Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/428

Rh 408 ENGLISH LITERATURE [NORMAN. cycle of romance, which till now had breathed only of revenge, slaughter, race-hatreds, unlawful love, magic, and witchcraft, becomes transformed in a few years into a series of mystical legends, symbolizing and teaching one of the profoundest dogmas of the Catholic creed. This strange effect was produced by the infusion into the Arthur legend Saint of the conception of the Saint Graal, the holy vessel used Graal. by Christ at the Last Supper, and containing drops of his blood, which Joseph of Arimathea was said to have brought into Britain. This transformation seems to have been executed by Walter Map, the remarkable Welshman whose genius decisively colours the intellectual history of the last forty years of the 12th century. Map is said to have written a Latin history of the Graal, which is not now extant; yet from it all the authors of the French prose romances on Arthur and the Saint Graal which appeared between 1170 and 1230 Robert de Borron, his kinsman Helie, Luc de Gast, and Map himself profess to have translated their compositions. The chief of these works are the Saint Graal, Merlin, the Quest of the Saint Graal, Lancelot, Tristan, and Mort Artur. In all, to &quot; achieve the Saint Graal,&quot; that is, to find or see the holy vessel which, on account of the sins of men, hud long since vanished from Britain, is represented as the height of chivalrous ambition : but among all Arthur s knights, only Sir Galahad, the son of Lancelot, is sufficiently pure in heart to be favoured with the sublime vision. English versions, more or less literal, of these romances, among which may be named the works of Lonelich and Sir Thomas Malory, and the alliterative poem of Joseph of Arimathie, attest the great and enduring popularity of the Graal form of Arthurian legend. Welsh 2. After a long period of silence, the bardic poetry of poetry. Wales broke out, just when the independence of the nation was about to be extinguished, into passionate and varied utterance. The princes who struggled successfully against the attacks of Henry II. found gifted bards Gwalchmai, Elidir, Gwion, &c. to celebrate in fiercely patriotic strains their imperfect triumphs. A translation of one of Gvvalchmai s odes may be found, under the title of the Triumph of Owen, among Gray s poems. Supposed &quot; Prophecies of Merlin,&quot; a sample of which may be seen in the strange work of Geoffrey of Monmouth, fed the popular belief that Arthur yet lived, and would return one day to Wales as a deliverer. Both the Triads and the Mabinogion refer in part to Arthur, but from different stand-points. In the Triads such mention as there is of him represents him as a British king, doing battle with the foes of his race, and full of a sententious wit and wisdom. In the Mabinoyion the indigenous Welsh view is over powered by that of the Norman trouveres ; we have the Arthur, not of history or tradition, but of chivalry ; the mysterious Saint Graal proves as attractive to the Celtic as to the Teutonic imagination. Three of the romances by Chretien de Troyes appear in a Welsh dress among the tales of the Mabinogion. After the loss of independence under Edward I., the importance and originality of Welsh literature appear to have progressively declined. 3. The English-speaking portion that is, the great mass of the population, down to the reign of John, has left few literary traces of its existence. Whoever wished to move amongst the educated and cultured classes, and to associate with persons of rank, authority, or influence, found it necessary, though he might be descended from Alfred himself, to speak French in good society, and to write in French whatever he wished good society to read. From the Conquest to 1200, the industry of the most lynx eyed antiquary has discovered with the exception of the continuation of the Saxon Chronicle no literary record in English beyond a few short fragments, such as the lines preserved as a part of Canute s song by Thomas of Ely, the prophecy of Here, and the hymn of St Godric. The con tinuation beyond the Conquest of the Saxon Chronicle was made by the monks of Peterborough. It is not complete for the reign of Stephen, passing over several years sub silentio ; but it records the accession of Henry II. in 1154, and then ends abruptly. The writer or writers were perhaps unable to stand up any longer against the then universal fashion of employing Latin for any serious prose work. Moreover, as the Anglo-Saxon was no longer taught in schools nor spoken in the higher circles of society, it had lost much of its original harmony and precision of structure; and when the annalist found himself using one inflexion for another, or dropping inflexions altogether, he may well have thought it high time to exchange a tongue which seemed to be crumbling and breaking up, for one whose forms were fixed and its grammar rational. Little did the down-hearted monk anticipate the future glories which, after a crisis of transformation and fusion, would surround his rude ancestral tongue.&quot; 1 A few years after the beginning of the 13th cen- Laya- tury we have to note the appearance of an important mon - and interesting work in English, Layamon s Brut. But it can scarcely be said to belong to English literature, unless Beowulf and Judith be similarly classified, for the language is almost as purely Teutonic as in these. In the older version of the Brut not more than fifty words of Latin or French origin have been found ; and of these several were in common use in England before the Con quest. The Brut is strictly a monument of the age of transition. We need not, with some writers, call the language &quot; semi-Saxon ; &quot; it is certainly English, and, from a particular point of view, purer English than we speak now ; but it is not that form of English which, from first to last, has been the instrument employed to build up English literature. That form, as we shall see in the next section, was determined and conditioned by the necessity of effecting a compromise between the speech of the governors and that of the governed, so that the new standard English should remain, as to its grammatical framework, comparatively intact, while admitting to its franchise, and enrolling among its vocables, an indefinite number of foreign recruits. The work of Layamon is a translation, but with very con siderable additions, of Wace s Brut d Angleterre. The most interesting of these additions (the sources of which have not been as yet pointed out) constitute an expansion of the legendary history of Arthur. Layamon was the parish priest of Ernley-on-Severn (now Areley Regis), a re mote Worcestershire village, far from the capital or any large city. At such a place Norman influence would be at a minimum ; the people would go on from one generation to another, living and speaking much as their fathers did before them ; and we may suppose that, finding some in dications of literary taste and poetic feeling among mem bers of his flock, the good Layamon took this way of gratifying them. But it must be carefully observed that in the Brut, although the language is English, the poetical atmosphere, the intellectual horizon, and even the cast of diction, are Norman-French. The rich poetic vocabulary of the Anglo-Saxon poets, traceable as late as the reign of Edgar, has vanished beyond recovery. Not one of the in numerable poetic compounds relating to battle and victory which are found in Beoivulf, Andreas, &c., occurs in the duller pages of the Brut. Words expressive of jurisdiction and government, of which the Anglo-Saxon, while the native race was dominant, had a great variety, are in the Brut, if used at all, borrowed to a large extent from French. 1 Arnold s Manual of English Literature.