Period of The greedy war hawk, And that grey beast, The wolf in the weald. No slaughter has been greater In this island Ever yet Of folk laid low Before this By the sword's edges From what book tells us Old chroniclers, Since hither from the east Angles and Saxons Came to land, O'er the broad seas Proud war-smiths, The Welsh o'ercame, There is yet another fine example of Anglo-Saxon poetry of the tenth century in the poem on the death of Byrhtnoth, Ealdorman of Essex, who was killed in battle near Maldon while resisting the Danish invasion of 991. The poet describes with great spirit Byrhtnoth's refusal to buy the invaders off, his romantic but inauspicious generosity in allowing them to land that the fight may be on even terms, his death from many wounds in the front of the battle, the flight of some of his companions, the heroic devotion of others: "Byrthwold, the aged comrade, spoke as he grasped fast his shield and shook his ash: 'The spirit should be all the harder, the heart all the bolder, the courage should be the greater, the more our forces lessen; here lieth our prince cut down, the brave one, slain in the dust. May he ever mourn who thinketh now to turn from this battleplay. I am old in days, I will not go away, but I think to lie by my lord's side; I will lie by such a beloved warrior.'" Here the MS. is mutilated, and the poem breaks off. Little more poetry of this description is to be found in the remaining period of Anglo-Saxon literature, or, indeed, much literature of any kind. The national spirit needed renovation. As M. Jusserand justly remarks: "In spite of the efforts of Cynewulf, Alfred, Dunstan, and Aelfric, literature goes on repeating itself. Poems, histories, and sermons are conspicuous, now for their grandeur, now for the emotion that is in them; but their main qualities and main defects are very much alike; they give an impression of monotony. The same notes, not very numerous, are incessantly repeated. Literature is almost stationary, it does not move and develop. A graft is wanted." The justice of these remarks is shown by the turn which affairs took under Edward the Confessor (1042-1066). Edward's partiality for the Normans among whom he had been educated angered his subjects, who AGE OF EDWARD THE CONFESSOR 67 could not perceive that the powerful, and for the age highly civilised state which had grown up on the other side of the Channel must of necessity exercise a strong attractive more influence upon one torpid and backward. They were displeased when Edward for the first time affixed a seal to his charters, a custom borrowed from the Normans; they liked still less the chancellors, clerks, chaplains, legal and spiritual advisers whom he brought from beyond the sea. These were but the forerunners of the great intellectual change which must needs occur if England was ever to hold a foremost place among the nations, which must have come even if there never had been any material Norman Conquest. Such literary vitality as the age possessed asserted itself in the endeavour to naturalise a Norman form of literature, the romance. The Normans had not invented, probably at this time not even translated, the romances of Seal of Edward the Confessor (obverse) Alexander and of Apollonius of Tyre, but they admired the class of literature of which these were types, and the translation into. Anglo Saxon of Alexander's supposititious letters to Aristotle, and of the probably Byzantine romance of Apollonius, which seems to have come into England through a Latin version, the earliest known copy of which belongs to the ninth or tenth century, were evidences of a new attraction beginning to be exercised upon the Anglo-Saxon mind, which might have produced considerable effect upon Anglo-Saxon literature but for the temporary abolition of that literature by the stroke of conquest. This convulsion occurring, as there is every reason to suppose, shortly after the Apollonius romance had been translated, Seal of Edward the Confessor (reverse) found and left it the sole representative of its class in Anglo-Saxon. One redeeming feature of the time should not remain unnoticed, that disposition to transcribe ancient writings which produced the priceless Exeter and Vercelli MSS. Arrived as we are at the eve of a great crisis, it will not be uninstructive to cast a glance upon literature at the other side of the world. In the Far East is a chain of great islands not unlike the British Isles in their configuration, resembling them still more in their physical relation to the adjacent continent and the individuality of the race inhabiting them, and indebted for their civilisation to China, as England to Italy. While, however, intellectual England of the eleventh century is stagnation, intellectual Japan is all animation and brightness. When hardly one Englishwoman could write her name, the literature of eleventh-century Japan was mainly provided by ladies, who displayed qualities akin to those which were to characterise French epistolary and memoir literature in future ages. The comparison seems most mortifying in retrospect, but would have failed to move the contemporaries of Edward the Confessor, who had as little conception of the height from which European literature had descended, or of the possibilities of recovery, as of the dignity and preciousness of literature herself, apart from utility or amusement. CHAPTER III EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE