A first sketch of English literature

Preface

Basil Valentine said, in his Triumphant Chariot of Antimony, " The shortness of life makes it impossible for one man thoroughly to learn Antimony, in which every day something of new is discovered." What shall we say then of all the best thought of the best men of our nation in all times ? Let no beginner think that when he has read this book, or any book, or any number of books for any number of years, he will have thoroughly learned English Literature. We can but study faithfully and work on from little to more, never to much. Basil Valentine felt in his own way with that teacher of the highest truth who wrote, " If any man think he knoweth anything, he knoweth nothing yet as he ought to know."

This book is but a first sketch of what in " English Writers " it is the chief work of my life to tell as fully and as truly as I can. But no labour of this kind is intended to save any one the pains of reading good books for himself. It is useful only when it quickens the desire to come into real contact with great minds of the past, and gives the kind of knowledge that will lessen distance between us and them. As far as our wit serves, we understand the books of our own day because we live with them. Knowledge common to us as the air we breathe will hereafter be a part of the detail necessary to make that fresh and pleasant to a student in the future, which the idler may enjoy now without trouble.

Together with a first outline of our literature, some account of the political and social history of England should be read ; and while each period is being studied, direct acquaintance should be made with one or two of its best books. Whatever examples may be chosen should be complete pieces, however short, not extracts, for we must learn from the first to recognise the unity of a true work of genius. A short Appendix gives the names and prices of a few of the books suitable for use in this way, and contains a page to be read with the chapter upon Chaucer and his time.

H. M.

University College, London.

Chapter I. The Forming Of The People : Celts

I. The Literature of a People tells its life. History records its deeds ; but Literature brings to us, yet warm with their first heat, the appetites and passions, the keen intellectual debate, the higher promptings of the soul, whose blended energies produced the substance of the record. We see some part of a man's outward life and guess his character, but do not know it as we should if we heard also the debate within, loud under outward silence, and could be spectators of each conflict for which lists are set within the soul. Such witnesses we are, through English Literature, of the life of our own country. Let us not begin the study with a dull belief that it is but a bewilderment of names, dates, and short summaries of conventional opinion, which must be learnt by rote. As soon as we can feel that we belong to a free country with a noble past, let us begin to learn through what endeavours and to what end it is free. Liberty as an abstraction is not worth a song. It is precious only for that which it enables us to be and do. Let us bring our hearts, then, to the study which we here begin, and seek through it accord with that true soul of our country by which we may be encouraged to maintain in our own day the best work of our forefathers.

The literature of this country has for its most distinctive mark the religious sense of duty. It represents a people striving through successive generations to find out the right and do it, to root out the wrong, and labour ever onward for the

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love of God. If this be really the strong spirit of her people, to show that it is so is to tell how England won, and how alone sne can expect to keep, her foremost place among the nations.

2. Once Europe was peopled only here and there by men who beat at the doors of nature and upon the heads of one another with sharp flints. What knowledge they struck out in many years was bettered by instruction from incoming tribes who, beginning earlier or learning faster, brought higher results of experience out of some part of the region that we now call Asia. Generation after generation came and went, and then Europe was peopled by tribes different in temper : some scattered among pastures with their flocks and herds, or gathering for fight and plunder around chiefs upon whom they depended ; others drawing together on the fields they ploughed, able to win and strong to hold the good land of the plain in battle under chiefs whose strength depended upon them. But none can distinguish surely the forefathers of these most remote forefathers of the Celt and Teuton, in whose unlike tempers lay some of the elements from which, when generations after generations more had passed away, a Shakespeare was to come.

Their old home may have been ugon the plains and in the valleys once occupied by the Medes and Persians, and in the lands watered by those five rivers of the Punjaub which flow into the Indus. We may look for it westward from the Indus to the Euphrates ; northward from the shores of the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea to the Caucasus, the Caspian, and the river Oxus.

