A Literary History of the English People Part 3

Whereas in England excavations are made in order to discover the remains of ancient Latin civilisation, in France we need only raise our eyes to behold them. Could the grave give up a Roman of the time of the Caesars, he would still at this day be able to wors.h.i.+p his divine emperors in the temples of Nimes and Vienne; pa.s.s, when entering Reims, Orange, or Saintes under triumphal arches erected by his ancestors; he might recognise their tombs at the "Aliscamps" of Arles; could see _Antigone_ played at Orange, and seated on the gradines of the amphitheatre, facing the blue horizon of Provence, still behold blood flowing in the arena.

Gaul was not, like Britain, disorganised and deprived of its legions when the Germanic hordes appeared; the victor had to reckon with the vanquished; the latter became not a slave but an ally, and this advantage, added to that of superior numbers and civilisation, allowed the Gallo-Roman to reconquer the invader. Latin tradition was so powerful that it was accepted by Clovis himself. That long-haired chieftain donned the toga and chlamys; he became a _patrice_; although he knew by experience that he derived his power from his sword, it pleased him to ascribe it to the emperor. He had an instinct of what Rome was. The prestige of the emperor was worth an army to him, and a.s.sisted him to rule his latinised subjects. Conquered, pillaged, sacked, and ruined, the Eternal City still remained fruitful within her crumbling walls. Under the ruins subsisted living seeds, one, amongst others, most important of all, containing the great Roman idea, the notion of the State. The Celts hardly grasped it, the Germans only at a late period. Clovis, barbarian though he was, became imbued with it. He endeavoured to mould his subjects, Franks, Gallo-Romans, and Visigoths, so as to form a State, and in spite of the disasters that followed, his efforts were not without some durable results.

In France the vanquished taught the victors their language; the grandsons of Clovis wrote Latin verses; and it is owing to poems written in a Romance idiom that Karl the Frank became the "Charlemagne" of legend and history; so that at last the new empire founded in Gaul had nothing Germanic save the name. The name, however, has survived, and is the name of France.

Thus, and not by an impossible ma.s.sacre, can be explained the different results of the invasions in France and England. In both countries, but less abundantly in the latter, the Celtic race has been perpetuated, and the veil which covers it to-day, a Latin or Germanic tissue, is neither so close nor so thick that we cannot distinguish through its folds the forms of British or Gaulish genius; a very special and easily recognisable genius, very different from that of the ancients, and differing still more from that of the Teutonic invaders.

FOOTNOTES:

[26] "De Moribus Germanorum," b. ii. chap. xlv.

[27] "Agricola," xxi.

[28] "Vita omnis in venationibus atque in studiis rei militaris const.i.tit; ab parvulis labori ac duritiei student." "De Bello Gallico,"

book vi.

[29] "Saxones, sicut omnes fere Germaniam incolentes nationes, et natura feroces et cultui daemonum dediti." Eginhard, "Vita Karoli," vii.

[30] The arms of the Franks and those of the Anglo-Saxons, the former preserved in the Museum of St. Germain, and the latter in the British Museum, are similar, and differ widely from those of the Celts. The s.h.i.+elds, a part of the equipment, which among all nations are found highly ornamented, were equally plain with the Franks and Angles; the _umbo_ or boss in the centre was, in those of both nations, of iron, and shaped like a rude dish-cover, which has often caused them to be catalogued as helmets or military head-pieces.

[31] "Innumerabiles et ferocissimae nationes universas Gallias occuparunt.... Quis hoc crederet?... Romam in gremio suo non pro gloria, sed pro salute pugnare? Imo ne pugnare quidem, sed auro et cuncta supellectile vitam redimere." Epistola cxxiii. ad Ageruchiam, in the "Patrologia" of Migne, vol. xxii., col. 1057-8.

