A Literary History of the English People Part 7

"Ohthere told his lord, king Alfred, that he dwelt northmost of all Northmen. He said that he dwelt in the land to the northward, along the west sea.[108] He said, however, that that land is very long north from thence, but it is all waste, except in a few places where the Fins here and there dwell, for hunting in the winter, and in the summer for fishing in that sea. He said that he was desirous to try, once on a time, how far that country extended due north; or whether any one lived to the north of the waste. He then went due north, along the country, leaving all the way, the waste land on the right, and the wide sea on the left, for three days: he was as far north as the whale-hunters go at the farthest. Then he proceeded in his course due north as far as he could sail within another three days. Then the land there inclined due east, or the sea into the land, he knew not which; but he knew that he there waited for a west wind, or a little north, and sailed thence eastward along that land, as far as he could sail in four days." He arrives at a place where the land turns to the south, evidently surrounding the White Sea, and he finds a broad river, doubtless the Dwina, that he dares not cross on account of the hostility of the inhabitants. This was the first tribe he had come across since his departure; he had only seen here and there some Fins, hunters and fishers. "He went thither chiefly, in addition to seeing the country, on account of the walruses, because they have very n.o.ble bones in their teeth; some of those teeth they brought to the king; and their hides are very good for ship ropes." Ohthere, adds Alfred, was very rich; he had six hundred tame reindeer; he said the province he dwelt in was called Helgoland, and that no one lived north of him.[109] The traveller gave also some account of lands more to the south, and even more interesting for his royal listener, namely Jutland, Seeland, and Sleswig, that is, as Alfred is careful to notice, the old mother country: "In these lands the Angles dwelt, before they came hither to this land."

When he has to deal with a Latin author, Alfred uses as much liberty. He takes the book that the adviser of Theodoric the Great, Boethius, had composed while in prison, and in which we see a personified abstraction, Wisdom, bringing consolation to the unfortunate man threatened with death. No work was more famous in the Middle Ages; it helped to spread the taste for abstract personages, owing to which so many shadows, men-virtues and men-vices, were to tread the boards of the mediaeval stage, and the strange plays called _Moralities_ were to enjoy a lasting popularity. The first in date of the numerous translations made of Boethius is that of Alfred.

Under his pen, the vague Christianity of Boethius[110] becomes a nave and superabundant faith; each episode is moralised; the affected elegance of the model disappears, and gives place to an almost childlike and yet captivating sincerity. The story of the misfortunes of Orpheus, written by Boethius in a very pretentious style, has in Alfred's translation a charm of its own, the charm of the wild flower.

Among the innumerable versions of this tale, the king's is certainly the one in which art has the least share, and in which emotion is most communicative: "It happened formerly that there was a harper in the country called Thrace, which was in Greece. The harper was inconceivably good. His name was Orpheus. He had a very excellent wife who was called Eurydice. Then began men to say concerning the harper that he could harp so that the wood moved, and the stones stirred themselves at the sound, and the wild beasts would run thereto, and stand as if they were tame; so still that though men or hounds pursued them, they shunned them not.

Then said they that the harper's wife should die, and her soul should be led to h.e.l.l. Then should the harper become so sorrowful that he could not remain among other men, but frequented the wood, and sat on the mountain both day and night, weeping and harping, so that the woods shook, and the rivers stood still, and no hart shunned any lion, nor hare any hound; nor did cattle know any hatred, or any fear of others, for the pleasure of the sound. Then it seemed to the harper that nothing in this world pleased him. Then thought he that he would seek the G.o.ds of h.e.l.l and endeavour to allure them with his harp, and pray that they would give him back his wife."

He goes down to the nether region; at the sweetness of his harping, Cerberus "began to wag his tail." Cerberus was "the dog of h.e.l.l; he should have three heads." "A very horrible gatekeeper," Charon by name, "had also three heads," according to the calculation of Alfred, whose mythology is not very safe. Charon welcomes the harper, "because he was desirous of the unaccustomed sound"; all sufferings cease at the melody of the harp; the wheel of Ixion ceases to turn; the hunger of Tantalus is appeased; the vulture ceases to torment King t.i.tyus; and the prayer of Orpheus is granted.

"But men can with difficulty, if at all, restrain love!" Orpheus retraces his steps, and, contrary to his promise, looks behind and stretches his hand towards the beloved shadow, and the shadow fades away. Moral--for with Alfred everything has a moral--when going to Christ, never look behind, for fear of being beguiled by the tempter: a practical conclusion not to be found in Boethius.[111]

Following the king's example, the bishops and monks set to work again.

