Amenities of Literature Part 2

Some years ago, a learned Welsh scholar, Dr. Owen Pughe, issued proposals to publish the "Mabinogion," accompanied by translations, on the completion of a subscription list sufficient to indemnify the costs of printing.--See Mr. Crofton Croker's interesting work on "Fairy Legends," vol. iii. He appealed in vain to the public, but the whole loss remains with them. Recently a munificent lady [Lady Charlotte Guest] has resumed the task, and has presented us in the most elegant form with two tales such as ladies read. Since this note was written several cheering announcements of some important works have been put forth. [Many have since been published.]

[11] See Warton and Ellis. "Poesies de Marie de France" have been published by M. de Roquefort, Paris, 1820.

[12] "The translators do the triadist an injustice in rendering _Tri_ by '_The Three_' when he has put no _The_ at all. The number was accounted fortunate, and they took a pleasure in binding up all their ideas into little sheaves or fasciculi of three; but in so doing they did not mean to imply that there were no more such."--"Britannia after the Romans."

[13] As these artificial a.s.sociations, like the topics invented by the Roman rhetoricians, have been ridiculed by those who have probably formed their notions from unskilful versions, I select a few which might enter into the philosophy of the human mind. They denote a literature far advanced in critical refinement, and appear to have been composed from the sixth to the twelfth century.

"The three foundations of genius; the gift of G.o.d, human exertion, and the events of life."

"The three first requisites of genius; an eye to see nature, a heart to feel it, and a resolution that dares follow it."

"The three things indispensable to genius; understanding, meditation, and perseverance."

"The three things that improve genius; proper exertion, frequent exertion, and successful exertion."

"The three qualifications of poetry; endowment of genius, judgment from experience, and felicity of thought."

"The three pillars of judgment; bold design, frequent practice, and frequent mistakes."

"The three pillars of learning; seeing much, suffering much, and studying much." See Turner's "Vindication of the Ancient British Bards."--Owen's "Dissertation on Bardism, prefixed to the Heroic Elegies of Llywarc Hen."

THE NAME OF ENGLAND AND OF THE ENGLISH.

Two brothers and adventurers of an obscure Saxon tribe raised their ensign of the White Horse on British land: the visit was opportune, or it was expected--this remains a state secret. Welcomed by the British monarch and his perplexed council amid their intestine dissensions, as friendly allies, they were renowned for their short and crooked swords called _Seax_, which had given the generic name of Saxons to their tribe.

These descendants of Woden, for such even the petty chieftains deemed themselves, whose trade was battle and whose glory was pillage, showed the spiritless what men do who know to conquer, the few against the many. They baffled the strong and they annihilated the weak. The Britons were grateful. The Saxons lodged in the land till they took possession of it. The first Saxon founded the kingdom of Kent; twenty years after, a second in Suss.e.x raised the kingdom of the South-Saxons; in another twenty years appeared the kingdom of the West-Saxons. It was a century after the earliest arrival that the great emigration took place. The tribe of the Angles depopulated their native province and flocked to the fertile island, under that foeman of the Britons whom the bards describe as "The Flame Bearer," and "The Destroyer." Every quality peculiar to the Saxons was hateful to the Britons; even their fairness of complexion. Taliessin terms Hengist "a white-bellied hackney," and his followers are described as of "hateful hue and hateful form." The British poet delights to paint "a Saxon shivering and quaking, his _white hair_ washed in blood;" and another sings how "close upon the backs of the _pale-faced_ ones were the spear-points."[1]

Already the name itself of _Britain_ had disappeared among the invaders.

Our island was now called "Saxony beyond the Sea," or "West Saxon land;"

and when the expatriated Saxons had alienated themselves from the land of their fathers, those who remained faithful to their native hearths perhaps proudly distinguished themselves as "the old Saxons," for by this name they were known by the Saxons in Britain.

Eight separate but uncertain kingdoms were raised on the soil of Britain, and present a moveable surface of fraternal wars and baffled rivals. There was one kingdom long left kingless, for "No man dared, though never so ambitious, to take up the sceptre which many had found so hot; the only effectual cure of ambition that I have read"--these are the Words of Milton. Finally, to use the quaint phrase of the Chancellor Whitelock, "the Octarchy was brought into one." At the end of five centuries the Saxons fell prostrate before a stronger race.

But of all the accidents and the fortunes of the Saxon dynasty, not the least surprising is that an obscure town in the duchy of Sleswick, _Anglen_, is commemorated by the transference of its name to one of the great European nations. The _Angles_, or _Engles_, have given their denomination to the land of Britain--_Engle-land_ is _England_, and the _Engles_ are the _English_.[2]

How it happened that the very name of _Britain_ was abolished, and why the Anglian was selected in preference to the more eminent race, may offer a philosophical ill.u.s.tration of the accidental nature of LOCAL NAMES.

