" is much more
poetic than "Widsith," and is the one perfect lyric[16] of the Anglo-Saxon
period.
Weland for a woman knew too well exile.
Strong of soul that earl, sorrow sharp he bore;
To companionship he had care and weary longing,
Winter-freezing wretchedness. Woe he found again, again,
After that Nithhad in a need had laid him--
Staggering sinew-wounds--sorrow-smitten man!
_That he overwent; this also may I_.[17]
THE SEAFARER. The wonderful poem of "The Seafarer" seems to be in two
distinct parts. The first shows the hardships of ocean life; but stronger
than hardships is the subtle call of the sea. The second part is an
allegory, in which the troubles of the seaman are symbols of the troubles
of this life, and the call of the ocean is the call in the soul to be up
and away to its true home with God. Whether the last was added by some monk
who saw the allegorical possibilities of the first part, or whether some
sea-loving Christian scop wrote both, is uncertain. Following are a few
selected lines to show the spirit of the poem:
The hail flew in showers about me; and there I heard only
The roar of the sea, ice-cold waves, and the song of the swan;
For pastime the gannets' cry served me; the kittiwakes' chatter
For laughter of men; and for mead drink the call of the sea mews.
When storms on the rocky cliffs beat, then the terns, icy-feathered,
Made answer; full oft the sea eagle forebodingly screamed,
The eagle with pinions wave-wet....
The shadows of night became darker, it snowed from the north;
The world was enchained by the frost; hail fell upon earth;
'T was the coldest of grain. Yet the thoughts of my heart now are throbbing
To test the high streams, the salt waves in tumultuous play.
Desire in my heart ever urges my spirit to wander,
To seek out the home of the stranger in lands afar off.
There is no one that dwells upon earth, so exalted in mind,
But that he has always a longing, a sea-faring passion
For what the Lord God shall bestow, be it honor or death.
No heart for the harp has he, nor for acceptance of treasure,
No pleasure has he in a wife, no delight in the world,
Nor in aught save the roll of the billows; but always a longing,
A yearning uneasiness, hastens him on to the sea.
The woodlands are captured by blossoms, the hamlets grow fair,
Broad meadows are beautiful, earth again bursts into life,
And all stir the heart of the wanderer eager to journey,
So he meditates going afar on the pathway of tides.
The cuckoo, moreover, gives warning with sorrowful note,
Summer's harbinger sings, and forebodes to the heart bitter sorrow.
Now my spirit uneasily turns in the heart's narrow chamber,
Now wanders forth over the tide, o'er the home of the whale,
To the ends of the earth--and comes back to me.
Eager and greedy,
The lone wanderer screams, and resistlessly drives my soul onward,
Over the whale-path, over the tracts of the sea.[18]
THE FIGHT AT FINNSBURGH AND WALDERE. Two other of our oldest poems well
deserve mention. The "Fight at Finnsburgh" is a fragment of fifty lines,
discovered on the inside of a piece of parchment drawn over the wooden
covers of a book of homilies. It is a magnificent war song, describing with
Homeric power the defense of a hall by Hnæf[19] with sixty warriors,
against the attack of Finn and his army. At midnight, when Hnæf and his men
are sleeping, they are surrounded by an army rushing in with fire and
sword. Hnæf springs to his feet at the first alarm and wakens his warriors
with a call to action that rings like a bugle blast:
This no eastward dawning is, nor is here a dragon flying,
Nor of this high hall are the horns a burning;
But they rush upon us here--now the ravens sing,
Growling is the gray wolf, grim the war-wood rattles,
Shield to shaft is answering.[20]
The fight lasts five days, but the fragment ends before we learn the
outcome: The same fight is celebrated by Hrothgar's gleeman at the feast in
Heorot, after the slaying of Grendel.
"Waldere" is a fragment of two leaves, from which we get only a glimpse of
the story of Waldere (Walter of Aquitaine) and his betrothed bride
Hildgund, who were hostages at the court of Attila. They escaped with a
great treasure, and in crossing the mountains were attacked by Gunther and
his warriors, among whom was Walter's former comrade, Hagen. Walter fights
them all and escapes. The same story was written in Latin in the tenth
century, and is also part of the old German _Nibelungenlied_. Though the
saga did not originate with the Anglo-Saxons, their version of it is the
oldest that has come down to us. The chief significance of these "Waldere"
fragments lies in the evidence they afford that our ancestors were familiar
with the legends and poetry of other Germanic peoples.
II. ANGLO-SAXON LIFE
We have now read some of our earliest records, and have been surprised,
perhaps, that men who are generally described in the histories as savage
fighters and freebooters could produce such excellent poetry. It is the
object of the study of all literature to make us better acquainted with
men,--not simply with their deeds, which is the function of history, but
with the dreams and ideals which underlie all their actions. So a reading
of this early Anglo-Saxon poetry not only makes us acquainted, but also
leads to a profound respect for the men who were our ancestors. Before we
study more of their literature it is well to glance briefly at their life
and language.
THE NAME Originally the name Anglo-Saxon denotes two of the three Germanic
tribes,--Jutes, Angles, and Saxons,--who in the middle of the fifth
century left their homes on the shores of the North Sea and the Baltic to
conquer and colonize distant Britain. Angeln was the home of one tribe, and
the name still clings to the spot whence some of our forefathers sailed on
their momentous voyage. The old Saxon word _angul_ or _ongul_ means a hook,
and the English verb _angle_ is used invariably by Walton and older writers
in the sense of fishing. We may still think, therefore, of the first Angles
as hook-men, possibly because of their fishing, more probably because the
shore where they lived, at the foot of the peninsula of Jutland, was bent
in the shape of a fishhook. The name Saxon from _seax, sax_, a short sword,
means the sword-man, and from the name we may judge something of the temper
of the hardy fighters who preceded the Angles into Britain. The Angles were
the most numerous of the conquering tribes, and from them the new home was
called Anglalond. By gradual changes this became first Englelond and then
England.
More than five hundred years after the landing of these tribes, and while
they called themselves Englishmen, we find the Latin writers of the Middle
Ages speaking of the inhabitants of Britain as _Anglisaxones_,--that is,
Saxons of England,--to distinguish them from the Saxons of the Continent.
In the Latin charters of King Alfred the same name appears; but it is never
seen or heard in his native speech. There he always speaks of his beloved
"Englelond" and of his brave "Englisc" people. In the sixteenth century,
when the old name of Englishmen clung to the new people resulting from the
union of Saxon and Norman, the name Anglo-Saxon was first used in the
national sense by the scholar Camden[21] in his _History of Britain_; and
since then it has been in general use among English writers. In recent
years the name has gained a wider significance, until it is now used to
denote a spirit rather than a nation, the brave, vigorous, enlarging spirit
that characterizes the English-speaking races everywhere, and that has
already put a broad belt of English law and English liberty around the
whole world.
