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Chapter I Writers Before The Norman Conquest, 67o-io66

i. The History of English Literature is the story of what great English men and women thought and felt, and then wrote down in good prose and beautiful poetry in the English language. The story is a long one. It begins in England about the year 670; it had its unwritten beginnings still earlier on the Continent, in the old Angle- Land ; it was still going on in the year which closes this book, 1832 ; nor has our literature lost any of its creative force in the years which have followed 1832. Into this little book then is to be briefly put the story of nearly 1200 years of the thoughts, feelings, and imagination of a great people. Every English man and woman has good reason to be proud of the work done by their forefathers in prose and poetry. Every one who can write a good book or a good song may say to himself, " I belong to a noble company, which has been teaching b 1 and delighting the world for more than iooo years." And that is a fact in which those who write and those who read English literature ought to feel a noble pride.

2. The English and the Welsh. — This literature is written in English, the tongue of our fathers. They lived, while this island of ours was still called Britain, in North and South Denmark, in Hanover and Friesland — Jutes, Angles, and Saxons. Their common tongue and name were English; but, either because they were pressed from the inland, perhaps by Attila, or for pure love of adventure, they took to the sea, and, landing at various parts of Britain at various times, drove back, after 150 years of hard fighting, the Britons, whom they called Welsh, to the land now called Wales, to Strathclyde, and to Cornwall. It is well for those who study English literature to remember that in these places the Britons remained as a distinct race with a distinct literature of their own, because the stories and the poetry of the Britons crept afterwards into English literature and had a great influence upon it. Moreover, in the later days of the Conquest, a great number of the Welsh were amalgamated with the English. The whole tale of King Arthur, of which English poetry and even English prose is so full, was a British tale. Some then of the imaginative work of the conquered afterwards took captive their fierce conquerors.

3. The English Tongue. — The earliest form of our English tongue is very different from modern English in form, pronunciation, and appearance ; but still the Ianguage written in the year 700 is the same as that in which the prose of the Bible is written, just as much as the tree planted a hundred years ago is the same tree to-day. It is this sameness of language, as well as the sameness of national spirit, which makes our literature one literature for 1200 years.

4. Of English Literature written in this tongue we have no extant prose until the time of King Alfred. Men like Baeda and Ealdhelm wrote their prose in Latin. But we have, in a few manuscripts, a great deal of poetry written in English, chiefly before the days of Alfred. There is (1) the MS. under the name of Cadmon's Paraphrase, a collection of religious poems by various writers, now in the Bodleian. There is (2) the MS. of Beowulf and of the last three books of Judith. There is (3) the Exeter Book, a miscellaneous collection of poems, left by Leofric, Bishop of Exeter, to his cathedral church in the year 107 1. There is (4) the Vercelli Book, discovered at Vercelli in the year 1822, in which, along with homilies, there is a collection of six poems. A few leaflets complete the list of the MSS. containing poems earlier than Alfred. All together they constitute a vernacular poetry which consists of more than twenty thousand lines.

5. The metre of the poems is essentially the same, unlike any modern metre, without rhyme, and without any fixed number of syllables. Its essential elements were accent and alliteration. Every verse is divided into two half-verses by a pause, and has four accented syllables, while the number of unaccented syllables is indifferent. These half-verses are linked together by alliteration. The two accented syllables of the first half, and one of the accented syllables in the second half, begin with the same consonant, or with vowels which were generally different one from another. This is the formal rule. But to give a greater freedom there is often only one alliterative letter in the first half-verse. Here is an example of the usual form : —

And the </ew-</ownfall : at the day-break is Winnowed by the wind.

This metre was continually varied, and was capable, chiefly by the addition of unaccented syllables, of many harmonious changes. The length of the lines depended on the nature of the things described, or on the rise and fall of the singer's emotion ; the emphatic words in which the chief thought lay were accented and alliterated, and probably received an additional force by the beat of the hand upon the harp. All the poetry was sung, and the poet could alter, as he sang, the movement of the verse. But, however the metre was varied, it was not varied arbitrarily. It followed clear rules, and all its developments were built on the simple original type of four accents and three alliterated syllables. This was the vehicle, interspersed with some rare instances in which rhymes were employed, in which all English poetry was sung and written till the French system of rhymes, metres, and accents was transferred to the English tongue ; and it continued, alongside of the French system, to be used, sometimes much and sometimes little, until the sixteenth century. Nor, though its use was finished then, was its influence lost. Its habits, especially alliteration, have entered into all English poetry.