Through the passes of the Caucasus it may be true that those known as the Celts first migrated to the region north of the Black Sea. Ezekiel, 600 years B.C., named Gomer as a nation, placing it in the north quarter, that is, south of the Caucasus. ^Eschylus, about 130 years later, placed the Cimmerians (whose name lives with our Welsh countrymen as Cymry) about the Sea of Azov and in the peninsula called from them the Crimea. We are told that in Assyrian inscriptions the Sacan or Scythian population which spread over the Persian Empire was called Gimiri ; and the two words (each, perhaps, meaning " rover") were applied afterwards to separate branches of the same national stock. North of the Black Sea, between the Danube and the Don, were the Cimmerian or Cymric Celts. East of the Don were the Scyths, whose name may live among ourselves as Scot, since they are thought to be fore. a, hers of

CELTS AND TEUTONS. 3

those Gaels who are of our nation as the Celts of Ireland and the Scottish Highlands.

Then came the migrations in which, it is said, the Scythian or Gaelic Celts, pushing westward across the Don, forced the Cymry before them. The Cymry, crossing the Danube, ravaged part of Asia Minor, and spread into Europe. The Gaels who followed them spread also into Europe, and were also driven westward as more tribes came after them.

These next tribes appear to have been men of another stock, who held by the eastern plains of Europe, and there established the Slavonic populations.

Then came the Teutons. First, perhaps, came those from about the upper waters of the Tigris and Euphrates and the northern part of the plateau of Iran, who went north-westward towards the shores of the North Sea and western Baltic, there to become forefathers of Low German populations. From the coasts of France and Spain they were shut out by the strong Celtic occupation ; and behind them pressed men of another branch of their own stock — men, perhaps, who had once occupied the highlands of Southern Iran. These established themselves on the higher lands of Central Europe, and were, if the theory be true, ancestors of the High Germans.

3. Gaelic Celts, migrating by sea from Spain, struck on the western coast of Ireland and on our south-western shores. Thence they spread over these islands, of which the first thin peopling seems to have been by a Celtic population of the Gaelic branch.

Low Germans afterwards crossed the Rhine, and made their way by Belgium along North France to the Seine, expelling Cymry whom they found there in possession. These Cymry, driven across the Channel, landed on the eastern part of our south coast, and forced Gaels there in occupation westward. The Low Germans, who had formed a Belgic Gaul, crossed also, and were strong enough to form a Belgic England. Low Germans and Scandinavians from all lands opposite our eastern coast came over as colonists. The Gaels went westward before pressure of the Cymry, as the Cymry were pushed westward by incoming Teutons. At last the main body of the Gaels of Southern Britain had been forced to join their countrymen across the Irish Sea. The Cymry held the pasture land among the mountain fastnesses of Western England, and the Teuton ploughed the plains.

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This process of change was continuous, and may have been so for some centuries before the hundred years between the middle of the fifth and the middle of the sixth century after Christ, during which there were six Teutonic settlements thought worthy of especial record. The six settlements were thus distinguished because they established sovereignties and began the strong uprearing of the nation which took from a great immigrant Teutonic tribe its name of English.

4. As tribe pressed upon tribe, lands were not yielded without struggle. These changes and recombinations in the chemistry of nations were accompanied with a quick effervescence ; there was war. War and the common needs of life were foremost in man's thought. We have in this country two famous traditional periods of Celtic literature. One belongs to the Gael, the other to the Cymry ; and each centres in a battle.