THE LIFE. If the literature of a people springs directly out of its life,
then the stern, barbarous life of our Saxon forefathers would seem, at
first glance, to promise little of good literature. Outwardly their life
was a constant hardship, a perpetual struggle against savage nature and
savage men. Behind them were gloomy forests inhabited by wild beasts and
still wilder men, and peopled in their imagination with dragons and evil
shapes. In front of them, thundering at the very dikes for entrance, was
the treacherous North Sea, with its fogs and storms and ice, but with that
indefinable call of the deep that all men hear who live long beneath its
influence. Here they lived, a big, blond, powerful race, and hunted and
fought and sailed, and drank and feasted when their labor was done. Almost
the first thing we notice about these big, fearless, childish men is that
they love the sea; and because they love it they hear and answer its call:
... No delight has he in the world,
Nor in aught save the roll of the billows; but always a longing,
A yearning uneasiness, hastens him on to the sea.[22]
As might be expected, this love of the ocean finds expression in all their
poetry. In _Beowulf_ alone there are fifteen names for the sea, from the
_holm_, that is, the horizon sea, the "upmounding," to the _brim_, which is
the ocean flinging its welter of sand and creamy foam upon the beach at
your feet. And the figures used to describe or glorify it--"the swan road,
the whale path, the heaving battle plain"--are almost as numerous. In all
their poetry there is a magnificent sense of lordship over the wild sea
even in its hour of tempest and fury:
Often it befalls us, on the ocean's highways,
In the boats our boatmen, when the storm is roaring,
Leap the billows over, on our stallions of the foam.[23]
THE INNER LIFE. A man's life is more than his work; his dream is ever
greater than his achievement; and literature reflects not so much man's
deed as the spirit which animates him; not the poor thing that he does, but
rather the splendid thing that he ever hopes to do. In no place is this
more evident than in the age we are now studying. Those early sea kings
were a marvelous mixture of savagery and sentiment, of rough living and of
deep feeling, of splendid courage and the deep melancholy of men who know
their limitations and have faced the unanswered problem of death. They were
not simply fearless freebooters who harried every coast in their war
galleys. If that were all, they would have no more history or literature
than the Barbary pirates, of whom the same thing could be said. These
strong fathers of ours were men of profound emotions. In all their fighting
the love of an untarnished glory was uppermost; and under the warrior's
savage exterior was hidden a great love of home and homely virtues, and a
reverence for the one woman to whom he would presently return in triumph.
So when the wolf hunt was over, or the desperate fight was won, these
mighty men would gather in the banquet hall, and lay their weapons aside
where the open fire would flash upon them, and there listen to the songs of
Scop and Gleeman,--men who could put into adequate words the emotions and
aspirations that all men feel but that only a few can ever express:
Music and song where the heroes sat--
The glee-wood rang, a song uprose
When Hrothgar's scop gave the hall good cheer.[24]
It is this great and hidden life of the Anglo-Saxons that finds expression
in all their literature. Briefly, it is summed up in five great
principles,--their love of personal freedom, their responsiveness to
nature, their religion, their reverence for womanhood, and their struggle
for glory as a ruling motive in every noble life.
In reading Anglo-Saxon poetry it is well to remember these five principles,
for they are like the little springs at the head of a great river,--clear,
pure springs of poetry, and out of them the best of our literature has
always flowed. Thus when we read,
Blast of the tempest--it aids our oars;
Rolling of thunder--it hurts us not;
Rush of the hurricane--bending its neck
To speed us whither our wills are bent,
we realize that these sea rovers had the spirit of kinship with the mighty
life of nature; and kinship with nature invariably expresses itself in
poetry. Again, when we read,
Now hath the man
O'ercome his troubles. No pleasure does he lack,
Nor steeds, nor jewels, nor the joys of mead,
Nor any treasure that the earth can give,
O royal woman, if he have but thee,[25]
we know we are dealing with an essentially noble man, not a savage; we are
face to face with that profound reverence for womanhood which inspires the
greater part of all good poetry, and we begin to honor as well as
understand our ancestors. So in the matter of glory or honor; it was,
apparently, not the love of fighting, but rather the love of honor
resulting from fighting well, which animated our forefathers in every
campaign. "He was a man deserving of remembrance" was the highest thing
that could be said of a dead warrior; and "He is a man deserving of praise"
was the highest tribute to the living. The whole secret of Beowulf's mighty
life is summed up in the last line, "Ever yearning for his people's
praise." So every tribe had its scop, or poet, more important than any
warrior, who put the deeds of its heroes into the expressive words that
constitute literature; and every banquet hall had its gleeman, who sang the
scop's poetry in order that the deed and the man might be remembered.
Oriental peoples built monuments to perpetuate the memory of their dead;
but our ancestors made poems, which should live and stir men's souls long
after monuments of brick and stone had crumbled away. It is to this intense
love of glory and the desire to be remembered that we are indebted for
Anglo-Saxon literature.
OUR FIRST SPEECH. Our first recorded speech begins with the songs of
Widsith and Deor, which the Anglo-Saxons may have brought with them when
they first conquered Britain. At first glance these songs in their native
dress look strange as a foreign tongue; but when we examine them carefully
we find many words that have been familiar since childhood. We have seen
this in _Beowulf_; but in prose the resemblance of this old speech to our
own is even more striking. Here, for instance, is a fragment of the simple
story of the conquest of Britain by our Anglo-Saxon ancestors:
Her Hengest and Æsc his sunu gefuhton with Bryttas, on thaere
stowe the is gecweden Creccanford, and thær ofslogon feower thusenda wera.
And tha Bryttas tha forleton Cent-lond, and mid myclum ege flugon to
Lundenbyrig. (At this time Hengest and Aesc, his son, fought against the
Britons at the place which is called Crayford and there slew four thousand
men. And then the Britons forsook Kentland, and with much fear fled to
London town.)[26]
The reader who utters these words aloud a few times will speedily recognize
his own tongue, not simply in the words but also in the whole structure of
the sentences.
From such records we see that our speech is Teutonic in its origin; and
when we examine any Teutonic language we learn that it is only a branch of
the great Aryan or Indo-European family of languages. In life and language,
therefore, we are related first to the Teutonic races, and through them to
all the nations of this Indo-European family, which, starting with enormous
vigor from their original home (probably in central Europe)[27] spread
southward and westward, driving out the native tribes and slowly developing
the mighty civilizations of India, Persia, Greece, Rome, and the wilder but
more vigorous life of the Celts and Teutons. In all these
languages--Sanskrit, Iranian, Greek, Latin, Celtic, Teutonic--we recognize
the same root words for father and mother, for God and man, for the common
needs and the common relations of life; and since words are windows through
which we see the soul of this old people, we find certain ideals of love,
home, faith, heroism, liberty, which seem to have been the very life of our
forefathers, and which were inherited by them from their old heroic and
conquering ancestors. It was on the borders of the North Sea that our
fathers halted for unnumbered centuries on their westward journey, and
slowly developed the national life and language which we now call Anglo-
Saxon.
It is this old vigorous Anglo-Saxon language which forms the basis of our
modern English. If we read a paragraph from any good English book, and then
analyze it, as we would a flower, to see what it contains, we find two
distinct classes of words. The first class, containing simple words
expressing the common things of life, makes up the strong framework of our
language. These words are like the stem and bare branches of a mighty oak,
and if we look them up in the dictionary we find that almost invariably
they come to us from our Anglo-Saxon ancestors. The second and larger class
of words is made up of those that give grace, variety, ornament, to our
speech. They are like the leaves and blossoms of the same tree, and when we
examine their history we find that they come to us from the Celts, Romans,
Normans, and other peoples with whom we have been in contact in the long
years of our development. The most prominent characteristic of our present
language, therefore, is its dual character. Its best qualities--strength,
simplicity, directness--come from Anglo-Saxon sources; its enormous added
wealth of expression, its comprehensiveness, its plastic adaptability to
new conditions and ideas, are largely the result of additions from other
languages, and especially of its gradual absorption of the French language
after the Norman Conquest. It is this dual character, this combination of
native and foreign, of innate and exotic elements, which accounts for the
wealth of our English language and literature. To see it in concrete form,
we should read in succession _Beowulf_ and _Paradise Lost_, the two great
epics which show the root and the flower of our literary development.
III. CHRISTIAN WRITERS OF THE ANGLO-SAXON PERIOD
The literature of this period falls naturally into two divisions,--pagan
and Christian. The former represents the poetry which the Anglo-Saxons
probably brought with them in the form of oral sagas,--the crude material
out of which literature was slowly developed on English soil; the latter
represents the writings developed under teaching of the monks, after the
old pagan religion had vanished, but while it still retained its hold on
the life and language of the people. In reading our earliest poetry it is
well to remember that all of it was copied by the monks, and seems to have
been more or less altered to give it a religious coloring.
The coming of Christianity meant not simply a new life and leader for
England; it meant also the wealth of a new language. The scop is now
replaced by the literary monk; and that monk, though he lives among common
people and speaks with the English tongue, has behind him all the culture
and literary resources of the Latin language. The effect is seen instantly
in our early prose and poetry.
