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A History of English Literature

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'Béowulf' presents an interesting though very incomplete picture of the
life of the upper, warrior, caste among the northern Germanic tribes during
their later period of barbarism on the Continent and in England, a life
more highly developed than that of the Anglo-Saxons before their conquest
of the island. About King Hrothgar are grouped his immediate retainers, the
warriors, with whom he shares his wealth; it is a part of the character, of
a good king to be generous in the distribution of gifts of gold and
weapons. Somewhere in the background there must be a village, where the
bondmen and slaves provide the daily necessaries of life and where some of
the warriors may have houses and families; but all this is beneath the
notice of the courtly poet. The center of the warriors' life is the great
hall of the king, built chiefly of timber. Inside, there are benches and
tables for feasting, and the walls are perhaps adorned with tapestries.
Near the center is the hearth, whence the smoke must escape, if it escapes
at all, through a hole in the roof. In the hall the warriors banquet,
sometimes in the company of their wives, but the women retire before the
later revelry which often leaves the men drunk on the floor. Sometimes, it
seems, there are sleeping-rooms or niches about the sides of the hall, but
in 'Béowulf' Hrothgar and his followers retire to other quarters. War,
feasting, and hunting are the only occupations in which the warriors care
to be thought to take an interest.

The spirit of the poem is somber and grim. There is no unqualified
happiness of mood, and only brief hints of delight in the beauty and joy of
the world. Rather, there is stern satisfaction in the performance of the
warrior's and the sea-king's task, the determination of a strong-willed
race to assert itself, and do, with much barbarian boasting, what its hand
finds to do in the midst of a difficult life and a hostile nature. For the
ultimate force in the universe of these fighters and their poets (in spite
of certain Christian touches inserted by later poetic editors before the
poem crystallized into its present form) is Wyrd, the Fate of the Germanic
peoples, cold as their own winters and the bleak northern sea,
irresistible, despotic, and unmoved by sympathy for man. Great as the
differences are, very much of this Anglo-Saxon pagan spirit persists
centuries later in the English Puritans.

For the finer artistic graces, also, and the structural subtilties of a
more developed literary period, we must not, of course, look in 'Béowulf.'
The narrative is often more dramatic than clear, and there is no thought of
any minuteness of characterization. A few typical characters stand out
clearly, and they were all that the poet's turbulent and not very attentive
audience could understand. But the barbaric vividness and power of the poem
give it much more than a merely historical interest; and the careful reader
cannot fail to realize that it is after all the product of a long period of
poetic development.

THE ANGLO-SAXON VERSE-FORM. The poetic form of 'Béowulf' is that of
virtually all Anglo-Saxon poetry down to the tenth century, or indeed to
the end, a form which is roughly represented in the present book in a
passage of imitative translation two pages below. The verse is unrimed, not
arranged in stanzas, and with lines more commonly end-stopped (with
distinct pauses at the ends) than is true in good modern poetry. Each line
is divided into halves and each half contains two stressed syllables,
generally long in quantity. The number of unstressed syllables appears to a
modern eye or ear irregular and actually is very unequal, but they are
really combined with the stressed ones into 'feet' in accordance with
certain definite principles. At least one of the stressed syllables in each
half-line must be in alliteration with one in the other half-line; and most
often the alliteration includes both stressed syllables in the first
halfline and the first stressed syllable in the second, occasionally all
four stressed syllables. (All vowels are held to alliterate with each
other.) It will be seen therefore that (1) emphatic stress and (2)
alliteration are the basal principles of the system. To a present-day
reader the verse sounds crude, the more so because of the harshly
consonantal character of the Anglo-Saxon language; and in comparison with
modern poetry it is undoubtedly unmelodious. But it was worked out on
conscious artistic principles, carefully followed; and when chanted, as it
was meant to be, to the harp it possessed much power and even beauty of a
vigorous sort, to which the pictorial and metaphorical wealth of the
Anglo-Saxon poetic vocabulary largely contributed.

This last-named quality, the use of metaphors, is perhaps the most
conspicuous one in the _style_, of the Anglo-Saxon poetry. The
language, compared to that of our own vastly more complex time, was
undeveloped; but for use in poetry, especially, there were a great number
of periphrastic but vividly picturesque metaphorical synonyms (technically
called _kennings_). Thus the spear becomes 'the slaughter-shaft';
fighting 'hand-play'; the sword 'the leavings of the hammer' (or 'of the
anvil'); and a ship 'the foamy-necked floater.' These kennings add much
imaginative suggestiveness to the otherwise over-terse style, and often
contribute to the grim irony which is another outstanding trait.