6. The Characters of this Poetry. — (i) It is marked by parallelism* It frequently repeats the same statement or thought in different ways. But this is not so common as it is, for example, in Hebrew poetry. (2) It uses the ordinary metaphorical phrases of Teutonic poetry, such as the whale 1 s~road for the sea, but uses them with greater moderation or with less inventiveness than the Icelandic poets. Elaborate similes are not found in the earlier poetry, but later poets, Cynewulf especially, invent them, not frequently, but well. (3) A great variety of compound words, chiefly adjectives, also characterise it, by the use of which the poet strove to express with brevity a number of qualities belonging to his subject. When Tennyson used such adjectives as hollow -vaulted, dainty-woeful, he was returning to the custom of his ancient predecessors. (4) At times the poetry is concise and direct, but this is chiefly found in those parts of the poems which have some relation to heathen times. For the most part, save when the subject is war or sea-voyaging, the poetry is diffuse, and wearies by a constant repetition. But we owe a great deal of this repetition to the introduction of extempore matter by the bards as they sung. There is not much of it in poems which have been carefully edited, as many were in the time of Alfred. Nor do I think that the original lays which the bards expanded were more diffuse than the early Icelandic lays. (5) It is the earliest extant body of poetry in any modern language. It began to be written in England towards the close of the seventh century, and all its best work was done before the close of the eighth. (6) Its width of range is very remarkable. The epic is represented in it by Beowulf. Judith is an heroic saga. The earlier Genesis is a paraphrase with original episodes. The later Genesis is an epic fragment with dramatic conversations, and in other poems there are traces of what might have formed a basis for a dramatic literature. The Exodus is an heroic narrative, freely invented on the Biblical story. The Christ of Cynewulf is a threefold poem, conceived like a trilogy, in the honour of Christ, the Hero. Narrative poetry is represented by Cynewulf s poems of the life of Saint Gufllac, of the martyrdom of Saint Juliana, by the Elene and the Andreas. There is one pure lyric, and there are sacred hymns of joy among Cynewulf s poems which have all the quality of lyrics. There are five elegiac poems. There are a number of Riddles, some of which are poems of pure natural description. There are didactic, gnomic, and allegorical poems. Almost every form of poetry is represented. (7) It is the only early poetry which has poems wholly dedicated to descriptions of nature. Of such descriptions there is no

I EARLY WRITERS TO THE CONQUEST J

trace in the Icelandic poetry. For anything resembling them we must look forward to the nineteenth century. (8) Many of the poems are extraordinarily modern in feeling. The hymns of Cynewulf might have been written by Crashaw. The sentiment of the Wanderer and the Ruin might belong to this century. The Seafarer has the same note of feeling for the sea which prevails in the sea-poetry of Swinburne and Tennyson. (9) There is no trace of any Norse influence or religion on early English poetry. Old Saxon poetry influenced the later English verse, but may itself have been derived from England. The poetry of natural description owes much to the Celtic influence which was largely present in Northumbria, but otherwise there is no Celtic note in early English poetry. There is a classic note. Virgil and other Latin poets were read by those whom Baeda taught, and the ancient models had their wonted power. The unexpected strain of culture, so remarkable in this poetry, must, I think, be due to this influence. (10) The greater part of this poetry was written in Northumbria, and before the coming of the Danes. This has been questioned, but it seems not wisely. The only examples of any importance outside of this statement are the war-lyrics in .the Chronicle and that portion of the Caedmonic poems which it is now believed was translated from an Old Saxon original, probably in the time of Alfred.

7. The First English Poems. — Our forefathers, while as yet they were heathen and lived on the Continent, r- t made poems, and of this poetry we may possess a few remains. The earliest is The Song of the Traveller — Widsith, the far-goer — but it has been filled up by later insertions. It is not much more than a catalogue of the folk and the places whither the minstrel said he went with the Goths, but when he expands concerning himself, he shows so pleasant a pride in his art that he wins our sympathy. Deor*s Complaint is another of these poems. Its form is that of a true lyric. The writer is a bard at the court of the Heodenings, from whom his rival takes his place and goods. He writes this complaint to comfort his heart. Weland, Beadohild, Theodric knew care and sorrow. " That they overwent, this also may I." This is the refrain of all the verses of our first, and, I may say, our only early English lyric. The Fight at Finsburg is an epic fragment. It tells, and with all the fire of war, of the attack on Fin's palace in Friesland, and another part of the same story is to be found in Beowulf. It is plain there was a full Fin-saga, portions of which were sung at feasts. This completes, with those parts of Beowulf which we may refer to heathen traditionary songs, the list of the English poetry which we may possibly say belonged to the older England over seas. There are two fragments of a romance of Waldhere of the date or place of which we know nothing. In the so-called Rune Song — which, as we have it, is not old — there is one Verse at least which alludes to the times of the heroic sagas. But the poems where we find most traces of early English paganism are the so-called Charms.