Werferth, bishop of Worcester, translates the famous dialogues of St.

Gregory, filled with miracles and marvellous tales.[112] In the monasteries the old national Chronicles, written in the Anglo-Saxon tongue, are copied, corrected, and continued. These Chronicles existed before Alfred, but they were instilled with a new life owing to his influence. Seven of them have come down to us.[113] It is not yet history; events are registered in succession, usually without comment; kings ascend the throne and they are killed; bishops are driven from their seats, a storm destroys the crops; the monk notes all these things, and does not add a word showing what he thinks of them.[114] He writes as a recorder, chary of words. The reader's feelings will be moved by the deeds registered, not by the words used. Of kings the chronicler will often say, "he was killed," without any observation: "And king Osric was killed.... And king Selred was killed...." Why say more? it was an everyday occurrence and had nothing curious about it.

But a comet is not seen every day; a comet is worth describing: "678.--In this year, the star [called] comet appeared in August, and shone for three months every morning like sunbeam. And bishop Wilfrith was driven from his bishopric by king Ecgferth." We are far from the art of Gibbon or Carlyle. Few monuments, however, are more precious than those old annals; for no people in Europe can pride itself on having chronicles so ancient written in its national language.

"Every craft and every power," said Alfred once, speaking there his own mind, "soon becomes old and is pa.s.sed over in silence, if it be without wisdom.... This is now especially to be said, that I wished to live honourably whilst I lived, and, after my life, to leave to the men who were after me my memory in good works."[115] It happened as he had wished. Long after his death, his influence was still felt; he was the ideal his successors strove to attain to; even after the Norman Conquest he continued to be: "Englene herde, Englene derling."[116]

V.

Alfred disappears; disturbances begin again; then, in the course of the tenth century, comes a fresh period of comparative calm. Edgar is on the throne, and the archbishop St. Dunstan rules under his name.[117]

Helped by Bishop aethelwold, Dunstan resumed the never-ending and ever-threatened task of teaching the people and clergy; he endowed monasteries, and like Alfred created new schools and encouraged the translation of pious works. Under his influence collections of sermons in the vulgar tongue were formed.[118] Several of these collections have come down to us: one of them, the Blickling Homilies (from Blickling Hall, Norfolk, where the ma.n.u.script was found), was compiled before 971[119]; others are due to the celebrated monk aelfric, who became abbot of Eynsham in 1005, and wrote most of his works about this time[120]; another collection includes the sermons of Wulfstan, bishop of York from 1002 to 1023.[121]

These sermons, most of which are translated from the Latin, "sometimes word for word and sometimes sense for sense," according to the example set by Alfred, were destined for "the edification of the ignorant, who knew no language" except the national one.[122]

The congregation being made up mostly of rude, uneducated people, must be interested in order that it may listen to the sermons; the homilies are therefore filled with legendary information concerning the Holy Land, with minute pictures of the devil and apostles, with edifying tales full of miracles. In the homilies of Blickling, the church of the Holy Sepulchre is described in detail, with its sculptured portals, its stained-gla.s.s and its lamps, that threefold holy temple, existing far away at the other extremity of the world, in the distant East.[123] This church has no roof, so that the sky into which Christ's body ascended can be always seen; but, by G.o.d's grace, rain water never falls there.

The preacher is positive about his facts; he has them from travellers who have seen with their own eyes this cathedral of Christendom.

aelfric also keeps alive the interest of the listeners by propounding difficult questions to them which he answers himself at once. "Now many a man will think and inquire whence the devil came?... Now some man will inquire whence came his [own] soul, whether from the father or the mother? We say from neither of them; but the same G.o.d who created Adam with his hands ... that same giveth a soul and life to children."[124]

Why are there no more miracles? "These wonders were needful at the beginning of Christianity, for by these signs was the heathen folk inclined to faith. The man who plants trees or herbs waters them so long until they have taken root; when they are growing he ceases from watering. Also, the Almighty G.o.d so long showed his miracles to the heathen folk until they were believing: when faith had sprung up over all the world, then miracles ceased."[125]

The lives of the saints told by aelfric recall at times tales in the Arabian Nights. There are transformations, disparitions, enchantments, emperors who become hermits, statues that burst, and out of which comes the devil. "Go," cries the apostle to the fiend, "go to the waste where no bird flies, nor husbandman ploughs, nor voice of man sounds." The "accursed spirit" obeys, and he appears all black, "with sharp visage and ample beard. His locks hung to his ankles, his eyes were scattering fiery sparks, sulphureous flame stood in his mouth, he was frightfully feather-clad."[126] This is already the devil of the Mysteries, the one described by Rabelais, almost in the same words. We can imagine the effect of so minute a picture on the Saxon herdsmen a.s.sembled on Sunday in their little mysterious churches, almost windowless, like that of Bradford-on-Avon.