ANGLO-SAXON POETRY. THE NORTHUMBRIAN PERIOD. The Anglo-Saxons were for a
long time fully occupied with the work of conquest and settlement, and
their first literature of any importance, aside from 'Beowulf,' appears at
about the time when 'Beowulf' was being put into its present form, namely
in the seventh century. This was in the Northern, Anglian, kingdom of
Northumbria (Yorkshire and Southern Scotland), which, as we have already
said, had then won the political supremacy, and whose monasteries and
capital city, York, thanks to the Irish missionaries, had become the chief
centers of learning and culture in Western Christian Europe. Still pagan in
spirit are certain obscure but, ingenious and skillfully developed riddles
in verse, representatives of one form of popular literature only less early
than the ballads and charms. There remain also a few pagan lyric poems,
which are all not only somber like 'Beowulf' but distinctly elegiac, that
is pensively melancholy. They deal with the hard and tragic things in life,
the terrible power of ocean and storm, or the inexorableness and dreariness
of death, banishment, and the separation of friends. In their frequent
tender notes of pathos there may be some influence from the Celtic spirit.
The greater part of the literature of the period, however, was Christian,
produced in the monasteries or under their influence. The first Christian
writer was Caedmon (pronounced Kadmon), who toward the end of the seventh
century paraphrased in Anglo-Saxon verse some portions of the Bible. The
legend of his divine call is famous. [Footnote: It may be found in Garnett
and Gosse, I, 19-20.] The following is a modern rendering of the hymn which
is said to have been his first work:


Now must we worship the heaven-realm's Warder,
The Maker's might and his mind's thought,
The glory-father's work as he every wonder,
Lord everlasting, of old established.
He first fashioned the firmament for mortals,
Heaven as a roof, the holy Creator.
Then the midearth mankind's Warder,
Lord everlasting, afterwards wrought,
For men a garden, God almighty.

After Caedmon comes Bede, not a poet but a monk of strong and beautiful
character, a profound scholar who in nearly forty Latin prose works
summarized most of the knowledge of his time. The other name to be
remembered is that of Cynewulf (pronounced Kinnywulf), the author of some
noble religious poetry (in Anglo-Saxon), especially narratives dealing with
Christ and Christian Apostles and heroes. There is still other Anglo-Saxon
Christian poetry, generally akin in subjects to Cynewulf's, but in most of
the poetry of the whole period the excellence results chiefly from the
survival of the old pagan spirit which distinguishes 'Beowulf'. Where the
poet writes for edification he is likely to be dull, but when his story
provides him with sea-voyages, with battles, chances for dramatic dialogue,
or any incidents of vigorous action or of passion, the zest for adventure
and war rekindles, and we have descriptions and narratives of picturesque
color and stern force. Sometimes there is real religious yearning, and
indeed the heroes of these poems are partly medieval hermits and ascetics
as well as quick-striking fighters; but for the most part the Christian
Providence is really only the heathen Wyrd under another name, and God and
Christ are viewed in much the same way as the Anglo-Saxon kings, the
objects of feudal allegiance which is sincere but rather self-assertive and
worldly than humble or consecrated.

On the whole, then, Anglo-Saxon poetry exhibits the limitations of a
culturally early age, but it manifests also a degree of power which gives
to Anglo-Saxon literature unquestionable superiority over that of any other
European country of the same period.

THE WEST-SAXON, PROSE, PERIOD. The horrors which the Anglo-Saxons had
inflicted on the Britons they themselves were now to suffer from their
still heathen and piratical kinsmen the 'Danes' or Northmen, inhabitants or
the Scandinavian peninsula and the neighboring coasts. For a hundred years,
throughout the ninth century, the Danes, appearing with unwearied
persistence, repeatedly ravaged and plundered England, and they finally
made complete conquest of Northumbria, destroyed all the churches and
monasteries, and almost completely extinguished learning. It is a familiar
story how Alfred, king from 871 to 901 of the southern kingdom of Wessex
(the land of the West Saxons), which had now taken first place among the
Anglo-Saxon states, stemmed the tide of invasion and by ceding to the
'Danes' the whole northeastern half of the island obtained for the
remainder the peace which was the first essential for the reestablishment
of civilization. Peace secured, Alfred, who was one of the greatest of all
English kings, labored unremittingly for learning, as for everything else
that was useful, and he himself translated from Latin into Anglo-Saxon half
a dozen of the best informational manuals of his time, manuals of history,
philosophy, and religion. His most enduring literary work, however, was the
inspiration and possibly partial authorship of the 'Anglo-Saxon Chronicle,'
a series of annals beginning with the Christian era, kept at various
monasteries, and recording year by year (down to two centuries and a half
after Alfred's own death), the most important events of history, chiefly
that of England. Most of the entries in the 'Chronicle' are bare and brief,
but sometimes, especially in the accounts of Alfred's own splendid
exploits, a writer is roused to spirited narrative, occasionally in verse;
and in the tenth century two great battles against invading Northmen, at
Brunanburh and Maldon, produced the only important extant pieces of
Anglo-Saxon poetry which certainly belong to the West Saxon period.