[32] This s.h.i.+p was discovered in 1863 in a peat bog of Schleswig; that is in the very country of the Angles; judging by the coins found at the same time, it must belong to the third century. It measures 22 metres 67 centimetres in length, 3 metres, 33 centim. in breadth, and 1 metre 19 centim. in height. Specimens of Scandinavian s.h.i.+ps have also been discovered. When a chief died his s.h.i.+p was buried with him, as his chariot or horse was in other countries. A description of a Scandinavian funeral (the chief placed on his boat, with his arms, and burnt, together with a woman and some animals killed for the occasion) has been handed down to us in the narrative of the Arab Ahmed Ibn Fozlan, sent by the caliph Al Moktader, in the tenth century, as amba.s.sador to a Scandinavian king established on the banks of the Volga (_Journal Asiatique_, 1825, vol. vi. pp. 16 ff.). In some cases there was an interment but no incineration, and thus it is that Norse s.h.i.+ps have been found. Two of these precious relics are preserved in the museum of Christiania. One of them, discovered in 1880, constructed out of oaken planks held together by iron nails, still retained several of its oars; they were about seven yards long, and must have been thirty-two, sixteen on each side. This measurement seems to have been normal, for the "Anglo-Saxon Chronicle" says that Alfred had s.h.i.+ps built twice the size of ordinary s.h.i.+ps, and gave them "sixty oars or more" (_sub anno_ 897).

A s.h.i.+p constructed on the exact model of the Scandinavian barks went from Bergen to New York at the time of the Chicago Exhibition, 1893. It was found to be perfectly seaworthy, even in rough weather.

[33] It may be added in favour of this same word that it is difficult to replace it by another as clear and convenient. Some have proposed "Old English," an expression considered as having the advantage of better representing the continuity of the national history, and marking less conspicuously the break occasioned by the Norman Conquest. "Anglo-Saxon"

before the Conquest, "English" after, implies a radical change, a sort of renovation in the people of England. It is added, too, that this people already bore in the days of King Alfred the name of English. But besides the above-mentioned reasons, it may be pointed out that this break and this renovation are historical facts. In language, for example, the changes have been such that, as it has been justly observed, cla.s.sical English resembles Anglo-Saxon less than the Italian of to-day resembles Latin. Still it would not be considered wise on the part of the Italians to give the name of "Old Italians" to their Roman ancestors, though they spoke a similar language, were of the same blood, lived in the same land, and called it by the same name. As for Alfred, he calls himself sometimes king of the Saxons "rex Saxonum," sometimes king of the Angles, sometimes king of the Anglo-Saxons: "aego Aelfredus, gratia Dei, Angol Saxonum rex." aethelstan again calls himself "rex Angul-Saxonum" (Kemble, "Codex" ii. p. 124; Grein, "Anglia," i. p. 1; de Gray Birch, "Cartularium Saxonic.u.m," 1885, ii. p. 333). They never call themselves, as may be believed, "Old English." The word, besides, is not of an easy use. In a recent work one of the greatest historians of our day, Mr. Freeman, spoke of people who were "men of old English birth"; evidently it would have been simpler and clearer to call them Anglo-Saxons.

[34] "Anglo-Saxon Chronicle," Rolls, _sub anno_ 491.

[35] "De Moribus Germanorum," xv., xxvi.

[36] Names of villages recalling German clans or families are very numerous on the eastern and southern coasts. "They diminish rapidly as we move inland, and they die away altogether as we approach the purely Celtic west. Fourteen hundred such names have been counted, of which 48 occur in Northumberland, 127 in Yorks.h.i.+re, 76 in Lincolns.h.i.+re, 153 in Norfolk and Suffolk, 48 in Ess.e.x, 60 in Kent, 86 in Suss.e.x and Surrey, only 2 are found in Cornwall, 6 in c.u.mberland, 24 in Devon, 13 in Worcester, 2 in Westmoreland, and none in Monmouth." Grant Allen, "Anglo-Saxon Britain" (S.P.C.K.), p. 43.

[37] Ammia.n.u.s Marcellinus: "Ipsa oppida, ut circ.u.mdata retiis busta declinant"; in reference to the Franks and Alemanni, "Rerum Gestarum,"

lib. xvi., cap. ii. Tacitus says the same thing for the whole of the Germans: "Nullas Germanorum populis urbes habitari, satis notum est....