NORTHUMBRIAN LITERATURE. In general, two great schools of Christian
influence came into England, and speedily put an end to the frightful wars
that had waged continually among the various petty kingdoms of the
Anglo-Saxons. The first of these, under the leadership of Augustine, came
from Rome. It spread in the south and center of England, especially in the
kingdom of Essex. It founded schools and partially educated the rough
people, but it produced no lasting literature. The other, under the
leadership of the saintly Aidan, came from Ireland, which country had been
for centuries a center of religion and education for all western Europe.
The monks of this school labored chiefly in Northumbria, and to their
influence we owe all that is best in Anglo-Saxon literature. It is called
the Northumbrian School; its center was the monasteries and abbeys, such as
Jarrow and Whitby, and its three greatest names are Bede, Cædmon, and
Cynewulf.
BEDE (673-735)
The Venerable Bede, as he is generally called, our first great scholar and
"the father of our English learning," wrote almost exclusively in Latin,
his last work, the translation of the Gospel of John into Anglo-Saxon,
having been unfortunately lost. Much to our regret, therefore, his books
and the story of his gentle, heroic life must be excluded from this history
of our literature. His works, over forty in number, covered the whole field
of human knowledge in his day, and were so admirably written that they were
widely copied as text-books, or rather manuscripts, in nearly all the
monastery schools of Europe.
The work most important to us is the _Ecclesiastical History of the English
People_. It is a fascinating history to read even now, with its curious
combination of accurate scholarship and immense credulity. In all strictly
historical matters Bede is a model. Every known authority on the subject,
from Pliny to Gildas, was carefully considered; every learned pilgrim to
Rome was commissioned by Bede to ransack the archives and to make copies of
papal decrees and royal letters; and to these were added the testimony of
abbots who could speak from personal knowledge of events or repeat the
traditions of their several monasteries.
Side by side with this historical exactness are marvelous stories of saints
and missionaries. It was an age of credulity, and miracles were in men's
minds continually. The men of whom he wrote lived lives more wonderful than
any romance, and their courage and gentleness made a tremendous impression
on the rough, warlike people to whom they came with open hands and hearts.
It is the natural way of all primitive peoples to magnify the works of
their heroes, and so deeds of heroism and kindness, which were part of the
daily life of the Irish missionaries, were soon transformed into the
miracles of the saints. Bede believed these things, as all other men did,
and records them with charming simplicity, just as he received them from
bishop or abbot. Notwithstanding its errors, we owe to this work nearly all
our knowledge of the eight centuries of our history following the landing
of Cæsar in Britain.
CÆDMON (Seventh Century)
Now must we hymn the Master of heaven,
The might of the Maker, the deeds of the Father,
The thought of His heart. He, Lord everlasting,
Established of old the source of all wonders:
Creator all-holy, He hung the bright heaven,
A roof high upreared, o'er the children of men;
The King of mankind then created for mortals
The world in its beauty, the earth spread beneath them,
He, Lord everlasting, omnipotent God.[28]
If _Beowulf_ and the fragments of our earliest poetry were brought into
England, then the hymn given above is the first verse of all native English
song that has come down to us, and Cædmon is the first poet to whom we can
give a definite name and date. The words were written about 665 A.D. and
are found copied at the end of a manuscript of Bede's _Ecclesiastical
History_.
LIFE OF CæDMON. What little we know of Cædmon, the Anglo-Saxon Milton, as
he is properly called, is taken from Bede's account[29] of the Abbess Hilda
and of her monastery at Whitby. Here is a free and condensed translation of
Bede's story:
There was, in the monastery of the Abbess Hilda, a brother distinguished by
the grace of God, for that he could make poems treating of goodness and
religion. Whatever was translated to him (for he could not read) of Sacred
Scripture he shortly reproduced in poetic form of great sweetness and
beauty. None of all the English poets could equal him, for he learned not
the art of song from men, nor sang by the arts of men. Rather did he
receive all his poetry as a free gift from God, and for this reason he did
never compose poetry of a vain or worldly kind.
Until of mature age he lived as a layman and had never learned any poetry.
Indeed, so ignorant of singing was he that sometimes, at a feast, where it
was the custom that for the pleasure of all each guest should sing in turn,
he would rise from the table when he saw the harp coming to him and go home
ashamed. Now it happened once that he did this thing at a certain
festivity, and went out to the stall to care for the horses, this duty
being assigned to him for that night. As he slept at the usual time, one
stood by him saying: "Cædmon, sing me something." "I cannot sing," he
answered, "and that is why I came hither from the feast." But he who spake
unto him said again, "Cædmon, sing to me." And he said, "What shall I
sing?" and he said, "Sing the beginning of created things." Thereupon
Cædmon began to sing verses that he had never heard before, of this import:
"Now should we praise the power and wisdom of the Creator, the works of the
Father." This is the sense but not the form of the hymn that he sang while
sleeping.
When he awakened, Cædmon remembered the words of the hymn and added to them
many more. In the morning he went to the steward of the monastery lands and
showed him the gift he had received in sleep. The steward brought him to
Hilda, who made him repeat to the monks the hymn he had composed, and all
agreed that the grace of God was upon Cædmon. To test him they expounded to
him a bit of Scripture from the Latin and bade him, if he could, to turn it
into poetry. He went away humbly and returned in the morning with an
excellent poem. Thereupon Hilda received him and his family into the
monastery, made him one of the brethren, and commanded that the whole
course of Bible history be expounded to him. He in turn, reflecting upon
what he had heard, transformed it into most delightful poetry, and by
echoing it back to the monks in more melodious sounds made his teachers his
listeners. In all this his aim was to turn men from wickedness and to help
them to the love and practice of well doing.
[Then follows a brief record of Cædmon's life and an exquisite picture of
his death amidst the brethren.] And so it came to pass [says the simple
record] that as he served God while living in purity of mind and serenity
of spirit, so by a peaceful death he left the world and went to look upon
His face.
CæDMON'S WORKS. The greatest work attributed to Cædmon is the so-called
_Paraphrase_. It is the story of Genesis, Exodus, and a part of Daniel,
told in glowing, poetic language, with a power of insight and imagination
which often raises it from paraphrase into the realm of true poetry. Though
we have Bede's assurance that Cædmon "transformed the whole course of Bible
history into most delightful poetry," no work known certainly to have been
composed by him has come down to us. In the seventeenth century this
Anglo-Saxon _Paraphrase_ was discovered and attributed to Cædmon, and his
name is still associated with it, though it is now almost certain that the
_Paraphrase_ is the work of more than one writer.
Aside from the doubtful question of authorship, even a casual reading of
the poem brings us into the presence of a poet rude indeed, but with a
genius strongly suggestive at times of the matchless Milton. The book opens
with a hymn of praise, and then tells of the fall of Satan and his rebel
angels from heaven, which is familiar to us in Milton's _Paradise Lost_.
Then follows the creation of the world, and the _Paraphrase_ begins to
thrill with the old Anglo-Saxon love of nature.
Here first the Eternal Father, guard of all,
Of heaven and earth, raisèd up the firmament,
The Almighty Lord set firm by His strong power
This roomy land; grass greened not yet the plain,
Ocean far spread hid the wan ways in gloom.
Then was the Spirit gloriously bright
Of Heaven's Keeper borne over the deep
Swiftly. The Life-giver, the Angel's Lord,
Over the ample ground bade come forth Light.
Quickly the High King's bidding was obeyed,
Over the waste there shone light's holy ray.
Then parted He, Lord of triumphant might,
Shadow from shining, darkness from the light.
Light, by the Word of God, was first named day.[30]
After recounting the story of Paradise, the Fall, and the Deluge, the
_Paraphrase_ is continued in the Exodus, of which the poet makes a noble
epic, rushing on with the sweep of a Saxon army to battle. A single
selection is given here to show how the poet adapted the story to his
hearers:
Then they saw,
Forth and forward faring, Pharaoh's war array
Gliding on, a grove of spears;--glittering the hosts!