For literature, indeed, the West-Saxon period has very little permanent
significance. Plenty of its other writing remains in the shape of religious
prose--sermons, lives and legends of saints, biblical paraphrases, and
similar work in which the monastic and priestly spirit took delight, but
which is generally dull with the dulness of medieval commonplace
didacticism and fantastic symbolism. The country, too, was still distracted
with wars. Within fifty years after Alfred's death, to be sure, his
descendants had won back the whole of England from 'Danish' rule (though
the 'Danes,' then constituting half the population of the north and east,
have remained to the present day a large element in the English race). But
near the end of the tenth century new swarms of 'Danes' reappeared from the
Baltic lands, once more slaughtering and devastating, until at last in the
eleventh century the 'Danish' though Christian Canute ruled for twenty
years over all England. In such a time there could be little intellectual
or literary life. But the decline of the Anglo-Saxon literature speaks also
partly of stagnation in the race itself. The people, though still sturdy,
seem to have become somewhat dull from inbreeding and to have required an
infusion of altogether different blood from without. This necessary
renovation was to be violently forced upon them, for in 1066 Duke William
of Normandy landed at Pevensey with his army of adventurers and his
ill-founded claim to the crown, and before him at Hastings fell the gallant
Harold and his nobles. By the fortune of this single fight, followed only
by stern suppression of spasmodic outbreaks, William established himself
and his vassals as masters of the land. England ceased to be Anglo-Saxon
and became, altogether politically, and partly in race, Norman-French, a
change more radical and far-reaching than any which it has since undergone.
[Footnote: Vivid though inaccurate pictures of life and events at the time
of the Norman Conquest are given in Bulwer-Lytton's 'Harold' and Charles
Kingsley's 'Hereward the Wake.' Tennyson's tragedy 'Harold' is much better
than either, though more limited in scope.]




CHAPTER II

PERIOD II. THE NORMAN-FRENCH PERIOD. A.D. 1066 TO ABOUT 1350 [Footnote:
Scott's 'Ivanhoe,' the best-known work of fiction dealing with any part of
this period, is interesting, but as a picture of life at the end of the
twelfth century is very misleading. The date assigned to his 'Betrothed,'
one of his less important, novels, is about the same.]


THE NORMANS. The Normans who conquered England were originally members of
the same stock as the 'Danes' who had harried and conquered it in the
preceding centuries--the ancestors of both were bands of Baltic and North
Sea pirates who merely happened to emigrate in different directions; and a
little farther back the Normans were close cousins, in the general Germanic
family, of the Anglo-Saxons themselves. The exploits of this whole race of
Norse sea-kings make one of the most remarkable chapters in the history of
medieval Europe. In the ninth and tenth centuries they mercilessly ravaged
all the coasts not only of the West but of all Europe from the Rhine to the
Adriatic. 'From the fury of the Norsemen, good Lord, deliver us!' was a
regular part of the litany of the unhappy French. They settled Iceland and
Greenland and prematurely discovered America; they established themselves
as the ruling aristocracy in Russia, and as the imperial body-guard and
chief bulwark of the Byzantine empire at Constantinople; and in the
eleventh century they conquered southern Italy and Sicily, whence in the
first crusade they pressed on with unabated vigor to Asia Minor. Those
bands of them with whom we are here concerned, and who became known
distinctively as Normans, fastened themselves as settlers, early in the
eleventh century, on the northern shore of France, and in return for their
acceptance of Christianity and acknowledgment of the nominal feudal
sovereignty of the French king were recognized as rightful possessors of
the large province which thus came to bear the name of Normandy. Here by
intermarriage with the native women they rapidly developed into a race
which while retaining all their original courage and enterprise took on
also, together with the French language, the French intellectual brilliancy
and flexibility and in manners became the chief exponent of medieval
chivalry.