8. Beowulf is our old English epic, and it recounts the great deeds and death of Beowulf. It may have arisen before the English conquest of Britain in the shape of short songs about the hero, and we can trace, perhaps, three different centres for the story. The scenery is laid among the Danes in Seeland and among the Geats in South Sweden, on the coast of the North Sea and the Kattegat. There is not a word about our England in the poem. Coming to England in the form of short poems, it was wrought together into a complete tale of two parts, the first of which we may again divide into two ; and was afterwards edited, with a few Christian applications, and probably by a Northumbrian poet, in the eighth century. In this form we possess it.

The story is of Hrothgar, one of the kingly race of Jutland, who builds his hall, Heorot, near the sea, on the edge of the moorland. A monster called Grendel, half-human, half-fiend, dwells in a sea-cave, near the moor over which he wanders by night, and hating the festive noise, carries off thirty of the thegns of Hrothgar and devours them. He then haunts the hall at night, and after twelve years of this distress, Beowulf, thegn of Hygelac, sails from Sweden to bring help to Hrothgar, and at night, when Grendel breaks into the hall, wrestles with him, tears away his arm, and the fiend flies away to die. The second division of the first part of the poem begins with the vengeance taken by GrendePs

IO ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP.

mother. She slays ^Eschere, a trusty thegn of Hrothgar. Then Beowulf descends into her sea-cave and slays her also; feasts in triumph with Hrothgar, and returns to his own land. The second part of the poem opens fifty years later. Beowulf is now king ; his land is happy under his rule. But his fate is at hand. A fire-drake, who guards a treasure, is robbed and comes from his den to harry and burn the country. The grayhaired king goes forth to fight his last fight, slays the dragon, but dies of its fiery breath, and the poem closes with the tale of his burial, burned on a lofty pyre on the top of Hronesnaes.

Its social interest lies in what it tells us of the manners and customs of our forefathers before they came to England. Their mode of life in peace and war is described ; their ships, their towns, the scenery in which they lived, their feasts, amusements — we have the account of a whole day from morning to night — the close union between the chieftain and his war-brothers ; their women and the reverence given them ; the way in which they faced death, in which they sang, in which they gave gifts and rewards. The story is told with Homeric directness and simplicity, but not with Homeric rapidity. A deep fatalism broods over it. " Wyrd (the fate-goddess) goes ever as it must," Beowulf says, when he thinks he may be torn to pieces by Grendel. "It shall be," he cries when he goes to fight the dragon, " for us in the fight as Wyrd shall foresee." But a daring spirit fills the fatalism. " Let him who can," he says, " gain honour

* EARLY WRITERS TO THE CONQUEST II

ere he die." " Let us have fame or death." Out of the fatalism naturally grew the dignity and much of the pathos of the poem. It is most poetical in the vivid character-drawing of men and women, and especially in the character of the hero, both in his youth and in his age; in the fateful pathos of the old man's last fight for his country against certain death, in the noble scene of the burial, in the versing of the grave and courteous interchange of human feeling between the personages. Moreover, the descriptions of the sea and the voyage, and of the savage places of the cliffs and the moor, are instinct with the spirit which is still alive among our poetry, and which makes dreadful and lonely wildernesses seem dwelt in — as if the places needed a king — by monstrous beings. In the creation of Grendel and his mother, the savage stalkers of the moor, that half-natural, half-supernatural world began, which, when men grew gentler and the country more cultivated, became so beautiful as fairyland. Here is the description of the dwelling-place of Grendel : —

o'er the sea.

Fearful is the tnarish-path, where the mountain torrent 'Neath the Nesses' mist, nither makes its way. Under earth the flood is, not afar from here it lies; But the measure of a mile, where the mere is set. Over it, outreaching, hang the ice-nipt trees : Held by roots the holt is fast, and o'er-helms the water.

There an evil wonder, every night, a man may see — In the flood a fire !

Not unhaunted is the place !

Thence the welter of the waves is upwhirled on high! Wan towards the clouds, when the wind is stirring Wicked weather up; till the lift is waxing dark, And the welkin weeping !

The whole poem, Pagan as it is, is English to its very root. It is sacred to us, our Genesis, the book of our origins.