Fluttered there the banners, there the folk the march trod.
Onwards surged the war, strode the spears along,
Blickered the broad shields; blew aloud the trumpets....
Wheeling round in gyres, yelled the fowls of war,
Of the battle greedy; hoarsely barked the raven,
Dew upon his feathers, o'er the fallen corpses--
Swart that chooser of the slain! Sang aloud the wolves
At eve their horrid song, hoping for the carrion.[31]
Besides the _Paraphrase_ we have a few fragments of the same general
character which are attributed to the school of Cædmon. The longest of
these is _Judith_, in which the story of an apocryphal book of the Old
Testament is done into vigorous poetry. Holofernes is represented as a
savage and cruel Viking, reveling in his mead hall; and when the heroic
Judith cuts off his head with his own sword and throws it down before the
warriors of her people, rousing them to battle and victory, we reach
perhaps the most dramatic and brilliant point of Anglo-Saxon literature.
CYNEWULF (Eighth Century)
Of Cynewulf, greatest of the Anglo-Saxon poets, excepting only the unknown
author of _Beowulf_, we know very little. Indeed, it was not till 1840,
more than a thousand years after his death, that even his name became
known. Though he is the only one of our early poets who signed his works,
the name was never plainly written, but woven into the verses in the form
of secret runes,[32] suggesting a modern charade, but more difficult of
interpretation until one has found the key to the poet's signature.
WORKS OF CYNEWULF. The only signed poems of Cynewulf are _The Christ,
Juliana, The Fates of the Apostles_, and _Elene_. Unsigned poems attributed
to him or his school are _Andreas_, the _Phoenix_, the _Dream of the Rood_,
the _Descent into Hell_, _Guthlac_, the _Wanderer_, and some of the
Riddles. The last are simply literary conundrums in which some well-known
object, like the bow or drinking horn, is described in poetic language, and
the hearer must guess the name. Some of them, like "The Swan"[33] and "The
Storm Spirit," are unusually beautiful.
Of all these works the most characteristic is undoubtedly _The Christ_, a
didactic poem in three parts: the first celebrating the Nativity; the
second, the Ascension; and the third, "Doomsday," telling the torments of
the wicked and the unending joy of the redeemed. Cynewulf takes his
subject-matter partly from the Church liturgy, but more largely from the
homilies of Gregory the Great. The whole is well woven together, and
contains some hymns of great beauty and many passages of intense dramatic
force. Throughout the poem a deep love for Christ and a reverence for the
Virgin Mary are manifest. More than any other poem in any language, _The
Christ_ reflects the spirit of early Latin Christianity.
Here is a fragment comparing life to a sea voyage,--a comparison which
occurs sooner or later to every thoughtful person, and which finds perfect
expression in Tennyson's "Crossing the Bar."
Now 'tis most like as if we fare in ships
On the ocean flood, over the water cold,
Driving our vessels through the spacious seas
With horses of the deep. A perilous way is this
Of boundless waves, and there are stormy seas
On which we toss here in this (reeling) world
O'er the deep paths. Ours was a sorry plight
Until at last we sailed unto the land,
Over the troubled main. Help came to us
That brought us to the haven of salvation,
God's Spirit-Son, and granted grace to us
That we might know e'en from the vessel's deck
Where we must bind with anchorage secure
Our ocean steeds, old stallions of the waves.
In the two epic poems of _Andreas_ and _Elene_ Cynewulf (if he be the
author) reaches the very summit of his poetical art. _Andreas_, an unsigned
poem, records the story of St. Andrew, who crosses the sea to rescue his
comrade St. Matthew from the cannibals. A young ship-master who sails the
boat turns out to be Christ in disguise, Matthew is set free, and the
savages are converted by a miracle.[34] It is a spirited poem, full of rush
and incident, and the descriptions of the sea are the best in Anglo-Saxon
poetry.
_Elene_ has for its subject-matter the finding of the true cross. It tells
of Constantine's vision of the Rood, on the eve of battle. After his
victory under the new emblem he sends his mother Helena (Elene) to
Jerusalem in search of the original cross and the nails. The poem, which is
of very uneven quality, might properly be put at the end of Cynewulf's
works. He adds to the poem a personal note, signing his name in runes; and,
if we accept the wonderful "Vision of the Rood" as Cynewulf's work, we
learn how he found the cross at last in his own heart. There is a
suggestion here of the future Sir Launfal and the search for the Holy
Grail.
DECLINE OF NORTHUMBRIAN LITERATURE. The same northern energy which had
built up learning and literature so rapidly in Northumbria was instrumental
in pulling it down again. Toward the end of the century in which Cynewulf
lived, the Danes swept down on the English coasts and overwhelmed
Northumbria. Monasteries and schools were destroyed; scholars and teachers
alike were put to the sword, and libraries that had been gathered leaf by
leaf with the toil of centuries were scattered to the four winds. So all
true Northumbrian literature perished, with the exception of a few
fragments, and that which we now possess[35] is largely a translation in
the dialect of the West Saxons. This translation was made by Alfred's
scholars, after he had driven back the Danes in an effort to preserve the
ideals and the civilization that had been so hardly won. With the conquest
of Northumbria ends the poetic period of Anglo-Saxon literature. With
Alfred the Great of Wessex our prose literature makes a beginning.
ALFRED (848-901)
"Every craft and every power soon grows
old and is passed over and forgotten, if it
be without wisdom.... This is now to be
said, that whilst I live I wish to live nobly,
and after life to leave to the men who come
after me a memory of good works."[36]
So wrote the great Alfred, looking back over his heroic life. That he lived
nobly none can doubt who reads the history of the greatest of Anglo-Saxon
kings; and his good works include, among others, the education of half a
country, the salvage of a noble native literature, and the creation of the
first English prose.
LIFE AND TIMES OF ALFRED. For the history of Alfred's times, and details of
the terrific struggle with the Northmen, the reader must be referred to the
histories. The struggle ended with the Treaty of Wedmore, in 878, with the
establishment of Alfred not only as king of Wessex, but as overlord of the
whole northern country. Then the hero laid down his sword, and set himself
as a little child to learn to read and write Latin, so that he might lead
his people in peace as he had led them in war. It is then that Alfred began
to be the heroic figure in literature that he had formerly been in the wars
against the Northmen.
With the same patience and heroism that had marked the long struggle for
freedom, Alfred set himself to the task of educating his people. First he
gave them laws, beginning with the Ten Commandments and ending with the
Golden Rule, and then established courts where laws could be faithfully
administered. Safe from the Danes by land, he created a navy, almost the
first of the English fleets, to drive them from the coast. Then, with peace
and justice established within his borders, he sent to Europe for scholars
and teachers, and set them over schools that he established. Hitherto all
education had been in Latin; now he set himself the task, first, of
teaching every free-born Englishman to read and write his own language, and
second, of translating into English the best books for their instruction.
Every poor scholar was honored at his court and was speedily set to work at
teaching or translating; every wanderer bringing a book or a leaf of
manuscript from the pillaged monasteries of Northumbria was sure of his
reward. In this way the few fragments of native Northumbrian literature,
which we have been studying, were saved to the world. Alfred and his
scholars treasured the rare fragments and copied them in the West-Saxon
dialect. With the exception of Cædmon's Hymn, we have hardly a single leaf
from the great literature of Northumbria in the dialect in which it was
first written.
WORKS OF ALFRED. Aside from his educational work, Alfred is known chiefly
as a translator. After fighting his country's battles, and at a time when
most men were content with military honor, he began to learn Latin, that he
might translate the works that would be most helpful to his people. His
important translations are four in number: Orosius's _Universal History and
Geography_, the leading work in general history for several centuries;
Bede's _History_,[37] the first great historical work written on English
soil; Pope Gregory's _Shepherds' Book_, intended especially for the clergy;
and Boethius's _Consolations of Philosophy_, the favorite philosophical
work of the Middle Ages.
More important than any translation is the _English_ or _Saxon Chronicle_.