5. About the Battle of G-abhra, said to have been fought A.D. 284, is gathered the main body of old Gaelic tradition. Fionn (which means "Fair-haired"), the son of Cumhaill, known in modern poetry as Fingal, had a son Oisin (which means " The Little Fawn "), who is known in modern poetry as Ossian. Fionn's father, Cumhaill, had been slain in battle by Goll Mac Morna, who, as Fionn's mortal enemy, and afterwards his friend, has an important place in the old traditions. Fionn led one of the four bands into which the Gaels were parted, that of Leinster, known as the Clanna Baoisgne. His clan attained to so much power that the other three combined against it, and then Fionn and his family had to fight for their lives against all the forces of Erin armed against them, except those of his friend the King of Munster. Stirred to the depths by a struggle that compelled them to put out all strength in the defence of what they held most dear, they felt keenly, reached the highest level of the life of their own time, and poured its music out in song. Fionn's cousin, Caeilte Mac Ronan, was warrior and bard. Oisin, the son of Fionn, was warrior and bard. The brother of Oisin, Fergus the Eloquent (Fergus Finnbheoil), was chief bard, and bard only.

More or less changed by time, some fragments of the singing of these men remain on the lips of country folks among the Scotch and Irish Gaels. Only eleven of them are to be found in records older than the fifteenth century ; but others were collected from the lips of the people by a Dean of Lismore in Argyllshire, before the days of Queen Elizabeth.

a.d. 570.] BATTLE OF CATTRAETH. 5

Of the old Gaelic poems and histories Ireland has many remains, such as the tale of The Battle of Moytura, and the Tain Bo, or Cattle Plunder of Chuailgne. In the Senchns Mor are ancient laws of Ireland, ascribed sometimes to the third century, sometimes to the fifth, and certainly known as ancient in the days of Alfred. But the chief feature in old Gaelic literature is the development of song during the struggle that ended a year after the death of Fionn in the crushing of his tribe at the battle of Gabhra, which is said to have been fought in the year 284. •

Oisin is said to have had a warrior son, Oscar, killed in the battle, and to have himself survived to an extreme old age, saddened by change of times. The name of Oisin was even blended in tradition with that of St. Patrick, who came to Ireland about a century and a half after the battle of Gabhra. Patrick is made to say to Oisin, " It is better for thee to be with me and the clergy, as thou art, than to be with Fionn and the Fenians, for they are in hell without order of release;" to which Oisin is made to answer, " By the book and its meaning, by thy crozier and by thine image, better were it for me to share their torments than to be among the clergy continually talking. . . Son of Alphinen of the Wise Words, woe is me that I am near the clergy of the bells ! For a time I lived with Caeilte, and then we were not poor."

6. The flowering of the other branch of our old Celtic literature—the Cymric — is associated also with a struggle that brought out the noblest life of men touched to the quick and concentrating all their powers for defence of home and liberty. Here also was a struggle against overwhelming force, closed with a ruinous defeat in battle. This was the Battle of Cattraeth, said to have been fought in the year 570 by confederate Cymry to resist the advance of the Teuton inland,, after the last of the six settlements upon our eastern shores. They were, indeed, men of the sixth settlement, who had landed (a.d. 547) in the north-east, under Ida, and then spread from the sea inland across a part of the land we now call Northumberland, Durham, aird Yorkshire. They took certain lands of the Gododin (Otadini of the Romans), which the Cymry made a last great effort to wrest from them. The scene of battle was probably Catterick Bridge, a few miles from Richmond, in Yorkshire. The Cymric tribes were gathered at the call of the Lord of Eiddin, which means, perhaps, not Edinburgh, but the region of the river Eden, flowing from a source near that of the Swale, through Westmoreland and Cumberland, into the Solway Frith. They came from districts now known by such names as Dumbarton, Wigtown, Kirkcudbright, and Ayr, from Morecambe Bay and all surrounding regions, gathered their force on the hills about the sources of the Eden and the Swale, and thence marched (A.D. 570) down through Swaledale, some five and twenty miles, to Catterick, or Cattraeth. Aneurin, one of the chief of the bards inspired by the great life-struggle, sang the disasters of the battle in a poem called the Gododin, of which ninety-seven stanzas yet remain. Gray found in a translation of it the passage which he thus put into music of his own : —

"To Cattraeth's vale in glittering row Twice two hundred warriors go ; Every warrior's manly neck Chains of regal honour deck, Wreathed in many a golden link : From the golden cup they drink Nectar that the bees produce, Or the grape's ecstatic juice.

