England's Antiphon Part 3

_Cain and Abel_ follows; then _Noah's Flood_, in which G.o.d says,

They shall not dread the flood's flow;

then _Abraham's Sacrifice_; then _Moses and the Two Tables_; then _The Prophets_, each of whom prophesies of the coming Saviour; after which we find ourselves in the Apocryphal Gospels, in the midst of much nonsense about Anna and Joachim, the parents of Mary, about Joseph and Mary and the birth of Jesus, till we arrive at _The Shepherds_ and _The Magi, The Purification, The Slaughter of the Innocents, The Disputing in the Temple, The Baptism, The Temptation_, and _The Woman taken in Adultery_, at which point I pause for the sake of the remarkable tradition embodied in the scene--that each of the woman's accusers thought Jesus was writing his individual sins on the ground. While he is writing the second time, the Pharisee, the Accuser, and the Scribe, who have chiefly sustained the dialogue hitherto, separate, each going into a different part of the Temple, and soliloquize thus:

_Pharisee_. Alas! alas! I am ashamed!

I am afeared that I shall die; All my sins even properly named Yon prophet did write before mine eye.

If that my fellows that did espy, They will tell it both far and wide; My sinful living if they outcry, I wot not where my head to hide.

_Accuser_. Alas! for sorrow mine heart doth bleed, All my sins yon man did write; If that my fellows to them took heed, I cannot me from death acquite.

I would I were hid somewhere out of sight, That men should me nowhere see nor know; If I be taken I am aflyght _afraid._ In mekyl shame I shall be throwe. _much._

_Scribe_. Alas the time that this betyd! _happened._ Right bitter care doth me embrace.

All my sins be now unhid, Yon man before me them all doth trace.

If I were once out of this place, To suffer death great and vengeance able,[15]

I will never come before his face, Though I should die in a stable.

Upon this follows _The Raising of Lazarus_; next _The Council of the Jews_, to which the devil appears as a Prologue, dressed in the extreme of the fashion of the day, which he sets forth minutely enough in his speech also. _The Entry into Jerusalem; The Last Supper; The Betrayal; King Herod; The Trial of Christ; Pilate's Wife's Dream_ come next; to the subject of the last of which the curious but generally accepted origin is given, that it was inspired by Satan, anxious that Jesus should not be slain, because he dreaded the mischief he would work when he entered Hades or h.e.l.l, for there is no distinction between them either here or in the Apocryphal Gospel whence the _Descent into h.e.l.l_ is taken. Then follow _The Crucifixion_ and _The Descent into h.e.l.l_--often called the _Harrowing of h.e.l.l_--that is, the _making war upon_ or _despoiling of h.e.l.l_,[16] for which the authority is a pa.s.sage in the Gospel of Nicodemus, full of a certain florid Eastern grandeur. I need hardly remind my readers that the Apostles' Creed, as it now stands, contains the same legend in the form of an article of faith. The allusions to it are frequent in the early literature of Christendom.

The soul of Christ comes to the gates of h.e.l.l, and says:

Undo your gates of sorwatorie; _place of sorrow._ On man's soul I have memorie; There cometh now the king of glory, These gates for to breke!

Ye devils that are here within, h.e.l.l gates ye shall unpin; I shall deliver man's kin-- From woe I will them wreke. _avenge._

Against me it were but waste To holdyn or to standyn fast; h.e.l.l-lodge may not last Against the king of glory.

Thy dark door down I throw; My fair friends now well I know; I shall them bring, reckoned by row, Out of their purgatory!

_The Burial; The Resurrection; The Three Maries; Christ appearing to Mary; The Pilgrim of Emmaus; The Ascension; The Descent of the Holy Ghost; The a.s.sumption of the Virgin_; and _Doomsday_, close the series. I have quoted enough to show that these plays must, in the condition of the people to whom they were presented, have had much to do with their religious education.

This fourteenth century was a wonderful time of outbursting life.

Although we cannot claim the _Miracles_ as entirely English products, being in all probability translations from the Norman-French, yet the fact that they were thus translated is one remarkable amongst many in this dawn of the victory of England over her conquerors. From this time, English prospered and French decayed. Their own language was now, so far, authorized as the medium of religious instruction to the people, while a similar change had pa.s.sed upon processes at law; and, most significant of all, the greatest poet of the time, and one of the three greatest poets as yet of all English time, wrote, although a courtier, in the language of the people. Before selecting some of Chaucer's religious verses, however, I must speak of two or three poems by other writers.

The first of these is _The Vision of William concerning Piers Plowman_,--a poem of great influence in the same direction as the writings of Wycliffe. It is a vision and an allegory, wherein the vices of the time, especially those of the clergy, are unsparingly dealt with.