9. Christianity and English Poetry. — When we came to Britain we were great warriors and great sea pirates — " sea wolves," as a Roman poet calls us ; and all our poetry down to the present day is full of war, and still more of the sea. No nation has ever written so much sea-poetry. But we were more than mere warriors. We were a home-loving people when we got settled either in Sleswick or in England, and all our literature from the first writings to the last is full of domestic love, the dearness of home, and the ties of kinsfolk. We were a religious people, even as heathen, still more so when we became Christian, and our poetry is as much of religion as of war. But with Christianity a new spirit entered into English poetry. The war spirit did not decay, but into the song steals a softer element. The fatalism is modified by the faith that the fate is the will of a good God. The sorrow is not less, but it is relieved by an onlook of joy. The triumph over enemies is not less, but even more exulting, for it is the triumph of God over His foes that is sung by Caedmon and Cynewulf. Nor is the

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imaginative delight in legends and in 'the supernatural less. But it is now found in the legends of the saints, in the miracles and visions of angels that Baeda tells of the Christian heroes, in fantastic allegories of spiritual things, like the poems of the Phcsnix and the Whale. The love of nature lasted, but it dwells now rather on gentle than on savage scenery. The human sorrow for the hardness of life is more tender, and when the poems speak of the love of home, it is with an added grace. One little bit still lives for us out of the older world.

Dear the welcomed one To his Frisian wife, when his Floater's drawn on shore, When his keel comes back, and her man returns to home ; Hers, her own food-giver. And she prays him in, Washes then his weedy coat, and new weeds puts on him ! O lythe it is on land to him whom his love constrains.

If that was the soft note of home in a Pagan time, it was softer still when Christianity had mellowed manners. Yet, with all this, the ancient faith still influences the Christian song. Christ is not only the Saviour, but the Hero who goes forth against the dragon. His overthrow of the fiends is described in much the same terms as that of Beowulf's wrestling with Grendel. "Bitterly grim, gripped them in his wrath." The death of Christ, at which the universe trembles and weeps, was mixed up afterwards with the story of the death of Balder. The old poetry penetrated the new, but the spirit of the new transformed that of the old.

10. Caedmon.* — The poem of Beowulf has the grave Teutonic power, but it is not, as a whole, native to our soil. It is not the first true English poem. That is the work of CjEdmon, and it was done in Northumbria. The story of it, as told by Baeda, proves that the making of songs was common at the time. Caedmon was a servant to the monastery of Hild, an abbess of royal blood, at Whitby in Yorkshire. He was somewhat aged when the gift of song came to him, and he knew* nothing of the art of verse, so that at the feasts when for the sake of mirth all sang in turn he left the table. One evening, having done so and gone to the stables, for he had the care of the cattle that night, he fell asleep, and One came to him in vision and said, " Caedmon, sing me some song." And he answered, " I cannot sing ; for this cause I left the feast and came hither." Then said the other, " However, you shall sing." " What shall I sing ? " he replied. "Sing the beginning of created things," answered the other. Whereupon he began to sing verses to the praise of God, and, awaking, remembered what he had sung, and added more in verse worthy of God. In the morning he came to the town-reeve, and told him of the gift he had received, and, being brought to Hild, was ordered to tell his dream before learned men, that they might give judgment whence his verses came. And when they had heard, they all said that heavenly grace had been conferred on him by our Lord. This story ought to be loved by us, for it tells of the beginning in England of the wonderful life of English Poetry. Nor should we

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fail to reverence the place where it began. Above the small and land-locked harbour of Whitby rises and juts out towards the sea the dark cliff where Hild's monastery stood, looking out over the German Ocean. It is a wild, wind-swept upland, above the furious sea ; and standing there we feel that it is a fitting birthplace for the poetry of the sea-ruling nation. Nor is the verse of the first poet without the stormy note of the sea-scenery among which it was written, nor without the love of the stars and the high moorlands that Caedmon saw from Whitby Head. Caedmon's poems were done before 680, in which year he died. Baeda tells us that he sang the story of Genesis and Exodus, many other tales in the Sacred Scriptures, and the story of Christ and the Apostles and of Heaven and Hell to come. "Others after him tried to make religious poems, but none could compare with him for he learnt the art of song not from men, but, divinely aided, received that gift." It is plain then that he was the founder of a school. It is equally plain, it seems, from this passage, that at Bseda's death the later school of religious poets, of whom Cynewulf was the chief, had not begun to write. Caedmon's poems, then, were widely known. Baeda quotes their first verses. They were copied from monastery to monastery. ^Elfred got them from the north, and no doubt gave them to the great schools at Winchester. They were however lost. Only their fame survived.