Colunt discreti ac diversi, ut fons, ut campus, ut nemus placuit. Vicos locant, non in nostrum morem, connexis et cohaerentibus aedificiis: suam quisque domum spatio circ.u.mdat." "De Moribus Germanorum," xvi.

[38] It seems impossible to admit, as has been suggested, that these frail objects should have been saved from the plunder and burning of the villas and preserved by the Anglo-Saxons as _curiosities_. Gla.s.ses with k.n.o.bs, "_a larmes_," abound in the Anglo-Saxon tombs, and similar ones have been found in the Roman tombs of an earlier epoch, notably at Lepine, in the department of the Marne.

[39] Where the Celtic element was reinforced, at the commencement of the sixth century, by a considerable immigration of Britons driven from England. Hence the name of Bretagne, given then for the first time to Armorica.

CHAPTER III.

_THE NATIONAL POETRY OF THE ANGLO-SAXONS._

I.

Towards the close of the fifth century, the greater part of England was conquered; the rulers of the land were no longer Celts or Romans, but men of Germanic origin, who wors.h.i.+pped Thor and Woden instead of Christ, and whose language, customs, and religion differed entirely from those of the people they had settled amongst and subjugated.

The force of circ.u.mstances produced a fusion of the two races, but during many centuries no literary fusion took place. The mind of the invader was not actuated by curiosity; he intrenched himself in his tastes, content with his own literature. "Each one," wrote Tacitus of the Germans, "leaves an open s.p.a.ce around his dwelling." The Anglo-Saxons remained in literature a people of isolated dwellings. They did not allow the traditions of the vanquished Celts to blend with theirs, and, in spite of their conversion to Christianity, they preserved, almost without change, the main characteristics of the race from which they were descended.

Their vocabulary, save for the introduction of a few words, taken from the Church Latin, their grammar, their prosody, all remain Germanic. In their verse the cadence is marked, not by an equal number of syllables, but by about the same number of accents; they have not the recurring sounds of rhyme, but they have, like the Germans and Scandinavians, _alliteration_, that is, the repet.i.tion of the same letters at the beginning of certain syllables. "Each long verse has four accented syllables, while the number of unaccented syllables is indifferent, and is divided by the caesura into two short verses, bound together by alliteration: two accented syllables in the first short line and one in the second, beginning with any vowel or the same consonant"[40] (or consonants giving about the same sound):

_F_lod under _f_oldan nis that _f_eor heonon.

"The water sinks underground; it is not far from here." (_Beowulf._) The rules of this prosody, not very difficult in themselves, are made still easier by a number of licenses and exceptions. The taste for alliteration was destined to survive; it has never completely disappeared in England. We find this ornamentation even in the Latin of poets posterior to the Norman Conquest, like Joseph of Exeter in the twelfth century:

_Au_dit et _au_det Dux _f_alli: _f_atisque _f_avet quum _f_ata recuset.[41]

The famous Visions of Langland, in the fourteenth century, are in alliterative verse; under Elizabeth alliteration became one of the peculiarities of the florid prose called Euphuism. Nearer to our own time, Byron makes a frequent use of alliteration:

Our bay Receives that prow which proudly spurns the spray; How gloriously her gallant course she goes: Her white wings flying--never from her foes. (_Corsair._)

The purely Germanic period of the literary history of England lasted six hundred years, that is, for about the same length of time as divides us from the reign of Henry III. Rarely has a literature been more consistent with itself than the literature of the Anglo-Saxons. They were not as the Celts, quick to learn; they had not the curiosity, loquacity, taste for art which were found in the subjugated race. They developed slowly. Those steady qualities which were to save the Anglo-Saxon genius from the absolute destruction which threatened it at the time of the Norman Conquest resulted in the production of literary works evincing, one and all, such a similitude in tastes, tendencies, and feelings that it is extremely difficult to date and localise them.

At the furthest end of the period, the Anglo-Saxons continued to enjoy, Christian as they were, and in more and more intimate contact with latinised races, legends and traditions going back to the pagan days, nay, to the days of their continental life by the sh.o.r.es of the Baltic.