One peculiarity makes these sermons remarkable; in them can be discerned a certain effort to attain to literary dignity. The preacher tries his best to speak well. He takes all the more pains because he is slightly ashamed, being himself learned, to write in view of such an illiterate public. He does not know any longer Alfred's doubts, who, being uncertain as to which words best express the meaning of his model, puts down all those his memory or glossary supply: the reader can choose. The authors of these homilies purposely write prose which comes near the tone and forms of poetry. Such are almost always the beginnings of literary prose. They go as far as to introduce a rude cadence in their writings, and adapt thereto the special ornament of Germanic verse, alliteration. Wulfstan and aelfric frequently afford their audience the pleasure of those repeated sonorities, so much so that it has been possible to publish a whole collection of sermons by the latter in the form of poems.[127] Moreover, the subject itself is often poetic, and the priest adorns his discourse with images and metaphors. Many pa.s.sages of the "Blickling Homilies," read in a translation, might easily be taken for poetical extracts. Such are the descriptions of contemporaneous evils, and of the signs that will herald the end of the world, that world that "fleeth from us with great bitterness, and we follow it as it flies from us, and love it although it is pa.s.sing away."[128]

Such are also the descriptions of landscapes, where even now, in this final period of the Anglo-Saxon epoch, northern nature, snow and ice are visibly described, as in "Beowulf," with delight, by connoisseurs: "As St. Paul was looking towards the northern region of the earth, from whence all waters pa.s.s down, he saw above the water a h.o.a.ry stone, and north of the stone had grown woods, very rimy. And there were dark mists; and under the stone was the dwelling-place of monsters and execrable creatures."[129]

Thus Anglo-Saxon literature, in spite of the efforts of Cynewulf, Alfred, Dunstan, and aelfric goes on repeating itself. Poems, histories, and sermons are conspicuous, now for their grandeur, now for the emotion that is in them; but their main qualities and main defects are very much alike; they give an impression of monotony. The same notes, not very numerous, are incessantly repeated. The Angles, Saxons, and other conquerors who came from Germany have remained, from a literary point of view, nearly intact in the midst of the subjugated race. Their literature is almost stationary; it does not perceptibly move and develop. A graft is wanted; Rome tried to insert one, but a few branches only were vivified, not the whole tree; and the fruit is the same each year, wild and sometimes poor.

The political state of the country leaves on the mind a similar impression. The men of Germanic blood established in England remain, or nearly so, grouped together in tribes; their hamlet is the mother country for them. They are unable to unite against the foreign foe.

Their subdivisions undergo constant change, much as they did, centuries before, on the Continent. A swarm of petty kings, ignored by history, are known to have lived and reigned, owing to their name having been found appended to charters; there were kings of the Angles of the South, kings of half Kent, kings with fewer people to rule than a village mayor of to-day. They are killed, and, as we have seen, the thing is of no importance.

The Danes come again; at one time they own the whole of England, which is thus subject to the same king as Scandinavia. Periods of unification are merely temporary, and due to the power or the genius of a prince: Alfred, aethelstan, c.n.u.t the Dane; but the people of Great Britain keep their tendency to break up into small kingdoms, into earldoms, as they were called in the eleventh century, about the end of the period; into tribes, in reality, as when they inhabited the Germanic land. Out of this chaos how can a nation arise? a nation that may give birth to Shakespeare, crush the Armada, people the American continent? No less than a miracle is needed. The miracle took place: it was the battle of Hastings.

FOOTNOTES:

[70] "Hengest and Horsa ... were the sons of Wihtgils; Wihtgils was the son of Witta, Witta of Wecta, Wecta of Woden. From Woden sprang all our royal kin, and the Southumbrians also" (year 449, "Anglo-Saxon Chronicle," Peterborough text). "Penda was the son of Pybba, Pybba of Cryda ... Waermund of Wihtlaeg, Wihtlaeg of Woden" (_Ibid._ year 626).

Orderic Vital, born in England, and writing in Normandy, in the twelfth century, continues to trace back the descent of the kings of England to Woden: "a quo Angh feriam [iv]am Wodenis diem nuncupant" ("Hist.