There is a tale familiar to us from youth, that Egbert, the more powerful king of the West Saxons, was crowned the first monarch of England, and issued a decree that this kingdom of Britain should be called England; yet an event so strange as to have occasioned the change of the name of the whole country remains unauthenticated by any of the original writers of our annals.[3] No record attests that Egbert in a solemn coronation a.s.sumed the t.i.tle of "King of England." His son and successor never claimed such a legitimate t.i.tle; and even our ill.u.s.trious Alfred, subsequently, only styled himself "King of the West Saxons."

The story, however, is of ancient standing; for Matthew of Westminster alludes to a similar if not the same incident, namely, that by "a common decree of all the Saxon kings, it was ordained that the t.i.tle of the island should no longer be Britain, from Brute, but henceforward be called from the English, England." Stowe furnishes a positive circ.u.mstance in this obscure transaction--"Egbert caused the brazen image of Cadwaline, King of the Britons, to be thrown down." The decree noticed by Matthew of Westminster, combined with the fact of pulling down the statue of a popular British monarch, betrays the real motive of this singular national change: whether it were the suggestion of Egbert, or the unanimous agreement of the a.s.sembled monarchs who were his tributary kings, it was a stroke of deep political wisdom; it knitted the members into one common body, under one name, abolishing, by legislative measures, the very memory of Britain from the land.

Although, therefore, no positive evidence has been produced, the state policy carries an internal evidence which yields some sanction to the obscure tradition.

It is a nicer difficulty to account for the choice of the Anglian name.

It might have been preferred to distinguish the Saxons of Britain from the Saxons of the Continent; or the name was adopted, being that of the far more numerous race among these people. Four kingdoms of the octarchy were possessed by the Angles. Thus doubtful and obscure remains the real origin of our national name, which hitherto has hinged on a suspicious fact.

The casual occurrence of the ENGLES leaving their name to this land has bestowed on our country a foreign designation; and--for the contingency was nearly occurring--had the kingdom of Northumbria preserved its ascendancy in the octarchy, the seat of dominion had been altered. In that case, the Lowlands of Scotland would have formed a portion of England; York would have stood forth as the metropolis of Britain, and London had been but a remote mart for her port and her commerce. Another idiom, perhaps, too, other manners, had changed the whole face of the country. We had been Northmen, not Southerns; our neighbourhood had not proved so troublesome to France. But the kingdom of Wess.e.x prevailed, and became the sole monarchy of England, Such local contingencies have decided the character of a whole people.[4]

The history of LOCAL NAMES is one of the most capricious and fortuitous in the history of man; the etymologist must not be implicitly trusted, for it is necessary to be acquainted with the history of a people as much as the history of languages, to be certain of local derivations. We have recently been cautioned by a sojourner in the most ancient of kingdoms,[5] not too confidently to rely on etymology, or to a.s.sign too positively any reason for the origin of LOCAL NAMES. No etymologist could have accounted for the name of our nation had he not had recourse to our annals. Sir WALTER RALEIGH, from his observations in the New World, has confirmed this observation by circ.u.mstances which probably remain unknown to the present inhabitants. The actual names given to those places in America which they still retain, are nothing more than the blunders of the first Europeans, demanding by signs and catching at words by which neither party were intelligible to one another.[6]

FOOTNOTES:

[1] "Britannia after the Romans," 62, 4to.

[2] It is a singular circ.u.mstance that our neighbours have preserved the name of our country more perfectly than we have done by our mutilated term of _England_, for they write it with antiquarian precision, _Angle-terre_--the land of the Angles. Our counties bear the vestiges of these Saxons expelling or exterminating the native Britons, as our pious Camden e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.es, "by G.o.d's wonderful providence."

[3] The diligent investigator of the history of our Anglo-Saxons concludes that this unauthorised tale of the coronation and the decree of Egbert is unworthy of credence.

Camden, in his first edition, had fixed the date of the change of the name as occurring in the year 810; in his second edition he corrected it to 800. Holinshed says _about_ 800. Speed gives a much later date, 819. It is evident that these disagreeing dates are all hazarded conjectures.

[4] Mitford's "Harmony of Language," 429. I might have placed this possible circ.u.mstance in the article "A History of Events which have not happened," in "Curiosities of Literature."

[5] Sir GARDNER WILKINSON, in the curious volume of his recondite discoveries in the land of the Pyramids.

[6] "History of the World," 167, fol. 1666. We have also a curious account of the ancient manner of naming persons and places among our own nation in venerable Lambarde's "Perambulations of Kent," 349, 453.