This was probably at first a dry record, especially of important births and
deaths in the West-Saxon kingdom. Alfred enlarged this scant record,
beginning the story with Cæsar's conquest. When it touches his own reign
the dry chronicle becomes an interesting and connected story, the oldest
history belonging to any modern nation in its own language. The record of
Alfred's reign, probably by himself, is a splendid bit of writing and shows
clearly his claim to a place in literature as well as in history. The
_Chronicle_ was continued after Alfred's death, and is the best monument of
early English prose that is left to us. Here and there stirring songs are
included in the narrative, like "The Battle of Brunanburh" and "The Battle
of Maldon."[38] The last, entered 991, seventy-five years before the Norman
Conquest, is the swan song of Anglo-Saxon poetry. The _Chronicle_ was
continued for a century after the Norman Conquest, and is extremely
valuable not only as a record of events but as a literary monument showing
the development of our language.
CLOSE OF THE ANGLO-SAXON PERIOD. After Alfred's death there is little to
record, except the loss of the two supreme objects of his heroic struggle,
namely, a national life and a national literature. It was at once the
strength and the weakness of the Saxon that he lived apart as a free man
and never joined efforts willingly with any large body of his fellows. The
tribe was his largest idea of nationality, and, with all our admiration, we
must confess as we first meet him that he has not enough sense of unity to
make a great nation, nor enough culture to produce a great literature. A
few noble political ideals repeated in a score of petty kingdoms, and a few
literary ideals copied but never increased,--that is the summary of his
literary history. For a full century after Alfred literature was
practically at a standstill, having produced the best of which it was
capable, and England waited for the national impulse and for the culture
necessary for a new and greater art. Both of these came speedily, by way of
the sea, in the Norman Conquest.
SUMMARY OF ANGLO-SAXON PERIOD. Our literature begins with songs and stories
of a time when our Teutonic ancestors were living on the borders of the
North Sea. Three tribes of these ancestors, the Jutes, Angles, and Saxons,
conquered Britain in the latter half of the fifth century, and laid the
foundation of the English nation. The first landing was probably by a tribe
of Jutes, under chiefs called by the chronicle Hengist and Horsa. The date
is doubtful; but the year 449 is accepted by most historians.
These old ancestors were hardy warriors and sea rovers, yet were capable of
profound and noble emotions. Their poetry reflects this double nature. Its
subjects were chiefly the sea and the plunging boats, battles, adventure,
brave deeds, the glory of warriors, and the love of home. Accent,
alliteration, and an abrupt break in the middle of each line gave their
poetry a kind of martial rhythm. In general the poetry is earnest and
somber, and pervaded by fatalism and religious feeling. A careful reading
of the few remaining fragments of Anglo-Saxon literature reveals five
striking characteristics: the love of freedom; responsiveness to nature,
especially in her sterner moods; strong religious convictions, and a belief
in Wyrd, or Fate; reverence for womanhood; and a devotion to glory as the
ruling motive in every warrior's life.
In our study we have noted: (1) the great epic or heroic poem _Beowulf_,
and a few fragments of our first poetry, such as "Widsith," "Deor's
Lament," and "The Seafarer." (2) Characteristics of Anglo-Saxon life; the
form of our first speech. (3) The Northumbrian school of writers. Bede, our
first historian, belongs to this school; but all his extant works are in
Latin. The two great poets are Cædmon and Cynewulf. Northumbrian literature
flourished between 650 and 850. In the year 867 Northumbria was conquered
by the Danes, who destroyed the monasteries and the libraries containing
our earliest literature. (4) The beginnings of English prose writing under
Alfred (848-901). Our most important prose work of this age is the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which was revised and enlarged by Alfred, and which
was continued for more than two centuries. It is the oldest historical
record known to any European nation in its own tongue.
SELECTIONS FOR READING. _Miscellaneous Poetry_. The Seafarer, Love Letter
(Husband's Message), Battle of Brunanburh, Deor's Lament, Riddles, Exodus,
The Christ, Andreas, Dream of the Rood, extracts in Cook and Tinker's
Translations from Old English Poetry[39] (Ginn and Company); Judith,
translation by A.S. Cook. Good selections are found also in Brooke's
History of Early English Literature, and Morley's English Writers, vols. 1
and 2.
_Beowulf_. J.R.C. Hall's prose translation; Child's Beowulf (Riverside
Literature Series); Morris and Wyatt's The Tale of Beowulf; Earle's The
Deeds of Beowulf; Metrical versions by Garnett, J.L. Hall, Lumsden, etc.
_Prose_. A few paragraphs of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in Manly's English
Prose; translations in Cook and Tinker's Old English Prose.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.[40]
_HISTORY_. For the facts of the Anglo-Saxon conquest of England consult
first a good text-book: Montgomery, pp. 31--57, or Cheyney, pp. 36-84. For
fuller treatment see Green, ch. 1; Traill, vol. 1; Ramsey's Foundations of
England; Turner's History of the Anglo-Saxons; Freeman's Old English
History; Allen's Anglo-Saxon England; Cook's Life of Alfred; Asser's Life
of King Alfred, edited by W.H. Stevenson; C. Plummer's Life and Times of
Alfred the Great; E. Dale's National Life and Character in the Mirror of
Early English Literature; Rhys's Celtic Britain.
_LITERATURE. Anglo-Saxon Texts_. Library of Anglo-Saxon Poetry, and Albion
Series of Anglo-Saxon and Middle English Poetry (Ginn and Company); Belles
Lettres Series of English Classics, sec. 1 (Heath & Co.); J.W. Bright's
Anglo-Saxon Reader; Sweet's Anglo-Saxon Primer, and Anglo-Saxon Reader.
_General Works_. Jusserand, Ten Brink, Cambridge History, Morley (full
titles and publishers in General Bibliography).
_Special Works_. Brooke's History of Early English Literature; Earle's
Anglo-Saxon Literature; Lewis's Beginnings of English Literature; Arnold's
Celtic Literature (for relations of Saxon and Celt); Longfellow's Poets and
Poetry of Europe; Hall's Old English Idyls; Gayley's Classic Myths, or
Guerber's Myths of the Northlands (for Norse Mythology); Brother Azarias's
Development of Old English Thought.
Beowulf, prose translations by Tinker, Hall, Earle, Morris and Wyatt;
metrical versions by Garnett, J.L. Hall, Lumsden, etc. The Exeter Book (a
collection of Anglo-Saxon texts), edited and translated by Gollancz. The
Christ of Cynewulf, prose translation by Whitman; the same poem, text and
translation, by Gollancz; text by Cook. Cædmon's Paraphrase, text and
translation, by Thorpe. Garnett's Elene, Judith, and other Anglo-Saxon
Poems. Translations of Andreas and the Phoenix, in Gollancz's Exeter Book.
Bede's History, in Temple Classics; the same with the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
(one volume) in Bohn's Antiquarian Library.
SUGGESTIVE QUESTIONS.[41]
1. What is the relation of history and literature? Why should both subjects
be studied together? Explain the qualities that characterize all great
literature. Has any text-book in history ever appealed to you as a work of
literature? What literary qualities have you noticed in standard historical
works, such as those of Macaulay, Prescott, Gibbon, Green, Motley, Parkman,
and John Fiske?
2. Why did the Anglo-Saxons come to England? What induced them to remain?
Did any change occur in their ideals, or in their manner of life? Do you
know any social or political institutions which they brought, and which, we
still cherish?
3. From the literature you have read, what do you know about our Anglo-
Saxon ancestors? What virtues did they admire in men? How was woman
regarded? Can you compare the Anglo-Saxon ideal of woman with that of other
nations, the Romans for instance?
4. Tell in your own words the general qualities of Anglo-Saxon poetry. How
did it differ in its metrical form from modern poetry? What passages seem
to you worth learning and remembering? Can you explain why poetry is more
abundant and more interesting than prose in the earliest literature of all
nations?