Flush'd with mirth and hope they burn ; But none from Cattraeth's vale return, Save Aeron brave and Conan strong (Bursting through the bloody throng).

And I, the meanest of them all, That live to weep and sing their fall."

The battle began on a Tuesday, and continued for a week. The Cymry fought to the death, and of three hundred and sixty-three chiefs who had led their people to the conflict, only three, says Aneurin, besides himself, survived. " Morien lifted up again his ancient lance, and, roaring, stretching out death towards the warriors, whilst towards the lovely, slender, bloodstained body of Gwen, sighed Gwenabwy, the only son of Gwen. . . . Fain would I sing, 'would that Morien had not died/ I sigh for Gwenabwy the son of Gwen." Thus Aneurin ends his plaint over the crowning triumph of the Teuton. But hearts had beaten high among the Cymry, and from souls astir song had been poured throughout the days of long resistance 'hat had come before. Urien was the great North of England :hief who led the battle of the Cymry for their homes and liberies against invading Angles. Llywarch the Old (Llvwarch Hen) Prince of Argoed, whom the remains of verse ascribed to lim show to have been first in genius among the Cymric bards, vas Urien's friend and fellow-combatant at Lindisfarne, between

TO a.u. 579.] TALIESIN. MERLIN. J

the years 572 and 579. There, after the death of Urien, he carried the chiefs head in his mantle from the field. "The head," he sang, " that I carry carried me ; I shall find it no more ; it will come no more to my succour. Woe to my hand, my happiness is lost ! " After Urien's death Llywarch joined arms with Cyndyllan, Prince of Powys, at his capital, where Shrewsbury now stands. Cyndyllan xell in a battle at Tarn, near the Wrekin. "The hall of Cyndyllan," then sang his friend Llywarch, "is gloomy this night, without fire, without songs — tears afflict the cheeks ! The hall of Cyndyllan is gloomy this night, without fire, without family— my overflowing tears gush out ! The hall of Cyndyllan pierces me to see it, roofless, fireless. My chief is dead, and I alive myself." Twelfth century tradition says that this bard was for a time one of King Arthur's counsellors. Llywarch had many sons ; he gave to all of them his heart to battle for their country, and lost them all upon the battle-field. " O, Gwenn," he sang of his youngest and last dead, " O, Gwenn, woe to him who is too old, since he has lost you. A man was my son, a hero, a generous warrior, and he was the nephew of Urien. Gwenn has been slain at the ford of Morlas. . . Sweetly sang a bird on a pear tree above the head of Gwenn before they covered him with the turf. That broke the heart of the old Llywarch."

Taliesia (Shining Forehead) was another of those Cymric bards who sang in the hall of Urien. He was bard only, chief bard, and sang Urien's victories over Ida at Argoed, at Gwenn Estrad, and at Menao, between the years 547 and 560. After the death of Urien, he was the bard of Urien's son, Owain, by whom Ida was slain. After the death of all Urien's sons, Taliesin ended a sad life in Wales, and was buried, it is said, under a cairn near Aberystwith.

Myrddhin, or Merlin, was another of these bards, the one who became afterwards one of the chief figures in Arthurian romance. He was born between the years 470 and 480 ; served first the British chief Ambrosius Aurelianus, from whom he took the name of Ambrose before his own name of Merlin ; then served as bard with Arthur, leader of the Southern Britons. That was the King Arthur who fought as Urien fought, and who, though seldom named in our oldest Cymric remains, became afterwards typical hero of the contest, Arthur, the King of that heroic myth which runs through our literature and is made part of the life of England. Merlin, one day, between the years 560 and 574,

8 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE.

in a field of slaughter on the Solway Firth, lost reason at sight of the miseries and horrors that surrounded him, broke his sword, and fled the society of man. Thenceforth he poured lament through all his music, and at last he was found dead by the banks of a river. Of other bards the memories survive, but these were the chief; and if the records of their lives be blended with much fable, they do, nevertheless, retain truths out of the life of that great time of effervescence which preceded in this country a blending of the elements of English strength.

