Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/423

Rh 403 ENGLISH LITEEATUEE I. A nglo-Saxon Period, 596-1066. The early history &quot;^ of literature in England might lend some counten ance to the theory that the development of a nation s literature is, at bottom, but a chapter of its religious his tory. While the religion of our fathers was in the main a rude awe-struck worship of the forces of nature, litera ture either had no existence for them, or was in a state not less elementary, consisting of a few songs and oracles, and nothing more. With the advent of the religion of Christ the only faith which at once recog nizes the original dignity of human nature and repairs its fall caine an intellectual as well as a spiritual awaken ing to the Teutonic nations for into such the original tribes or clans of the invaders had now grown that were planted in the old provinces of Roman Britain. Fortified by gospel precept for the present life, and thrilled with the hope of the life to come, the Saxon mind, released from disquietude, felt free to range discursively through such regions of human knowledge as its teachers opened before it, and the Saxon heart was fain to pour out many a rude but vigorous song. Pope Gregory himself, who, according to the old phraseology, sent baptism to the English, is said indeed to have spoken disparagingly of human learning. Bat the missionaries could not fail to bring with them from Rome the intellectual culture of the countries bordering on the Mediterranean, so far as it had survived the fall of the Western empire and the irruption of the barbarians. The Roman alphabet, paper or parchment, and pen and ink, drove out the Northern runes, the beechen tablet, and the scratching implement. The necessity of the preservation, and at least partial translation, of the Scriptures, the varied exigences of the Catholic ritual, the demand for so much knowledge of astronomy as would enable the clergy to fix beforehand the date of Easter, all favoured, or rather com pelled, the promotion of learning and education up to a certain point, and led to continual discussion and inter change of ideas. Gratefully and eagerly our forefathers drew in the warm and genial breath which came to them from the iutenser life and higher enlightenment of the south. Beda dates his history by the indictious of the Eastern emperors ; and while in practice he obeyed his native king descended from Woden, in theory he recognized the larger and more rational sway of the Cfesar enthroned at Constantinople. On a closer examination, we find that there were two principal centres, during the first two centuries after the conversion, where learning was honoured and literature nourished. These centres were Wessex and Northumbria. For although Christianity was first preached in Kent, and the great monastery at Canterbury was long a valuable school of theology and history (witness the liberal praise awarded by Beda to Abbot Albiuus in the preface to his Ecclesiastical History}, yet the limited size of the kingdom, and the ill fortune which befell it in its wars with Mercia and Wessex, seem to have chocked its intellectual growth. When we have named the oldest form of the Saxon Chronicle, that represented by the 1 arker MS. S, and the not very interesting works of Abbot ^Elfric, there is little left in the shape of extant writings, dating before the Conquest, for which we have to thank the men of Kent. Bat in Wessex and North urnbria alike, the size of the territory, the presence of numerous monasteries, perhaps also the proximity of Celtic peoples cr societies endowed with many literary gifts, the Britons in the case of Wessex, the Culdees of lona in the case of Northumbria, co-operated to produce .a long period of literary activity, the monuments of which it must now be our endeavour briefly to review and characterize. But before we consider the Anglo-Saxon literature which was founded on Christianity, the question whether any Anglo-Saxon literature exists of date prior to the conver sion demands an answer. It was formerly thought that the important poem of Heowulf was in the main a pagan work, and must have been produced before the Angles and Saxons quitted their German homes ; but closer investiga tion has shown that it is permeated almost everywhere by Christian ideas, and that it cannot be dated earlier than the first quarter of the 8th century. But two poems remain, presenting problems of great difficulty, many of which have not yet been satisfactorily solved, which so far as appears must kave been composed in Germany while our forefathers were still in their German seats. These are The Travellers Song and Dear s Complaint. In the first, The Tr&- Widsith, a poet of Myrging race (the Myrgings were a tribe eller 8 dwelling near the Eider), recounts the nations that he had visited as a travelling gleeman, names the kings who ruled over them, and singles out two or three whose open-handed generosity he had experienced, and to whom he accordingly awards the tribute of a poet s praise. This poem may per haps be dated from the second half of the 6th century. Though written in or near Anglen, after the migration of most of the Angles to Britain, the language of the poem seems to have been accommodated to the ordinary West- Saxon dialect, for in this respect it differs in uo degree from the other poems which stand before and after it in the Exeter Codex. Dear s Complaint mentions Weland, the Deor s Teutonic demi-god corresponding to Vulcan, Theodric, c m- Eormanric, &c. ; it is the lament of a bard supplanted by * am a rival in his lord s favour. In date it is probably not far distant from the Traveller s Song. We may now return to the literary development in Wessex. Christianity was introduced into Wessex by Bishop Birinus in 634, and spread over the whole kingdom with marvellous celerity. The bishop s see was fixed at first at Dorchester, near Oxford ; thence it was moved to Winchester ; before the end of the century it was necessary to carve out another bishopric farther to the west, and the see was fixed at Sherborne. Winchester, Malmesbury, and Glastonbury were great and famous monasteries early in the 8th century. The heroic Winfrid (better known as St Boniface), trained in a monastery at Exeter, could not rest contented that Wessex should have received the faith, but carried Christianity to the Germans. Great spiritual fervour, arJent zeal, great intellectual activity, seems to have prevailed in every part of the little kingdom. The interesting letters of St Boniface give us tantalizing glimpses of a busy life, social and monastic, in the west of England, no detailed picture of which it is now possible to reconstruct. The most distinguished known writer was St Ahlhelm, Aldhelm, a monk of Malmesbury, and, for a few years before his death in 709, bishop of Sherborne. His extant works in Latin are chiefly in praise of virginity, that form of self-mastery which, difficult as it was for a people teeming with undeveloped power and unexhausted passion, included, he might think, aud made possible every other kind of self-mastery. The Saxon writings of St Aldhelm are lost, unless we accept a conjecture of Grimm that he was the author of Andreas, one of the poems in the Vercelli Codex. Cynewulf, the author of Crist, Elcne, and Cyne- Juliana, though to us unhappily no more than a name, ^^ was a poet of no mean powers. Mr Kemble was disposed to identify him with an abbot of Peterborough who lived