5. Tell the story of _Beowulf_. What appeals to you most in the poem? Why
is it a work for all time, or, as the Anglo-Saxons would say, why is it
worthy to be remembered? Note the permanent quality of literature, and the
ideals and emotions which are emphasized in _Beowulf_. Describe the burials
of Scyld and of Beowulf. Does the poem teach any moral lesson? Explain the
Christian elements in this pagan epic.
6. Name some other of our earliest poems, and describe the one you like
best. How does the sea figure in our first poetry? How is nature regarded?
What poem reveals the life of the scop or poet? How do you account for the
serious character of Anglo-Saxon poetry? Compare the Saxon and the Celt
with regard to the gladsomeness of life as shown in their literature.
7. What useful purpose did poetry serve among our ancestors? What purpose
did the harp serve in reciting their poems? Would the harp add anything to
our modern poetry?
8. What is meant by Northumbrian literature? Who are the great Northumbrian
writers? What besides the Danish conquest caused the decline of
Northumbrian literature?
9. For what is Bede worthy to be remembered? Tell the story of Cædmon, as
recorded in Bede's History. What new element is introduced in Cædmon's
poems? What effect did Christianity have upon Anglo-Saxon literature? Can
you quote any passages from Cædmon to show that Anglo-Saxon character was
not changed but given a new direction? If you have read Milton's _Paradise
Lost_, what resemblances are there between that poem and Cædmon's
_Paraphrase?_
10. What are the Cynewulf poems? Describe any that you have read. How do
they compare in spirit and in expression with _Beowulf_? with Cædmon? Read
_The Phoenix_ (which is a translation from the Latin) in Brooke's History
of Early English Literature, or in Gollancz's Exeter Book, or in Cook's
Translations from Old English Poetry, and tell what elements you find to
show that the poem is not of Anglo-Saxon origin. Compare the views of
nature in Beowulf and in the Cynewulf poems.
11. Describe the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. What is its value in our language,
literature, and history? Give an account of Alfred's life and of his work
for literature. How does Anglo-Saxon prose compare in interest with the
poetry?
CHRONOLOGY
=====================================================================
HISTORY | LITERATURE
---------------------------------------------------------------------
|
449(?). Landing of Hengist and |
Horsa in Britain |
|
477. Landing of South Saxons |
|
547. Angles settle Northumbria | 547. Gildas's History
|
597. Landing of Augustine and his |
monks. Conversion of Kent |
|
617. Eadwine, king of Northumbria |
|
635-665. Coming of St. Aidan. |
Conversion of Northumbria | 664. Cædmon at Whitby
|
| 673-735. Bede
|
| 750 (_cir_.). Cynewulf
| poems
867. Danes conquer Northumbria |
|
871. Alfred, king of Wessex | 860. Anglo-Saxon Chronicle begun
|
878. Defeat of Danes. Peace of |
Wedmore |
|
901. Death of Alfred | 991. Last known poem of the
| Anglo-Saxon
| period, The Battle of
| Maldon, otherwise called
| Byrhtnoth's Death
1013-1042. Danish period |
|
1016. Cnut, king |
|
1042. Edward the Confessor. Saxon |
period restored |
|
1049. Westminster Abbey begun |
|
1066. Harold, last of Saxon kings. |
Norman Conquest |
=====================================================================
* * * * *
CHAPTER III
THE ANGLO-NORMAN PERIOD (1066-1350)
I. HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION
THE NORMANS. The name Norman, which is a softened form of Northman, tells
its own story. The men who bore the name came originally from
Scandinavia,--bands of big, blond, fearless men cruising after plunder and
adventure in their Viking ships, and bringing terror wherever they
appeared. It was these same "Children of Woden" who, under the Danes' raven
flag, had blotted out Northumbrian civilization in the ninth century. Later
the same race of men came plundering along the French coast and conquered
the whole northern country; but here the results were altogether different.
Instead of blotting out a superior civilization, as the Danes had done,
they promptly abandoned their own. Their name of Normandy still clings to
the new home; but all else that was Norse disappeared as the conquerors
intermarried with the native Franks and accepted French ideals and spoke
the French language. So rapidly did they adopt and improve the Roman
civilization of the natives that, from a rude tribe of heathen Vikings,
they had developed within a single century into the most polished and
intellectual people in all Europe. The union of Norse and French (i.e.
Roman-Gallic) blood had here produced a race having the best qualities of
both,--the will power and energy of the one, the eager curiosity and vivid
imagination of the other. When these Norman-French people appeared in
Anglo-Saxon England they brought with them three noteworthy things: a
lively Celtic disposition, a vigorous and progressive Latin civilization,
and a Romance language.[42] We are to think of the conquerors, therefore,
as they thought and spoke of themselves in the Domesday Book and all their
contemporary literature, not as Normans but as _Franci_, that is,
Frenchmen.
THE CONQUEST. At the battle of Hastings (1066) the power of Harold, last of
the Saxon kings, was broken, and William, duke of Normandy, became master
of England. Of the completion of that stupendous Conquest which began at
Hastings, and which changed the civilization of a whole nation, this is not
the place to speak. We simply point out three great results of the Conquest
which have a direct bearing on our literature. First, notwithstanding
Cæsar's legions and Augustine's monks, the Normans were the first to bring
the culture and the practical ideals of Roman civilization home to the
English people; and this at a critical time, when England had produced her
best, and her own literature and civilization had already begun to decay.
Second, they forced upon England the national idea, that is, a strong,
centralized government to replace the loose authority of a Saxon chief over
his tribesmen. And the world's history shows that without a great
nationality a great literature is impossible. Third, they brought to
England the wealth of a new language and literature, and our English
gradually absorbed both. For three centuries after Hastings French was the
language of the upper classes, of courts and schools and literature; yet so
tenaciously did the common people cling to their own strong speech that in
the end English absorbed almost the whole body of French words and became
the language of the land. It was the welding of Saxon and French into one
speech that produced the wealth of our modern English.
Naturally such momentous changes in a nation were not brought about
suddenly. At first Normans and Saxons lived apart in the relation of
masters and servants, with more or less contempt on one side and hatred on
the other; but in an astonishingly short time these two races were drawn
powerfully together, like two men of different dispositions who are often
led into a steadfast friendship by the attraction of opposite qualities,
each supplying what the other lacks. The _Anglo-Saxon Chronicle_, which was
continued for a century after Hastings, finds much to praise in the
conquerors; on the other hand the Normans, even before the Conquest, had no
great love for the French nation. After conquering England they began to
regard it as home and speedily developed a new sense of nationality.
Geoffrey's popular _History_,[43] written less than a century after the
Conquest, made conquerors and conquered alike proud of their country by its
stories of heroes who, curiously enough, were neither Norman nor Saxon, but
creations of the native Celts. Thus does literature, whether in a battle
song or a history, often play the chief role in the development of
nationality.[44] Once the mutual distrust was overcome the two races
gradually united, and out of this union of Saxons and Normans came the new
English life and literature.
LITERARY IDEALS OF THE NORMANS. The change in the life of the conquerors
from Norsemen to Normans, from Vikings to Frenchmen, is shown most clearly
in the literature which they brought with them to England. The old Norse
strength and grandeur, the magnificent sagas telling of the tragic
struggles of men and gods, which still stir us profoundly,--these have all
disappeared. In their place is a bright, varied, talkative literature,
which runs to endless verses, and which makes a wonderful romance out of
every subject it touches. The theme may be religion or love or chivalry or
history, the deeds of Alexander or the misdeeds of a monk; but the author's
purpose never varies. He must tell a romantic story and amuse his audience;
and the more wonders and impossibilities he relates, the more surely is he
believed. We are reminded, in reading, of the native Gauls, who would stop
every traveler and compel him to tell a story ere he passed on. There was
more of the Gaul than of the Norseman in the conquerors, and far more of
fancy than of thought or feeling in their literature. If you would see this
in concrete form, read the _Chanson de Roland_, the French national epic
(which the Normans first put into literary form), in contrast with
_Beowulf_, which voices the Saxon's thought and feeling before the profound
mystery of human life. It is not our purpose to discuss the evident merits
or the serious defects of Norman-French literature, but only to point out
two facts which impress the student, namely, that Anglo-Saxon literature
was at one time enormously superior to the French, and that the latter,
with its evident inferiority, absolutely replaced the former. "The fact is
too often ignored," says Professor Schofield,[45] "that before 1066 the
Anglo-Saxons had a body of native literature distinctly superior to any
which the Normans or French could boast at that time; their prose
especially was unparalleled for extent and power in any European
vernacular." Why, then, does this superior literature disappear and for
nearly three centuries French remain supreme, so much so that writers on
English soil, even when they do not use the French language, still
slavishly copy the French models?