Towards the close it loses itself in a metaphysical allegory concerning Dowel, Dobet, and Dobest.[17] I do not find much poetry in it. There is more, to my mind, in another poem, written some thirty or forty years later, the author of which is unknown, perhaps because he was an imitator of William Langland, the author of the _Vision_. It is called _Pierce the Plough-man's Crede_. Both are written after the fashion of the Anglo-Saxon poetry, and not after the fashion of the Anglo-Norman, of which distinction a little more presently. Its object is to contrast the life and character of the four orders of friars with those of a simple Christian. There is considerable humour in the working plan of the poem.

A certain poor man says he has succeeded in learning his A B C, his Paternoster, and his Ave Mary, but he cannot, do what he will, learn his Creed. He sets out, therefore, to find some one whose life, according with his profession, may give him a hope that he will teach him his creed aright. He applies to the friars. One after another, every order abuses the other; nor this only, but for money offers either to teach him his creed, or to absolve him for ignorance of the same. He finds no helper until he falls in with Pierce the Ploughman, of whose poverty he gives a most touching description. I shall, however, only quote some lines of _The Believe_ as taught by the Ploughman, and this princ.i.p.ally to show the nature of the versification:

Leve thou on our Lord G.o.d, that all the world wroughte; _believe._ Holy heaven upon high wholly he formed; And is almighty himself over all his workes; And wrought as his will was, the world and the heaven; And on gentle Jesus Christ, engendered of himselven, His own only Son, Lord over all y-knowen.

With thorn y-crowned, crucified, and on the cross died; And sythen his blessed body was in a stone buried; _after that._ And descended adown to the dark h.e.l.le, And fetched out our forefathers; and they full fain weren. _glad._ The third day readily, himself rose from death, And on a stone there he stood, he stey up to heaven. _where: ascended._

Here there is no rhyme. There is measure--a dance-movement in the verse; and likewise, in most of the lines, what was essential to Anglo-Saxon verse--three or more words beginning with the same sound. This is somewhat of the nature of rhyme, and was all our Anglo-Saxon forefathers had of the kind. Their Norman conquerors brought in rhyme, regularity of measure, and division into stanzas, with many refinements of versification now regarded, with some justice and a little more injustice, as peurilities. Strange as it may seem, the peculiar rhythmic movement of the Anglo-Saxon verse is even yet the most popular of all measures. Its representative is now that kind of verse which is measured not by the number of syllables, but by the number of _accented_ syllables. The bulk of the nation is yet Anglo-Saxon in its blind poetic tastes.

Before taking my leave of this mode, I would give one fine specimen from another poem, lately printed, for the first time in full, from Bishop Percy's ma.n.u.script. It may chronologically belong to the beginning of the next century: its proper place in my volume is here. It is called _Death and Liffe_. Like Langland's poem, it is a vision; but, short as it is in comparison, there is far more poetry in it than in _Piers Plowman_. Life is thus described:

She was brighter of her blee[18] than was the bright sun; Her rudd[19] redder than the rose that on the rise[20] hangeth; Meekly smiling with her mouth, and merry in her looks; Ever laughing for love, as she like would.

Everything bursts into life and blossom at her presence,

And the gra.s.s that was grey greened belive. _forthwith._

But the finest pa.s.sage is part of Life's answer to Death, who has been triumphing over her:

How didst thou joust at Jerusalem, with Jesu, my Lord, Where thou deemedst his death in one day's time! _judgedst._ There wast thou shamed and shent and stripped for aye! _rebuked._ When thou saw the king come with the cross on his shoulder, On the top of Calvary thou camest him against; Like a traitor untrue, treason thou thought; Thou laid upon my liege lord loathful hands, Sithen beat him on his body, and buffeted him rightly, _then._ Till the railing red blood ran from his sides; _pouring down._

Sith rent him on the rood with full red wounds: _then._ To all the woes that him wasted, I wot not few, Then deemedst (him) to have been dead, and dressed for ever.

But, Death, how didst thou then, with all thy derffe words, _fierce._ When thou p.r.i.c.ked at his pap with the point of a spear, And touched the tabernacle of his true heart, Where my bower was bigged to abide for ever? _built._ When the glory of his G.o.dhead glinted in thy face, Then wast thou feared of this fare in thy false heart; _affair._ Then thou hied into h.e.l.l-hole to hide thee belive; _at once._ Thy falchion flew out of thy fist, so fast thou thee hied; Thou durst not blush once back, for better or worse, _look._ But drew thee down full in that deep h.e.l.l, And bade them bar bigly Belzebub his gates. _greatly, strongly._ Then thou told them tidings, that teened them sore; _grieved._ How that king came to kithen his strength, _show._ And how she[21] had beaten thee on thy bent,[22]

and thy brand taken, With everlasting life that longed him till. _belonged to him._

When Life has ended her speech to Death, she turns to her own followers and says:--

Therefore be not abashed, my barnes so dear, _children._ Of her falchion so fierce, nor of her fell words.

