Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/294

Rh New Latin in fusion into English. Effect on litera ture. Use of Latin in divine service. 280 ment of battle, so that this last came in again in after times in the guise of a foreign innovation. But, small as were the direct legal or political changes which it wrought, the conversion of the English, even petting aside its purely theological and spiritual side, was the greatest event in the history of our nation. The effects which it wrought were great and manifold. The Roman missionaries brought with them a new learn ing, a new culture, The little influence which Rome had on our language and laws, before the great continental infusion of later times, was due far more to the days of the conversion than to the days of the first conquest. Our forefathers translated a great number of ecclesiastical terms, some of which we have come again to use in a Latin shape. Still, as new things must have new names, the Roman missionaries brought into our language a good many Latin words to express ecclesiastical ideas, and seemingly a few other words, expressing other objects of Roman culture. Here was a second Roman infusion into our Teutonic speech. It was an infusion far greater than the handful of Latin words which we picked up in the course of the first conquest ; but it was still an infusion which in no way affected the purity of our native vocabu lary. Some foreign things kept their foreign names ; but no native thing changed its native name for a foreign one. The effect on language was in short much the same as the effect on law. There was no break, no change ; only certain new elements were adopted and assimilated by the old. But if the conversion wrought but little change in the English tongue, it breathed a new literary life into the English people. The missionaries brought with them the whole learning of their time, and, above all, the use of the Latin language. Latin, it must be remembered, was still, not merely the literary tongue, but the common every-day speech of Western Europe. The dialects which grew into the Romance languages had doubtless already begun to form themselves ; but no one looked on them as anything but vulgar dialects- of Latin ; no one thought of committing them to writing, or of using them for any serious purpose. A people who knew no Latin were cut off from all inter course with the civilized world of the West ; a people among whom Latin was cultivated at once formed part of that world. From the corning of Augustine, &quot;book Latin &quot; again took its place among the languages of Britain. 1 But happily it always remained &quot;book Latin.&quot; It never displaced the native Teutonic speech on the lips of men ; it never even shut out the native speech from the rank of a cultivated language possessing a written literature. Or rather, the general intellectual impulse which followed on the conversion, while it first gave us n Latin literature, also first made our English written literature. We learned to use a more convenient alphabet than the runes, a more con venient writing material than the beech. English was, what the Romance languages were not as yet, so far apart from Latin that the two languages, the two literatures, could live side by side. One point only is to be regretted. It is at once the strength and the weakness of the Latin Church, and one of her points of contrast with the Churches of the East, that, wherever her system is accepted in its fulness, she imposes the tongue of Rome as the one tongue of religious worship. Like crowds of other laws and usages, good and bad, this usage came about of itself, without any set purpose ; it was only when it was objected to in after times that arguments were sought for to defend 1 The Chronicles at the very beginning say, &quot; Her synd on ham iglande fif gebeodu ^Englisc, Brytwylsc, Scottysc, Pihttisc, and Boclseden.&quot; This translates Baada s list &quot; Anglorum videlicet, Brit- tonum, Scottorum, Pictorum, et Latinorum, quae rueditatione scriptu- rarum caeteris omnibus est facta communis.&quot; [HISTORY. it. It was in England that the practice began of having divine service in a tongue not understanded of the people. That is to say, England was the first country of wholly foreign speech which the Roman Church had to deal with. It had not come into any man s head to translate the mass or the lectionary into the dialects of Gaul or Spain. Indeed we may be sure that the time for such a step was not yet come ; the ecclesiastical Latin was doubtless at least as intelligible then as the English of the sixteenth century is now. Thus men who were accustomed only to Latin in public worship went on using it, even in a country where the same reasons which pleaded for the use of Latin at Rome pleaded no less strongly for the use of English. But this was the only error ; the native tongue was in no way discouraged as the tongue either of devotional writ or of translations or paraphrases of Scripture. A noble Christian literature soon grew up in the English tongue. The only thing to be lamented is that its growth must have put the older heathen literature under a cloud. The songs which record the English conquest live only in Latin fragments, and Beowulf himself has been taught to utter Christian phrases, if only with stammering lips. The two ends of England contributed to the growth of the new English literature. Our Christian English poetry is of Deira ; our English prose is of Wessex; our Latin litera- ture, our earliest history in literary shape, is of Bernicia. Caedmon of Streoneshalh led the way, the first of our Eng lish sacred poets, he who, a thousand years before Milton, dealt with Milton s theme in Milton s spirit he who sang the warfare of Hebrew patriarchs with the true ring of a Teutonic battle-song. Next came B;eda of Jarrow, the first who recorded English history in Latin prose, and who, amid a crowd of Latin writings, did not forget the ren dering of the gospel into the tongue of his own people. For Csedmon there might have been a place in the older state of things ; for B0eda there could have been none. Caedmon, born while parts of England were still heathen, might have been a heathen born ; he might, in the self same spirit, with little more than the change of names, have sung of Woden and Loki instead of Christ and Satan ; ho might have told the tale of Ida warring with the Briton instead of the tale of Abraham warring with the kings of Caanan. But Bseda is the direct offspring of the great religious change. The monk, the student, who never struck a blow in battle or raised his voice in the assembly of shire or kingdom, was a new character among Englishmen. Yet Baeda is English too ; he is no stranger to us ; he is the man of our own race, as the man of our race might now become under a state of things so far removed from the thoughts of the olden time. Of English prose, though in a sense it begins with Bteda, the true and full growth is later. Its founder is the king who was at once the judge, the captain, and the teacher of his people, West-Saxon Alfred himself. We may also safely say that it was with the conversion to Christianity that the first rudiments of art were brought back into Britain. As heathen Rome taught her culture to the Briton, so Christian Rome taught her culture to the Englishman. How far the monuments of Roman skill were designedly swept away it might be hard to say. Most likely there was no design in the matter. Much would perish in the ordinary course of barbarian havoc,. and there was no English Theodoric to guard what escaped. It is a speaking fact that a Roman column standing in its place is a thing unknown in Britain. We may be sure that the art of stone building was unknown to the heathen English in their old homes; nor was there anything in the circum stances of their settlement in their new homes to lead their thoughts in that direction. Architecture, and with it the other arts, painting, music, and the rest, came in again in the wake of the Church. Churches were built in the style aml i{3e(la- Effects ou art -