7. Influence of the Celt on English literature proceeds not from example set by one people and followed by another, but in the way of nature, by establishment of blood relationship, and the transmission of modified and blended character to a succeeding generation.

The pure Gael — now represented by the Irish and Scotch Celts — was, at his best, an artist. He had a sense of literature, he had active and bold imagination, joy in bright colour, skill in music, touches of a keen sense of honour in most savage times, and in religion fervent and self-sacrificing zeal. In the Cymry — now represented by the Celts of Wales — there was the same artist nature. By natural difference, and partly, no doubt, because their first known poets learnt in suffering what they taught in song, the oldest Cymric music comes to us, not like the music of the Irish harp, in throbbings of a pleasant tunefulness, but as a wail that beats again, again, and again some iterated burden on the ear.

The blending of the_Celt and Teuton had begun in the north even before the days of the great battle at Cattraeth. Some passages in Aneurin's Gododin show that Celts of part of the Northumberland, Durham, and Yorkshire coast, the men of Deivyr and Bryneich (Deira and Bernicia), had remained there and become incorporated with the new possessors of the soil. There never was repulse of the whole body of the Cymry into Wales. Bede, writing a hundred and fifty years after the battle of Cattraeth, speaks of the Britons of Northumberland as being in his day partly free and partly subject to the Angles. In the hill-country of the north and west, to which the Teuton did not care to follow with his plough, and in the fens, were independent Celts. The drone of a Lincolnshire bagpipe is one of FalstafFs similes for melancholy. The familiar presence of the bagpipe indicates a former Celtic occupation of the fens. In the West of England the Celts were so far from having been entirely driven

INFLUENCE OF THE CELT. 9

into Wales that in King Alfred's time, three centuries after the struggle ended at Cattraeth, a line from north to south, dividing England into equal parts, had on the west side of it a country in which Celts abounded. They were the chief occupants of the five south-western counties. In Athelstane's time, Celts and Teutons, Britons and Englishmen, divided equal rule in Exeter. Neither in the West nor in the North of England were the Celts, enslaved. Wales they had to themselves ; and there they cherished British nationality. But where they lived among the English they accepted, when outnumbered, the established power; or, if in equal force, divided rule, and lived in either case as fellow-citizens with their Teutonic neighbours.

In the fusion of the two races, which then slowly began among the hills and valleys of the North and West of England, where the populations came most freely into contact, the gift of genius was the contribution of the Celt. The writer of our latest and best history of Architecture, when ' preparing the ground for his work by a survey of the characteristics of different races in relation to his ait, says that " the true glory of the Celt in Europe is his artistic eminence. It is not, perhaps," adds Mr. Fergusson, " too much to assert that without his intervention we should not have possessed in modern times a church worthy of admiration, or a picture or a statue we could look at without shame."

8. The sense of literature was shown in the earliest times by the support of a distinct literary class among the Celts who then possessed this country. In Erin, the first headquarters of song and story, even in the third century, there was the poet with his staff of office, a square tablet staff, on the four sides of which he cut his verse ; and there were degrees in literature. There was the Ollamh, or perfect doctor, who could recite seven fifties of historic tales ; and there were others, down to the Driseg, who could tell but twenty. As we travel down from the remotest time of which there can be doubtful record, we find the profession of historian to be a recognised calling, transmitted in one family from generation to generation, and these later professors of history still bore the name of Ollamhs. Of the active and bold fancy that accompanied this Celtic sense of literature as an art, and of the Celt's delight in bright colour, almost any one of the old Gaelic poems will bear witness. The delight in colour is less manifest in the first poems of the Cymry. For them the one colour was that of blood ; they are

IO A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE.