She hath no might, nay, no means, no more you to grieve, Nor on your comely corses to clap once her hands.

I shall look you full lively, and latch full well, _search for: And keere ye further of this kithe,[23] above [lay hold of._ the clear skies.

I now turn from those poems of national scope and wide social interest, bearing their share, doubtless, in the growth of the great changes that showed themselves at length more than a century after, and from the poem I have just quoted of a yet wider human interest, to one of another tone, springing from the grief that attends love, and the aspiration born of the grief. It is, nevertheless, wide in its scope as the conflict between Death and Life, although dealing with the individual and not with the race. The former poems named of Pierce Ploughman are the cry of John the Baptist in the English wilderness; this is the longing of Hannah at home, having left her little son in the temple. The latter _seems_ a poorer matter; but it is an easier thing to utter grand words of just condemnation, than, in the silence of the chamber, or with the well-known household-life around, forcing upon the consciousness only the law of things seen, to regard with steadfastness the blank left by a beloved form, and believe in the unseen, the marvellous, the eternal. In the midst of "the light of common day," with all the persistently common things pressing upon the despairing heart, to hold fast, after what fashion may be possible, the vanishing song that has changed its key, is indeed a victory over the flesh, however childish the forms in which the faith may embody itself, however weak the logic with which it may defend its intrenchments.

The poem which has led me to make these remarks is in many respects noteworthy. It is very different in style and language from any I have yet given. There was little communication to blend the different modes of speech prevailing in different parts of the country. It belongs,[24]

according to students of English, to the Midland dialect of the fourteenth century. The author is beyond conjecture.

It is not merely the antiquity of the language that causes its difficulty, but the acc.u.mulated weight of artistically fantastic and puzzling requirements which the writer had laid upon himself in its composition. The nature of these I shall be enabled to show by printing the first twelve lines almost as they stand in the ma.n.u.script.

Perle plesaunte to prynces paye, To clanly clos in golde so clere!

Oute of oryent I hardyly saye, Ne proued I neuer her precios pere; So rounde, so reken in vche araye, So smal, so smothe her sydes were!

Quere-so-euer I iugged gemmes gaye, I sette hyr sengeley in synglure: Allas! I leste hyr in on erbere, Thurh gresse to grounde hit fro me yot; I dewyne for-dolked of luf daungere, Of that pryuy perle with-outen spot.

Here it will be observed that the Norman mode--that of rhymes--is employed, and that there is a far more careful measure in the line that is found in the poem last quoted. But the rhyming is carried to such an excess as to involve the necessity of constant invention of phrase to meet its requirements--a fertile source of obscurity. The most difficult form of stanza in respect of rhyme now in use is the Spenserian, in which, consisting of nine lines, four words rhyme together, three words, and two words. But the stanza in the poem before us consists of twelve lines, six of which, two of which, four of which, rhyme together. This we should count hard enough; but it does not nearly exhaust the tyranny of the problem the author has undertaken. I have already said that one of the essentials of the poetic form in Anglo-Saxon was the commencement of three or more words in the line with the same sound: this peculiarity he has exaggerated: every line has as many words as possible commencing with the same sound. In the first line, for instance,--and it must be remembered that the author's line is much shorter than the Anglo-Saxon line,--there are four words beginning with _p_; in the second, three beginning with _cl_, and so on. This, of course, necessitates much not merely of circ.u.mlocution, but of contrivance, involving endless obscurity.

He has gone on to exaggerate the peculiarities of Norman verse as well; but I think it better not to run the risk of wearying my reader by pointing out more of his oddities. I will now betake myself to what is far more interesting as well as valuable.

The poem sets forth the grief and consolation of a father who has lost his daughter. It is called _The Pearl_. Here is a literal rendering, line for line, into modern English words, not modern English speech, of the stanza which I have already given in its original form:

Pearl pleasant to prince's pleasure, Most cleanly closed in gold so clear!

Out of the Orient, I boldly say, I never proved her precious equal; So round, so beautiful in every point!

So small, so smooth, her sides were!

Wheresoever I judged gemmes gay I set her singly in singleness.

Alas! I lost her in an arbour; Through the gra.s.s to the ground it from me went.

I pine, sorely wounded by dangerous love Of that especial pearl without spot.

The father calls himself a jeweller; the pearl is his daughter. He has lost the pearl in the gra.s.s; it has gone to the ground, and he cannot find it; that is, his daughter is dead and buried. Perhaps the most touching line is one in which he says to the grave:

O moul, thou marrez a myry mele.

(O mould, thou marrest a merry talk.)