To understand this curious phenomenon it is necessary only to remember the
relative conditions of the two races who lived side by side in England. On
the one hand the Anglo-Saxons were a conquered people, and without liberty
a great literature is impossible. The inroads of the Danes and their own
tribal wars had already destroyed much of their writings, and in their new
condition of servitude they could hardly preserve what remained. The
conquering Normans, on the other hand, represented the civilization of
France, which country, during the early Middle Ages, was the literary and
educational center of all Europe. They came to England at a time when the
idea of nationality was dead, when culture had almost vanished, when
Englishmen lived apart in narrow isolation; and they brought with them law,
culture, the prestige of success, and above all the strong impulse to share
in the great world's work and to join in the moving currents of the world's
history. Small wonder, then, that the young Anglo-Saxons felt the
quickening of this new life and turned naturally to the cultured and
progressive Normans as their literary models.
II. LITERATURE OF THE NORMAN PERIOD
In the Advocates' Library at Edinburgh there is a beautifully illuminated
manuscript, written about 1330, which gives us an excellent picture of the
literature of the Norman period. In examining it we are to remember that
literature was in the hands of the clergy and nobles; that the common
people could not read, and had only a few songs and ballads for their
literary portion. We are to remember also that parchments were scarce and
very expensive, and that a single manuscript often contained all the
reading matter of a castle or a village. Hence this old manuscript is as
suggestive as a modern library. It contains over forty distinct works, the
great bulk of them being romances. There are metrical or verse romances of
French and Celtic and English heroes, like Roland, Arthur and Tristram, and
Bevis of Hampton. There are stories of Alexander, the Greek romance of
"Flores and Blanchefleur," and a collection of Oriental tales called "The
Seven Wise Masters." There are legends of the Virgin and the saints, a
paraphrase of Scripture, a treatise on the seven deadly sins, some Bible
history, a dispute among birds concerning women, a love song or two, a
vision of Purgatory, a vulgar story with a Gallic flavor, a chronicle of
English kings and Norman barons, and a political satire. There are a few
other works, similarly incongruous, crowded together in this typical
manuscript, which now gives mute testimony to the literary taste of the
times.
Obviously it is impossible to classify such a variety. We note simply that
it is mediæval in spirit, and French in style and expression; and that sums
up the age. All the scholarly works of the period, like William of
Malmesbury's _History_, and Anselm's[46] _Cur Deus Homo_, and Roger Bacon's
_Opus Majus_, the beginning of modern experimental science, were written in
Latin; while nearly all other works were written in French, or else were
English copies or translations of French originals. Except for the advanced
student, therefore, they hardly belong to the story of English literature.
We shall note here only one or two marked literary types, like the Riming
Chronicle (or verse history) and the Metrical Romance, and a few writers
whose work has especial significance.
GEOFFREY OF MONMOUTH. (d. 1154). Geoffrey's _Historia Regum Britanniae_ is
noteworthy, not as literature, but rather as a source book from which many
later writers drew their literary materials. Among the native Celtic tribes
an immense number of legends, many of them of exquisite beauty, had been
preserved through four successive conquests of Britain. Geoffrey, a Welsh
monk, collected some of these legends and, aided chiefly by his
imagination, wrote a complete history of the Britons. His alleged authority
was an ancient manuscript in the native Welsh tongue containing the lives
and deeds of all their kings, from Brutus, the alleged founder of Britain,
down to the coming of Julius Cæsar.[47] From this Geoffrey wrote his
history, down to the death of Cadwalader in 689.
The "History" is a curious medley of pagan and Christian legends, of
chronicle, comment, and pure invention,--all recorded in minute detail and
with a gravity which makes it clear that Geoffrey had no conscience, or
else was a great joker. As history the whole thing is rubbish; but it was
extraordinarily successful at the time and made all who heard it, whether
Normans or Saxons, proud of their own country. It is interesting to us
because it gave a new direction to the literature of England by showing the
wealth of poetry and romance that lay in its own traditions of Arthur and
his knights. Shakespeare's _King Lear_, Malory's _Morte d'Arthur_, and
Tennyson's _Idylls of the King_ were founded on the work of this monk, who
had the genius to put unwritten Celtic tradition in the enduring form of
Latin prose.
WORK OF THE FRENCH WRITERS. The French literature of the Norman period is
interesting chiefly because of the avidity with which foreign writers
seized upon the native legends and made them popular in England. Until
Geoffrey's preposterous chronicle appeared, these legends had not been used
to any extent as literary material. Indeed, they were scarcely known in
England, though familiar to French and Italian minstrels. Legends of Arthur
and his court were probably first taken to Brittany by Welsh emigrants in
the fifth and sixth centuries. They became immensely popular wherever they
were told, and they were slowly carried by minstrels and story-tellers all
over Europe. That they had never received literary form or recognition was
due to a peculiarity of mediæval literature, which required that every tale
should have some ancient authority behind it. Geoffrey met this demand by
creating an historical manuscript of Welsh history. That was enough for the
age. With Geoffrey and his alleged manuscript to rest upon, the Norman-
French writers were free to use the fascinating stories which had been-for
centuries in the possession of their wandering minstrels. Geoffrey's Latin
history was put into French verse by Gaimar _(c_. 1150) and by Wace (_c_.
1155), and from these French versions the work was first translated into
English. From about 1200 onward Arthur and Guinevere and the matchless band
of Celtic heroes that we meet later (1470) in Malory's _Morte d' Arthur_
became the permanent possession of our literature.
LAYAMON'S BRUT (_c_. 1200). This is the most important of the English
riming chronicles, that is, history related in the form of doggerel verse,
probably because poetry is more easily memorized than prose. We give here a
free rendering of selected lines at the beginning of the poem, which tell
us all we know of Layamon, the first who ever wrote as an Englishman for
Englishmen, including in the term all who loved England and called it home,
no matter where their ancestors were born.
Now there was a priest in the land named Layamon. He was son of Leovenath
--may God be gracious unto him. He dwelt at Ernley, at a noble church on
Severn's bank. He read many books, and it came to his mind to tell the
noble deeds of the English. Then he began to journey far and wide over the
land to procure noble books for authority. He took the English book that
Saint Bede made, another in Latin that Saint Albin made,[48] and a third
book that a French clerk made, named Wace.[49] Layamon laid these works
before him and turned the leaves; lovingly he beheld them. Pen he took, and
wrote on book-skin, and made the three books into one.
The poem begins with the destruction of Troy and the flight of "Æneas the
duke" into Italy. Brutus, a great-grandson of Æneas, gathers his people and
sets out to find a new land in the West. Then follows the founding of the
Briton kingdom, and the last third of the poem, which is over thirty
thousand lines in length, is taken up with the history of Arthur and his
knights. If the _Brut_ had no merits of its own, it would still interest
us, for it marks the first appearance of the Arthurian legends in our own
tongue. A single selection is given here from Arthur's dying speech,
familiar to us in Tennyson's _Morte d'Arthur_. The reader will notice here
two things: first, that though the poem is almost pure Anglo-Saxon,[50] our
first speech has already dropped many inflections and is more easily read
than _Beowulf_; second, that French influence is already at work in
Layamon's rimes and assonances, that is, the harmony resulting from using
the same vowel sound in several successive lines:
And ich wulle varen to Avalun: And I will fare to Avalun,
To vairest alre maidene, To fairest of all maidens,
To Argante there quene, To Argante the queen,
Alven swithe sceone. An elf very beautiful.