n. The Junian Caedmon. — Archbishop Ussher, hunting for books for Trinity College, Dublin, found an Old

English MS. which Francis Dujon (Junius) printed in Amsterdam about 1650, and published as the work of Caedmon, because its contents agreed with Baeda's description of Caedmon's poems and of his first hymn. Junius was a friend of Milton, and Milton was one of the first to hear what the earliest English poet was supposed to have written on the Fall of the Angels and the Fall of Man. Since then critics have wrought their will upon this MS. Some say that Caedmon did not write a line of it ; others allow him some share in it. It pleases us to think, and the judgment is possible, that the more archaic portion of the first poem in the MS. — the Genesis — which describes the Fall of the Angels and the Creation, the Flood, and perhaps the battle of Abraham with the kings of the East is by Caedmon himself. In the midst of the Genesis there is however a second description of the Fall of the Angels and an elaborate account of the council in Hell, and of the temptation in the Garden. This is held to be an after-insertion, made perhaps in the time of Alfred. It differs in feeling, in subtlety, and in manner of verse from the rest. A conjecture was made that it was a translation of a part of an Old Saxon poem, and this seems to be borne out by the discovery in 1894 of a fragment of Old Saxon poetry in which there are lines similar to those of this separated portion of the Genesis. The next poem in the MS. is the Exodus, It is certainly not by Caedmon. It is not a paraphrase ; it is a triumphal poem of war, boldly invented, on the passage of the Red Sea. The Daniel, the third poem of the

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MS., is so dull that it is no matter who wrote it or when it was written. The second part of the MS. is in a different handwriting from the first, and is a series of Psalmlike poems on the Fall of the Angels, the Harrowing of Hell, the Resurrection, Ascension, Pentecost, the Judgment Day, and the Temptation. They are a kind of Paradise Regained.

12. The interest of these poems is not found in any paraphrase of the Scriptures, but in those parts of them which are the invention of the poets, in the drawing of the characters, in the passages instinct with the genius of our race, and with the individuality of the writers. The account of the creation in the older Genesis has the grandeur of a nature-myth. The description of the flood is full of the experience of one who had known the sea in storm. The battle of Abraham is a fine clash of war, and might be the description of the repulse by some Northumbrian king of the northern tribes. The ruin of the angels and the* peace of Heaven, set in contrast, have the same kind of proud pathos as Milton's work on the same subject. The later Genesis is even more Teutonic than the first Satan's fierce cry of wrath and freedom against God from his bed of chains in Hell is out of the heart of heathendom. The northern rage of war and the northern tie of war-brotherhood speak in all he says, in all that his thegns reply. The pleasure of the northern imagination in swiftness and joy is just as marked as its pleasure in dark pride and in revenge. The burst of exulting vengeance when the thegn of Satan succeeds in the tempta'

tion is magnificent. His master, he cries, will lie softly and be blithe of heart in the dusky fire, now that his revenge is gained. There is true dramatic power in the dialogue between Eve and the fiend, and so much subtlety of thought that it cannot belong to Caedmon's time. It is characteristic of Teutonic manners that the motives of the woman for eating the fruit are all good, and the passionate and tender conscientiousness of the love and repentance of Adam and Eve is equally characteristic of the gentler and more religious side of the Teutonic nature. "Dark and true and tender is the North."

The Exodus is remarkable for its descriptions of war and a marching host, and especially for the elaborate painting of the breaking up of the sea, which was probably done by one who had himself battled with a whirling gale on the German Ocean. On the whole, we have in the two parts of the Genesis, and in the Exodus, in the midst of spaces of dulness, original and imaginative pieces of poetry well worthy of the beginnings of English song.

13. English in the South. — While Caedmon was still alive, Theodore, Archbishop of Canterbury, and his subdeacon Hadrian set up a celebrated school of learning at Canterbury, which flourished for a short time and then decayed. One of Theodore's scholars was Ealdhelm. A young man when Caedmon died in 680, his name is connected with English poetry. As Abbot of Malmesbury and Bishop of Sherborne he spread the learning of Canterbury over the south of England, and sent his influence into Northumbria, where his Riddles were imitated by Cynewulf. But our chief interest in him is that he was himself an Epglish poet. It is said that he had not his equal in the making and singing of English verse. One of his songs was popular in the twelfth century. Alfred had some in his possession, and a pretty story tells that when the traders came into the towns, Ealdhelm used, like a gleeman, to stand on the bridge or the public way and sing songs to them in the English tongue, that he might lure them by the sweetness of his speech to hear the word of God.