Eccl.," ed. Le Prevost, vol. iii. p 161). "Wodenis dies" has become Wednesday. In the same fashion, and even more characteristically, the feast of the northern G.o.ddess Eostra has become "Easter": "Eostur-monath, qui nunc paschalis mensis interpretatur, quondam a dea eorum quae Eostre vocabatur ... nomen habuit." Bede, "De Temporum Ratione" in Migne's "Patrologia," xc., col. 357. Similar genealogies occur in Matthew Paris, thirteenth century, "Chronica Majora," vol. i.

pp. 188-9, 422 (Rolls).

[71] This unique monument seems to be of the eighth century. _Cf._ "Pre-Conquest Churches of Northumbria," an article by C. Hodges in the "Reliquary," July, 1893.

[72] For example, charter of Offa, dated 793, "Matthaei Parisiensis ...

Chronica Majora," ed. Luard (Rolls), vol. vi., "Additamenta," pp. 1, 25, &c.: "Regnante Domino nostro Jesu Christo in perpetuum."

[73] "King Ceadwalla's tomb in the ancient basilica of St. Peter," by M.

Tesoroni, Rome, 1891, 8vo.

[74] "Anglo-Saxon Chronicle," year 855. The princess was Judith, daughter of Charles the Bald. Hincmar, archbishop of Reims, blessed the marriage.

[75] "Quid dicam de tot episcopis ..." &c. "Willelmi Malmesbiriensis....

Gesta regum Anglorum," ed. Hardy, London, 1840, 2 vols. 8vo, vol. ii. p.

417.

[76] See his will and various doc.u.ments concerning him in Migne's "Patrologia," vol. lx.x.xix., col. 535 _et seq._

[77] "Fraternitatis vestrae pietatem intimis obsecramus precibus ut nos inter feras et ignaras gentes Germaniae laborantes, vestris sacrosanctis orationibus adjuvemur." Boniface to Cuthberht and others, year 735, in Migne's "Patrologia," vol. lx.x.xix., col. 735.

[78] "Ideo haec Vestrae Excellentiae dico ... ut aliquos ex pueris nostris remittam, qui excipiant n.o.bis necessaria quaeque, et revehant in Franciam flores Britanniae: ut non sit tantummodo in Eborica hortus conclusus, sed in Turonica emissiones Paradisi c.u.m pomorum fructibus, ut veniens Auster perflare hortos Ligeris fluminis et fluant aromata illius...." Migne's "Patrologia," vol. c., col. 208. Many among Alcuin's letters are directed to Anglo-Saxon kings whom he does not forbear to castigate, threatening them, if need be, with the displeasure of the mighty emperor: "Ad Offam regem Merciorum;" "Ad Coenulvum regem Merciorum,"

year 796, col. 213, 232.

[79] Works in Migne's "Patrologia," vol. lx.x.xix. col. 87 _et seq._ They include, besides his poetry ("De laude Virginum," &c.), a prose treatise: "De Laudibus Virginitatis," and other works in prose. He uses alliteration in his Latin poems.

[80] "Vita Sancti Wilfridi episcopi Eboracensis, auctore Eddio Stephano," in Gale's "Historiae Britannicae, Saxonicae, Anglo-Danicae Scriptores x." Oxford, 1691, 2 vols. fol., vol. i. pp. 50 ff.

[81] Ed. G. H. Moberly, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1881, 8vo (or Stevenson, London, 1838-41, 2 vols. 8vo). Complete works in Migne's "Patrologia," vol. xc. ff.

[82] Letter of Cuthberht, later abbot of Jarrow, to his friend Cuthwine, on the death of Bede, printed with the "Historia ecclesiastica." Bede is represented, on his death-bed, "in nostra lingua, ut erat doctus in nostris carminibus, dicens de terribili exitu animarum e corpore:

Fore the nei-faerae Naenig uniurthit Thonc snoturra...."

Bede had translated the Gospel of St. John, but this work is lost.

[83] See below, p. 70.

[84] Letter of the year 735, "Cuthberto et aliis"; letter of 736 to Ecgberht, archbishop of York. He receives the books, and expresses his delight at them; he sends in exchange pieces of cloth to Ecgberht; letter of the year 742; "Patrologia," vol. lx.x.xix.

[85] Archbishop of Canterbury, seventh century.

[86] J. M. Kemble, "Codex Vercellensis," London, aelfric Society, 1847-56; Part I., ll. 1 ff., 2507 ff., "Andreas," attributed to Cynewulf. On this question, see Gollancz, "Cynewulf's Christ," London, 1892, p. 173.

[87] "Neque enim possunt carmina, quamvis optime composita ex alia in aliam linguam ad verb.u.m sine detrimento sui decoris ac dignitatis transferri." "Historia Ecclesiastica," book iv. chap. xxiv.