The different elements contributed to the modern English character by the
latest stocks which have been united in it have been indicated by Matthew
Arnold in a famous passage ('On the Study of Celtic Literature'): 'The
Germanic [Anglo-Saxon and 'Danish'] genius has steadiness as its main
basis, with commonness and humdrum for its defect, fidelity to nature for
its excellence. The Norman genius, talent for affairs as its main basis,
with strenuousness and clear rapidity for its excellence, hardness and
insolence for its defect.' The Germanic (Anglo-Saxon and 'Danish') element
explains, then, why uneducated Englishmen of all times have been
thick-headed, unpleasantly self-assertive, and unimaginative, but sturdy
fighters; and the Norman strain why upper-class Englishmen have been
self-contained, inclined to snobbishness, but vigorously aggressive and
persevering, among the best conquerors, organizers, and administrators in
the history of the world.

SOCIAL RESULTS OF THE CONQUEST. In most respects, or all, the Norman
conquest accomplished precisely that racial rejuvenation of which, as we
have seen, Anglo-Saxon England stood in need. For the Normans brought with
them from France the zest for joy and beauty and dignified and stately
ceremony in which the Anglo-Saxon temperament was poor--they brought the
love of light-hearted song and chivalrous sports, of rich clothing, of
finely-painted manuscripts, of noble architecture in cathedrals and
palaces, of formal religious ritual, and of the pomp and display of all
elaborate pageantry. In the outcome they largely reshaped the heavy mass of
Anglo-Saxon life into forms of grace and beauty and brightened its duller
surface with varied and brilliant colors. For the Anglo-Saxons themselves,
however, the Conquest meant at first little else than that bitterest and
most complete of all national disasters, hopeless subjection to a
tyrannical and contemptuous foe. The Normans were not heathen, as the
'Danes' had been, and they were too few in number to wish to supplant the
conquered people; but they imposed themselves, both politically and
socially, as stern and absolute masters. King William confirmed in their
possessions the few Saxon nobles and lesser land-owners who accepted his
rule and did not later revolt; but both pledges and interest compelled him
to bestow most of the estates of the kingdom, together with the widows of
their former holders, on his own nobles and the great motley throng of
turbulent fighters who had made up his invading army. In the lordships and
manors, therefore, and likewise in the great places of the Church, were
established knights and nobles, the secular ones holding in feudal tenure
from the king or his immediate great vassals, and each supported in turn by
Norman men-at-arms; and to them were subjected as serfs, workers bound to
the land, the greater part of the Saxon population. As visible signs of the
changed order appeared here and there throughout the country massive and
gloomy castles of stone, and in the larger cities, in place of the simple
Anglo-Saxon churches, cathedrals lofty and magnificent beyond all
Anglo-Saxon dreams. What sufferings, at the worst, the Normans inflicted on
the Saxons is indicated in a famous passage of the 'Anglo-Saxon Chronicle,'
an entry seventy years subsequent to the Conquest, of which the least
distressing part may be thus paraphrased:

'They filled the land full of castles. [Footnote: This was only during a
period of anarchy. For the most part the nobles lived in manor-houses, very
rude according to our ideas. See Train's 'Social England,' I, 536 ff.] They
compelled the wretched men of the land to build their castles and wore them
out with hard labor. When the castles were made they filled them with
devils and evil men. Then they took all those whom they thought to have any
property, both by night and by day, both men and women, and put them in
prison for gold and silver, and tormented them with tortures that cannot be
told; for never were any martyrs so tormented as these were.'

THE UNION OF THE RACES AND LANGUAGES. LATIN, FRENCH, AND ENGLISH. That
their own race and identity were destined to be absorbed in those of the
Anglo-Saxons could never have occurred to any of the Normans who stood with
William at Hastings, and scarcely to any of their children. Yet this result
was predetermined by the stubborn tenacity and numerical superiority of the
conquered people and by the easy adaptability of the Norman temperament.
Racially, and to a less extent socially, intermarriage did its work, and
that within a very few generations. Little by little, also, Norman contempt
and Saxon hatred were softened into tolerance, and at last even into a
sentiment of national unity. This sentiment was finally to be confirmed by
the loss of Normandy and other French possessions of the Norman-English
kings in the thirteenth century, a loss which transformed England from a
province of the Norman Continental empire and of a foreign nobility into an
independent country, and further by the wars ('The Hundred Years' War')
which England-Norman nobility and Saxon yeomen fighting together--carried
on in France in the fourteenth century.

