Page:Gummere (1909) The Oldest English Epic.djvu/195

Rh into sunshine at last. The exempla shall give him hope; and hope is the overword of his breezy refrain. It is a manly piece of verse. The poet does not rail on lady fortune herself, does not whine or snivel over the king’s inconstancy, and does not call the public hard names,—“dull ass” is Jonson’s way,—with insistence on his own superiority. Granting, what is true, that “Widsith” is a wholly ideal figure, composite, a type, and granting, what is probable, that Deor must pass as a definite man, it is highly gratifying that the first poet whom we can name as an individual in the long English list gives such an amiable account of himself.

Careful reading of the lyric, however, takes away something of the immediate impression made by its plan and its seeming purpose. Deor, to be sure, stands before us a definite and quite real man, but he is not an Englishman; he belongs on the continent, and his people, the “sons of Heoden,” are shadowy folk. He is even accused of getting into English by translation out of the Norse. Any actual personal poem that such a singer could have made about his own fortunes had a long and thorny way to travel before it came to its present estate as the oldest lyric in our tongue. From our point of view, it is the story of the typical court-singer, just as Widsith is a story of the typical wandering singer. Widsith, too, talks in the first person, tells what gifts he got, where he wandered, and how excellent was his art. “I and Scilling were as good poets as you could find,—and the best judges of poetry applauded us to the echo,” is his complacent account of the matter. The difference really lies in the fact that Widsith, for all his first personal confidences, makes no impression as an individual on any count;