TO "PIERS PLOWMAN” tion of the Norman We have now accompanied English literature to the eve of the most Transformaviolent and abrupt transformation ever wrought in that of any people. English It is no uncommon circumstance for a literature to undergo profound literature by modification through contact with another in presence of whose superior Conquest refinement the old hereditary forms are no longer able to hold their ground. Acquaintance with Greek literature thus remodelled the literature of Rome, and Italian forms of verse displaced the national metres of Portugal and Spain. But sweeping as these changes might be, they did not destroy the continuity of literary tradition. No one would think of separating the primitive stages of Latin and Spanish literature from the more recent, and making them the subject of distinct histories. With English literature it is otherwise, a gulf yawns at the Conquest, and although some stragglers cross the gap, like plants of one zone of vegetation straying into another, we soon become conscious that the conditions of soil and climate have undergone vast mutation, and that Anglo-Saxon literature as we have hitherto known it can exist no more. The case is wholly different from that of Latin borrowings from Greece. Greek literature was recommended solely by its superiority; had the Romans been incapable of perceiving this they could no more have been compelled to conform themselves to Hellenic models than the modern Germans can be compelled to adopt the Roman character in writing and printing. In England, however, new literary forms and a new literary language were established upon the same soil as the old, pressing upon and permeating these at every point, and leaving them no choice but to amalgamate with the innovators, or to be crushed out of existence. It will have been observed that at the time of the Conquest the condition of Anglo-Saxon literature was by no means vigorous. It would indeed be an entire error to assert, as was at one time generally held, that the Danish invasion had reduced the people to barbarism, and that letters were virtually extinct among them. We have seen, on the contrary, that men of considerable learning were still to be found, and even that literature was evincing vitality by assimilating a new form, the romance. It is nevertheless true that after the repulse of the great Danish invasions of the ninth century the national energy in intellectual things seemed impaired, and that such mental life as remained chiefly expended itself in ecclesiastical, rather than even theological controversies. It is but just to remark that this coincided with a general lowering of the intellectual level all over Europe, excepting the stationary Byzantine Empire and the then brilliant caliphate of Cordova, by neither of which could England be materially affected. Everywhere else the tenth century is an age of intellectual dearth, and even the few who impressed themselves upon their contemporaries as men of intellect, such as Dunstan and Gerbert, were rather distinguished as administrators or natural philosophers than as authors. A new type of character, meanwhile, was slowly coming to the birth in at corner of France, where, throughout the tenth century, the fusion of Frank, Celt, and Scandinavian was producing the Norman, like the ancient Viking a conqueror and a freebooter, but rather the propagator than the enemy of culture. Had the Norman invasion of England failed, the animosity engendered between the nations would probably have long preserved Anglo-Saxon literature without material modification; but had it never been attempted the influence of Norman example upon England must still have been very considerable. We should have found Norman vocables, metres, ways of thought, gradually becoming naturalised by the influence of foreign visitors, courtiers, and ecclesiastics; and the effect upon our speech would have been far more disastrous than that which actually resulted from its temporary proscription as a vehicle of literature. Instead of that complete fusion between the Teutonic and Romance elements which now endows our language with such copiousness, and so happy a choice of alternative words, we should, as in the German of the seventeenth century, have had the new element uncouthly grafted on the old. French idioms would have little by little insinuated themselves, and the result would have been not renovation but corruption. The sharp and long-continued severance between the tongues, which could have been maintained in no other way than by one ranking as the language of the lord and the other as that of the serf, brought at last an alliance on equal terms, producing an amalgamation more complete than has often been effected in the case of languages so dissimilar in vocabulary and in genius. We have now to follow the course of both languages until, alike in a linguistic and a literary point of view, they have become one. At the moment where we now find ourselves. the year of the Conquest (1066), they present a striking contrast. Each, indeed, has a great epic, AngloSaxon has Beowulf, Norman has, or is on the point of having, the Chanson de Roland. But the Anglo-Saxon poem, and hardly less the works of Caedmon, Cynewulf, and their circles, have almost fallen into oblivion, while Norman songs, fresh and full of vitality, are sung by the Norman soldiers on the eve of battle: 1 |