Late ma.n.u.scripts have preserved for us their oldest conceptions, by which is shown the continuity of taste for them. The early pagan character of some of the poetry in "Beowulf," in "Widsith," in the "Lament of Deor," is undoubted; still those poems continued to be copied up to the last century of the Anglo-Saxon rule; it is, in fact, only in ma.n.u.scripts of that date that we have them. An immense amount of labour, ingenuity, and knowledge has been spent on questions of date and place, but the difficulty is such, and that literature forms such a compact whole, that the best and highest authorities have come on all points to contrary conclusions. The very greatness of their labour and amplitude of their science happens thus to be the best proof of the singular cohesion between the various produce of the Anglo-Saxon mind. Of all the poets of the period, the one who had the strongest individuality, as well as the greatest genius, one whom we know by name, Cynewulf, the only one whose works are authentic, being signed, who thus offered the best chance to critics, has caused as many disagreements among them as any stray leaf of parchment in the whole collection of Anglo-Saxon poetry. According to Ten Brink he was born between 720 and 730; according to Earle he more probably lived in the eleventh century, at the other end of the period.[42] One authority sees in his works the characteristics of the poetry of Northumbria, another inclines towards Mercia. All possible dates have been a.s.signed to the beautiful poem of "Judith," from the seventh to the tenth century. "Beowulf" was written in Northumbria according to Stopford Brooke, in Mercia according to Earle, in Wess.e.x according to Ten Brink. The attribution of "Andreas" to Cynewulf has just been renewed by Gollancz, and denied by Fritzsche.

"Dream of the Rood" follows similar fluctuations. The truth is that while there were doubtless movement and development in Anglo-Saxon poetry, as in all human things, they were very slow and difficult to measure. When material facts and landmarks are discovered, still it will remain true that till then authorities, judging poems on their own merits, could not agree as to their cla.s.sification, so little apparent was the movement they represent. Anglo-Saxon poetry is like the river Saone; one doubts which way it flows.

Let us therefore take this literature as a whole, and confess that the division here adopted, of national and worldly and of religious literature, is arbitrary, and is merely used for the sake of convenience. Religious and worldly, northern and southern literature overlap; but they most decidedly belong to the same Anglo-Saxon whole.

This whole has strong characteristics of its own, a force, a pa.s.sion, a grandeur, unexampled at that day. Contrary to what is found in Celtic literature, there is no place in the monuments of Anglo-Saxon thought for either light gaiety, or those shades of feeling which the Celts could already express at that remote period. The new settlers are strong, but not agile. Of the two master pa.s.sions attributed by Cato to the inhabitants of Gaul, one alone, the love of war, _rem militarem_, is shared by the dwellers on the sh.o.r.es of the northern ocean; the other, _argute loqui_, is unknown to them.

Members of the same family of nations established by the sh.o.r.es of the North Sea, as the cla.s.sic nations were on the Mediterranean coasts in the time of the emperors, the Anglo-Saxon, the German, and the Scandinavian tribes spoke dialects of the same tongue, preserved common traditions and the memory of an identical origin. Grein has collected in his "Anglo-Saxon Library" all that remains of the ancient literature of England; Powell and Vigfusson have comprised in their "Corpus Poetic.u.m Boreale" all we possess in the way of poems in the Scandinavian tongue, formerly composed in Denmark, Norway, the Orkneys, Iceland, and even Greenland, within the Arctic circle.[43] The resemblances between the two collections are striking, the differences are few. In both series it seems as if the same people were revealing its origins, and leading its heroes to Walhalla.[44] The Anglo-Saxon tale of Beowulf and the Scandinavian saga of Gretti, the Anglo-Saxon story of Waldhere and the Scandinavian and Germanic tale of the Niblungs and Volsungs,[45] turn on the same incidents or are dedicated to the same heroes, represent a similar ideal of life, similar manners, the same race. They are all of them part of the literary patrimony common to the men of the North.