THE ANGLO-SAXONS.

The history and literature of England are involved in the transactions of a people who, living in such remote times at the highest of their fortunes, never advanced beyond a semi-civilization. But political freedom was the hardy and jealous offspring nursed in the forests of Germany; there was first heard the proclamation of equal laws, and there a people first a.s.sumed the name of Franks or Freemen. Our language, and our laws, and our customs, originate with our Teutonic ancestors; among them we are to look for the trunk, if not the branches, of our national establishments. In the rude antiquities of the Anglo-Saxon church, our theoretical inquirers in ecclesiastical history trace purer doctrines and a more primitive discipline; and in the shadowy Witenagemot, the moveable elements of the British const.i.tution: the language and literature of England still lie under their influence, for this people everywhere left the impression of a strong hand.

The history of the Anglo-Saxons as a people is without a parallel in the annals of a nation. Their story during five centuries of dominion in this land may be said to have been unknown to generations of Englishmen; the monuments of their history, the veritable records of their customs and manners, their polity, their laws, their inst.i.tutions, their literature, whatever reveals the genius of a people, lie entombed in their own contemporary ma.n.u.scripts, and in another source which we long neglected--in those ancient volumes of their northern brothers, who had not been idle observers of the transactions of England, which seems often to have been to them "the land of promise." The Anglo-Saxon ma.n.u.scripts, those authentic testimonies of the existence of the nation, were long dispersed, neglected, even unintelligible, disfigured by strange characters, and obscured by perplexing forms of diction. The language as well as the writing had pa.s.sed away; all had fallen into desuetude; and no one suspected that the history of a whole people so utterly cast into forgetfulness could ever be written.

But the lost language and the forgotten characters antiquity and religion seemed to have consecrated in the eyes of the learned Archbishop MATTHEW PARKER, who was the first to attempt their rest.i.tution by an innocent stratagem. To his edition of Thomas Walsingham's History in 1574, his Grace added the Life of Alfred by this king's secretary, a.s.ser, _printed in the Saxon character_; we are told, as "an invitation to English readers to draw them in unawares to an acquaintance with the _handwriting of their ancestors_."[1] "The invitation" was somewhat awful, and whether the guests were delighted or dismayed, let some Saxonist tell! SPELMAN, the great legal archaeologist, was among the earliest who ventured to search amid the Anglo-Saxon duskiness, at a time when he knew not one who could even interpret the writing. This great lawyer had been perplexed by many barbarous names and terms which had become obsolete; they were Saxon. He was driven to the study; and his "Glossary" is too humble a t.i.tle for that treasure of law and antiquity, of history and of disquisition, which astonished the learned world at home and abroad--while the unsold copies during the life of the author checked the continuation; so few was the number of students, and few they must still be; yet the devotion of its votary was not the less, for he had prepared the foundation of a Saxon professorship. Spelman was the father; but he who enlarged the inheritance of these Anglo-Saxon studies, appeared in the learned SOMNER; and though he lived through distracted times which loved not antiquity, the cell of the antiquary was hallowed by the rest.i.tuted lore. HICKES, in his elaborate "Thesaurus," displayed a literature which had never been read, and which he himself had not yet learned to read.

These were giants; their successors were dwarfs who could not add to their stores, and little heeded their possessions. Few rarely succeeded in reading the Saxon; and at that day, about the year 1700, no printer could cast the types, which were deemed barbarous, or, as the antiquary Rowe Mores expresses it, "unsightly to politer eyes." A lady--and she is not the only one who has found pleasure in studying this ancient language of our country--Mrs. ELSTOB, the niece of Hickes, patronised by a celebrated d.u.c.h.ess of Portland, furnished several versions; but the Saxon Homilies she had begun to print, for some unknown cause, were suspended: the unpublished but printed sheets are preserved at our National Library. These pursuits having long languished, seemed wholly to disappear from our literature.

None of our historians from MILTON to HUME ever referred to an original Saxon authority. They took their representations from the writings of the monks; but the true history of the Anglo-Saxons was not written in Latin. It was not from monkish scribes, who recorded public events in which the Saxons had no influence, that the domestic history of a race dispossessed of all power could be drawn, and far less would they record the polity which had once const.i.tuted their lost independence. The annalist of the monastery, flourishing under another dynasty, placed in other times and amid other manners, was estranged from any community of feeling with a people who were then sunk into the helots of England.