of the sixth century, and sing of men who died in the vain fight against the spreading power of the Teuton. Of those Gaels who were known as Gauls to Rome, Diodorus, the Sicilian, told, three centuries before the time of Fionn and Oisin, how they wore bracelets and costly finger-rings, gold corselets, and dyed tunics flowered with colours of every kind, trews, striped cloaks fastened with a brooch and divided into many parti-coloured squares, a taste still represented by the Highland plaid. In the old Gaelic tale of the " Tain Bo," men are described marching : u Some are with red cloaks ; others with light blue cloaks ; others with deep blue cloaks ; others with green, or grey, or white, or yellow cloaks, bright and fluttering about them. There is a young, red-freckled lad, with a crimson cloak, in their midst; a golden brooch in that cloak at his breast." Even the ghost of a Celt, if it dropped the substance, retained all the colouring of life. The vivacity of Celtic fancy is shown also by an outpouring of bold metaphor and effective simile : —

" Both shoulders covered with his painted shield The hero there, swift as the war-horse, rushed. Noise in the mount of slaughter, noise and fire ; The darting lances were as gleams of sun. There the glad raven fed. The foe must fly- While he so swept them as when in his course An eagle strikes the morning dews aside, And like a whelming billow struck their front. Brave men, so say the bards, are dumb to slaves. Spears wasted men, and ere the swan-white steeds Trod the still grave that hushed the master voice, His blood washed all his arms. Such was Buddvan, Son of Bleedvan the Bold."

Here, in a mere average stanza, containing one of the ninety celebrations of the Cymric chiefs who fell at Cattraeth, we have more similes than in the six thousand and odd lines (English measure) of " Beowulf," the first heroic poem of the Teutonic section of our people. The delight in music — among the old Irish Celts in the music of the harp and tabor, among the old Welsh Celts in music of the harp, the pipe, and the crowd — is another characteristic. It is noted also that the music of the Gaels was sweet, lively, and rapid ; and that the music of the Cymry was slower and more monotonous.

In the old Gaelic story of the first appearance of their people in Erin, we read how the Milesians landed unobserved, marched upon Tara, and called on the three kings of the Tuatha de Danaan, who then held the country, to surrender. The kings

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answered that they h°d been taken by surprise, and that the invaders ought to re-embark, retire nine waves, and try whether they could make good their landing in fair fight. The Milesians agreed that this was just, and did try back. We are not bound to believe that such things were ever done ; enough for us that there is the temper of the people indicated by the character of its inventions. And they are suggestions of a chivalrous ideal in old days of savage artist life, when the Celt was a pagan gentleman very much in the rough ; savage times when, says another of these old tales, the Ulster men mixed the brains of their slain enemies with lime, and played with the hard balls they made of them. Such a brainstone is said to have gone through the skull of Conchobar, who lived afterwards seven years with two brains in his head, always sitting very still, because it would be death to shake himself. The Ollamh of old told, doubtless, this story with a roguish twinkle of the eye that has descended to his children's children.

The self-sacrificing zeal that entered into the religion of the Celts bore fruit in the first Christianising of the English.

Chapter II. The Forming Of The People : First English

I. The First English, who are commonly known by the school' name of Anglo-Saxons, but who called themselves, as we call ourselves now, the English people {Englisc /o/c),were formed by a gradual blending of Teutonic tribes. They came, at different times and in different generations, from different parts of the opposite coast. On our eastern shores, from the Moray Firth to below Whitby, the land lay readiest of access to men from the opposite side of the North Sea, among whom Scandinavians were numerous ; accordingly, the Scandinavian element is chiefly represented in the character, form, face, and provincial dialects of our north country. The part of our east coast belonging now to Lincolnshire was readiest of access to the Danes ; and in Lincolnshire the Danish element is strongly represented. Farther south, our coast was opposite the Frisian settlements ; therefore, among the immigrants over the North Sea to Southern England, the Frisians, forefathers of the