As happened with the Celts, the greater number of the monuments of ancient Germanic and Scandinavian literature has been preserved in the remotest of the countries where the race established itself; distance having better sheltered it from wars, the songs and ma.n.u.scripts were more easily saved from destruction. Most of the Celtic tales extant at this day have been preserved in Ireland; and most of the pieces collected in the "Corpus Poetic.u.m Boreale" have been taken from Icelandic doc.u.ments.

Manners and beliefs of the northern people are abundantly ill.u.s.trated by the poems included in this collection. We find ourselves amid giants and dwarfs, monsters, dragons, unconquerable heroes, b.l.o.o.d.y battles, gloomy omens, magic spells, and enchanted treasures. The poet leads us through halls with ornamented seats, on which warriors spend long hours in drinking; to pits full of serpents into which the vanquished are thrown; in the midst of dismal landscapes where gibbeted corpses swing in the wind; to mysterious islands where whirlwinds of flame shoot from the tombs, and where the heroine arrives on her s.h.i.+ps, her "ocean steeds,"

to evoke the paternal shade, behold once more the beloved being in the midst of infernal fires, and receive from his hands the enchanted and avenging sword. Armed Valkyrias cross the sky; ravens comment on the actions of men; the tone is sad and doleful, sometimes so curt and abrupt that, in order to follow the poet's fantastic imaginations, a marginal commentary would be necessary, as for the "Ancient Mariner" of Coleridge, in whom lives again something of the spirit of this literature.

Scenes of slaughter and torture abound of course, as they do with all primitive nations; the victims laugh in the midst of their sufferings; they sing their death-song. Sigfried roasts the heart of his adversary, Fafni, the man-serpent, and eats it. Eormunrek's feet and hands are cut off and thrown into the fire before his eyes. Skirni, in order to win Gerda's love for his master, heaps curses upon her, threatens to cut off her head, and by these means succeeds in his emba.s.sy.[46] Gunnar, wanting to keep for himself the secret of the Niblungen treasure, asks for the heart of his own brother, Hogni:

"Hogni's bleeding heart must be laid in my hand, carved with the keen-cutting knife out of the breast of the good knight.

"They carved the heart of Hialli (the thrall) from out his breast, and laid it bleeding on a charger, and bore it to Gunnar.

"Then spake Gunnar, king of men: 'Here I have the heart of Hialli the coward, unlike the heart of Hogni the brave. It quakes greatly as it lies on the charger, but it quaked twice as much when it lay in his breast.'

"Hogni laughed when they cut out the quick heart of that crested hero; he had little thought of whimpering. They laid it bleeding on the charger and bore it before Gunnar.

"Then spake Gunnar, the Hniflungs' hero: 'Here I have the heart of Hogni the brave, unlike the heart of Hialli the coward; it quakes very little as it lies on the charger, but it quaked much less when it lay in his breast.'"

Justice being thus done to his brother, and feeling no regret, Gunnar's joy breaks forth; he alone now possesses the secret of the Niblungen (Hniflungs') treasure, and "the great rings shall gleam in the rolling waters rather than they shall s.h.i.+ne on the hands of the sons of the Huns."[47]

From this example, and from others which it would be easy to add, it can be inferred that _nuances_ and refined sentiments escape the comprehension of such heroes; they waste no time in describing things of beauty; they care not if earth brings forth flowers, or if women have cheeks "purple as the fox-glove." Neither have these men any apt.i.tude for light repartee; they do not play, they kill; their jests fell the adversary to the ground. "Thou hast eaten the fresh-bleeding hearts of thy sons, mixed with honey, thou giver of swords," says Queen Gudrun to Attila, the historic king of the Huns, who, in this literature, has become the typical foreign hero; "now thou shalt digest the gory flesh of man, thou stern king, having eaten of it as a dainty morsel, and sent it as a mess to thy friends." Such is the kind of jokes they enjoy; the poet describes the speech of the Queen as "a word of mockery."[48] The exchange of mocking words between Loki and the G.o.ds is of the same order as Gudrun's speech. Cowards! cries Loki to the G.o.ds; Prost.i.tutes! cries he to the G.o.ddesses; Drunkard! is the reply of both. There is no question here of _argute loqui_.