In language and literature the most general immediate result of the
Conquest was to make of England a trilingual country, where Latin, French,
and Anglo-Saxon were spoken separately side by side. With Latin, the tongue
of the Church and of scholars, the Norman clergy were much more thoroughly
familiar than the Saxon priests had been; and the introduction of the
richer Latin culture resulted, in the latter half of the twelfth century,
at the court of Henry II, in a brilliant outburst of Latin literature. In
England, as well as in the rest of Western Europe, Latin long continued to
be the language of religious and learned writing--down to the sixteenth
century or even later. French, that dialect of it which was spoken by the
Normans--Anglo-French (English-French) it has naturally come to be
called--was of course introduced by the Conquest as the language of the
governing and upper social class, and in it also during the next three or
four centuries a considerable body of literature was produced. Anglo-Saxon,
which we may now term English, remained inevitably as the language of the
subject race, but their literature was at first crushed down into
insignificance. Ballads celebrating the resistance of scattered Saxons to
their oppressors no doubt circulated widely on the lips of the people, but
English writing of the more formal sorts, almost absolutely ceased for more
than a century, to make a new beginning about the year 1200. In the
interval the 'Anglo-Saxon Chronicle' is the only important document, and
even this, continued at the monastery of Peterboro, comes to an end in
1154, in the midst of the terrible anarchy of Stephen's reign.

It must not be supposed, notwithstanding, that the Normans, however much
they despised the English language and literature, made any effort to
destroy it. On the other hand, gradual union of the two languages was no
less inevitable than that of the races themselves. From, the very first the
need of communication, with their subjects must have rendered it necessary
for the Normans to acquire some knowledge of the English language; and the
children of mixed parentage of course learned it from their mothers. The
use of French continued in the upper strata of society, in the few
children's schools that existed, and in the law courts, for something like
three centuries, maintaining itself so long partly because French was then
the polite language of Western Europe. But the dead pressure of English was
increasingly strong, and by the end of the fourteenth century and of
Chaucer's life French had chiefly given way to it even at Court. [Footnote:
For details see O. F. Emerson's 'History of the English Language,' chapter
4; and T. B. Lounsbury's 'History of the English Language.'] As we have
already implied, however, the English which triumphed was in fact
English-French--English was enabled to triumph partly because it had now
largely absorbed the French. For the first one hundred or one hundred and
fifty years, it seems, the two languages remained for the most part pretty
clearly distinct, but in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries English,
abandoning its first aloofness, rapidly took into itself a large part of
the French (originally Latin) vocabulary; and under the influence of the
French it carried much farther the process of dropping its own
comparatively complicated grammatical inflections--a process which had
already gained much momentum even before the Conquest. This absorption of
the French was most fortunate for English. To the Anglo-Saxon
vocabulary--vigorous, but harsh, limited in extent, and lacking in fine
discriminations and power of abstract expression, was now added nearly the
whole wealth of French, with its fullness, flexibility, and grace. As a
direct consequence the resulting language, modern English, is the richest
and most varied instrument of expression ever developed at any time by any
race.

THE RESULT FOR POETRY. For poetry the fusion meant even more than for
prose. The metrical system, which begins to appear in the thirteenth
century and comes to perfection a century and a half later in Chaucer's
poems combined what may fairly be called the better features of both the
systems from which it was compounded. We have seen that Anglo-Saxon verse
depended on regular stress of a definite number of quantitatively long
syllables in each line and on alliteration; that it allowed much variation
in the number of unstressed syllables; and that it was without rime. French
verse, on the other hand, had rime (or assonance) and carefully preserved
identity in the total number of syllables in corresponding lines, but it
was uncertain as regarded the number of clearly stressed ones. The derived
English system adopted from the French (1) rime and (2) identical
line-length, and retained from the Anglo-Saxon (3) regularity of stress.
(4) It largely abandoned the Anglo-Saxon regard for quantity and (5) it
retained alliteration not as a basic principle but as an (extremely useful)
subordinate device. This metrical system, thus shaped, has provided the
indispensable formal basis for making English poetry admittedly the
greatest in the modern world.

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