MILTON, in his history of Britain, imagined that the transactions of the Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy, or Octarchy, would be as worthless "to chronicle as the wars of kites or crows flocking and fighting in the air." Thus a poet-historian can veil by a brilliant metaphor the want of that knowledge which he contemns before he has acquired--this was less pardonable in a philosopher; and when HUME observed, perhaps with the eyes of Milton, that "he would hasten through the obscure and uninteresting period of Saxon Annals," however cheering to his reader was the calmness of his indolence, the philosopher, in truth, was wholly unconscious that these "obscure and uninteresting annals of the Anglo-Saxons" formed of themselves a complete history, offering new results for his profound and luminous speculations on the political state of man. Genius is often obsequious to its predecessors, and we track BURKE in the path of Hume; and so late as in 1794, we find our elegant antiquary, Bishop PERCY, lamenting the scanty and defective annals of the Anglo-Saxons; naked epitomes, bare of the slightest indications of the people themselves. The history of the dwellers in our land had hitherto yielded no traces of the customs and domestic economy of the nation; all beyond some public events was left in darkness and conjecture.

We find ELLIS and RITSON still erring in the trackless paths. All this national antiquity was wholly unsuspected by these zealous investigators. In this uncertain condition stood the history of the Anglo-Saxons, when a new light rose in the hemisphere, and revealed to the English public a whole antiquity of so many centuries. In 1805, for the first time, the story and the literature of the Anglo-Saxons was given to the country. It was our studious explorer, SHARON TURNER, who first opened these untried ways in our national antiquities.[2]

Anglo-Saxon studies have been recently renovated, but unexpected difficulties have started up. A language whose syntax has not been regulated, whose dialects can never be discriminated, and whose orthography and orthoepy seem irrecoverable, yields faithless texts when confronted; and treacherous must be the version if the construction be too literal or too loose, or what happens sometimes, ambiguous.

Different anglicisers offer more than one construction.[3]

It is now ascertained that the Anglo-Saxon ma.n.u.scripts are found in a most corrupt state.[4] This fatality was occasioned by the inattention or the unskilfulness of the caligrapher, whose task must have required a learned pen. The Anglo-Saxon verse was regulated by a puerile system of alliteration,[5] and the rhythm depended on accentuation. Whenever the strokes, or dots, marking the accent or the pauses are omitted, or misplaced, whole sentences are thrown into confusion; compound words are disjoined, and separate words are jumbled together. "Nouns have been mistaken for verbs, and particles for nouns."

These difficulties, arising from unskilful copyists, are infinitely increased by the genius of the Anglo-Saxon poets themselves. The tortuous inversion of their composition often leaves an ambiguous sense: their perpetual periphrasis; their abrupt transitions; their pompous inflations, and their elliptical style; and not less their portentous metaphorical nomenclature where a single object must be recognised by twenty denominations, not always appropriate, and too often clouded by the most remote and dark a.n.a.logies[6]--all these have perplexed the most skilful judges, who have not only misinterpreted pa.s.sages, but have even failed to comprehend the very subject of their original. This last circ.u.mstance has been remarkably shown in the fate of the heroic tale of BEOWULF. When it first fell to the hard lot of WANLEY, the librarian of the Earl of Oxford, to describe "The Exploits of Beowulf," he imagined, or conjectured, that it contained "the wars which this Dane waged against the reguli, or petty kings of Sweden." He probably decided on the subject by confining his view to the opening page, where a hero descends from his ship--but for a very different purpose from a military expedition. Fortunately Wanley lauded the ma.n.u.script as a "tractatus n.o.bilissimus," and an "egregium exemplum" of the Anglo-Saxon poetry.

Probably this ma.n.u.script remained unopened during a century, when SHARON TURNER detected the error of Wanley, but he himself misconceived the design of these romantic "Exploits." Yet this diligent historian carefully read and a.n.a.lysed this heroic tale. CONYBEARE, who had fallen into the same erroneous conception, at length caught up a clue in this labyrinth; and finally even a safer issue has been found, though possibly not without some desperate efforts, by the version of Mr.

KEMBLE.

Even the learned in Saxon have not always been able to distinguish this verse from prose; the verse unmarked by rhyme being written continuously as prose.[7] A diction turgid and obscure was apparent; but in what consisted the art of the poet, or the metrical system, long baffled the most ingenious conjectures. RITSON, in his perplexity, described this poetry or metre as a "rhymeless sort of poetry, a kind of bombast or insane prose, from which it is very difficult to be distinguished."

TYRWHIT and ELLIS remained wholly at a loss to comprehend the fabric of Anglo-Saxon poesy. HICKES, in the fascination of scholarship, had decided that it proceeded on a metrical system of syllabic quant.i.ties, and surmounted all difficulties by submitting the rhythmical cadences of Gothic poesy to the prosody of cla.s.sical antiquity. This was a literary hallucination, and a remarkable evidence of a favourite position maintained merely by the force of prepossession.