And heo seal mine wunden And she shall my wounds
Makien alle isunde, Make all sound;
Al hal me makien All whole me make
Mid haleweiye drenchen. With healing drinks.
And seothe ich cumen wulle And again will I come
To mine kiueriche To my kingdom
And wunien mid Brutten And dwell with Britons
Mid muchelere wunne. With mickle joy.
Aefne than worden Even (with) these words
Ther com of se wenden There came from the sea
That wes an sceort bat lithen, A short little boat gliding,
Sceoven mid uthen, Shoved by the waves;
And twa wimmen ther inne, And two women therein,
Wunderliche idihte. Wondrously attired.
And heo nomen Arthur anan And they took Arthur anon
And an eovste hine vereden And bore him hurriedly,
And softe hine adun leiden, And softly laid him down,
And forth gunnen lithen. And forth gan glide.
METRICAL ROMANCES. Love, chivalry, and religion, all pervaded by the spirit
of romance,--these are the three great literary ideals which find
expression in the metrical romances. Read these romances now, with their
knights and fair ladies, their perilous adventures and tender love-making,
their minstrelsy and tournaments and gorgeous cavalcades,--as if humanity
were on parade, and life itself were one tumultuous holiday in the open
air,--and you have an epitome of the whole childish, credulous soul of the
Middle Ages. The Normans first brought this type of romance into England,
and so popular did it become, so thoroughly did it express the romantic
spirit of the time, that it speedily overshadowed all other forms of
literary expression.
Though the metrical romances varied much in form and subject-matter, the
general type remains the same,--a long rambling poem or series of poems
treating of love or knightly adventure or both. Its hero is a knight; its
characters are fair ladies in distress, warriors in armor, giants, dragons,
enchanters, and various enemies of Church and State; and its emphasis is
almost invariably on love, religion, and duty as defined by chivalry. In
the French originals of these romances the lines were a definite length,
the meter exact, and rimes and assonances were both used to give melody. In
England this metrical system came in contact with the uneven lines, the
strong accent and alliteration of the native songs; and it is due to the
gradual union of the two systems, French and Saxon, that our English became
capable of the melody and amazing variety of verse forms which first find
expression in Chaucer's poetry.
In the enormous number of these verse romances we note three main
divisions, according to subject, into the romances (or the so-called
matter) of France, Rome, and Britain.[51] The matter of France deals
largely with the exploits of Charlemagne and his peers, and the chief of
these Carlovingian cycles is the _Chanson de Roland_, the national epic,
which celebrates the heroism of Roland in his last fight against the
Saracens at Ronceval. Originally these romances were called _Chansons de
Geste_; and the name is significant as indicating that the poems were
originally short songs[52] celebrating the deeds _(gesta)_ of well-known
heroes. Later the various songs concerning one hero were gathered together
and the _Geste_ became an epic, like the _Chanson de Roland_, or a kind of
continued ballad story, hardly deserving the name of epic, like the _Geste
of Robin Hood_.[53]
The matter of Rome consisted largely of tales from Greek and Roman sources;
and the two great cycles of these romances deal with the deeds of
Alexander, a favorite hero, and the siege of Troy, with which the Britons
thought they had some historic connection. To these were added a large
number of tales from Oriental sources; and in the exuberant imagination of
the latter we see the influence which the Saracens--those nimble wits who
gave us our first modern sciences and who still reveled in the _Arabian
Nights_--had begun to exercise on the literature of Europe.
To the English reader, at least, the most interesting of the romances are
those which deal with the exploits of Arthur and his Knights of the Round
Table,--the richest storehouse of romance which our literature has ever
found. There were many cycles of Arthurian romances, chief of which are
those of Gawain, Launcelot, Merlin, the Quest of the Holy Grail, and the
Death of Arthur. In preceding sections we have seen how these fascinating
romances were used by Geoffrey and the French writers, and how, through the
French, they found their way into English, appearing first in our speech in
Layamon's _Brut_. The point to remember is that, while the legends are
Celtic in origin, their literary form is due to French poets, who
originated the metrical romance. All our early English romances are either
copies or translations of the French; and this is true not only of the
matter of France and Rome, but of Celtic heroes like Arthur, and English
heroes like Guy of Warwick and Robin Hood.
The most interesting of all Arthurian romances are those of the Gawain
cycle,[54] and of these the story of _Sir Gawain and the Green Knight_ is
best worth reading, for many reasons. First, though the material is taken
from French sources,[55] the English workmanship is the finest of our early
romances. Second, the unknown author of this romance probably wrote also
"The Pearl," and is the greatest English poet of the Norman period. Third,
the poem itself with its dramatic interest, its vivid descriptions, and its
moral purity, is one of the most delightful old romances in any language.
In form _Sir Gawain_ is an interesting combination of French and Saxon
elements. It is written in an elaborate stanza combining meter and
alliteration. At the end of each stanza is a rimed refrain, called by the
French a "tail rime." We give here a brief outline of the story; but if the
reader desires the poem itself, he is advised to begin with a modern
version, as the original is in the West Midland dialect and is exceedingly
difficult to follow.
On New Year's day, while Arthur and his knights are keeping the Yuletide
feast at Camelot, a gigantic knight in green enters the banquet hall on
horseback and challenges the bravest knight present to an exchange of
blows; that is, he will expose his neck to a blow of his own big battle-ax,
if any knight will agree to abide a blow in return. After some natural
consternation and a fine speech by Arthur, Gawain accepts the challenge,
takes the battle-ax, and with one blow sends the giant's head rolling
through the hall. The Green Knight, who is evidently a terrible magician,
picks up his head and mounts his horse. He holds out his head and the
ghastly lips speak, warning Gawain to be faithful to his promise and to
seek through the world till he finds the Green Chapel. There, on next New
Year's day, the Green Knight will meet him and return the blow.
The second canto of the poem describes Gawain's long journey through the
wilderness on his steed Gringolet, and his adventures with storm and cold,
with, wild beasts and monsters, as he seeks in vain for the Green Chapel.
On Christmas eve, in the midst of a vast forest, he offers a prayer to
"Mary, mildest mother so dear," and is rewarded by sight of a great castle.
He enters and is royally entertained by the host, an aged hero, and by his
wife, who is the most beautiful woman the knight ever beheld. Gawain learns
that he is at last near the Green Chapel, and settles down for a little
comfort after his long quest.
The next canto shows the life in the castle, and describes a curious
compact between the host, who goes hunting daily, and the knight, who
remains in the castle to entertain the young wife. The compact is that at
night each man shall give the other whatever good thing he obtains during
the day. While the host is hunting, the young woman tries in vain to induce
Gawain to make love to her, and ends by giving him a kiss. When the host
returns and gives his guest the game he has killed Gawain returns the kiss.
On the third day, her temptations having twice failed, the lady offers
Gawain a ring, which he refuses; but when she offers a magic green girdle
that will preserve the wearer from death, Gawain, who remembers the giant's
ax so soon to fall on his neck, accepts the girdle as a "jewel for the
jeopardy" and promises the lady to keep the gift secret. Here, then, are
two conflicting compacts. When the host returns and offers his game, Gawain
returns the kiss but says nothing of the green girdle.
The last canto brings our knight to the Green Chapel, after he is
repeatedly warned to turn back in the face of certain death. The Chapel is
a terrible place in the midst of desolation; and as Gawain approaches he
hears a terrifying sound, the grating of steel on stone, where the giant is
sharpening a new battle-ax. The Green Knight appears, and Gawain, true to
his compact, offers his neck for the blow. Twice the ax swings harmlessly;
the third time it falls on his shoulder and wounds him. Whereupon Gawain
jumps for his armor, draws his sword, and warns the giant that the compact
calls for only one blow, and that, if another is offered, he will defend
himself.