Page:King Alfred's Old English version of St. Augustine's Soliloquies - Hargrove - 1902.djvu/49

ALFRED'S VERSION or THE SOLILOQUIES XLIII stands out in bolder relief, and to that extent appeals to us more strongly.

What he might have become as an original artist is not entirely a matter of speculation. Although natural endowments, education (or lack of it), and environment conspired to make of him a man of affairs and a king of intense practicality rather than a man of letters or a philosopher, yet in the genuinely original prefaces to his various translations we can but recognize a master-hand. These are veritable preludes - thematic chords - touched by an artist, who, we feel, had he possessed opportunity, might have wrought out a composition that would take rank as a classic. But, in truth, so far as present scholarship can positively assert, he left us no single original production that is complete. Who shall say that he did less wisely in turning what time and talents he had to the popularizing of what he considered the classics of his age giving his people the best of the old and the established rather than venturing to contrive something new and possibly false?

No better example of a skilful preface or introduction can be found than the one with which he begins the Soliloquies. It recalls Emerson's saying: 'Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests and mines and stone-quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.' With some such thought as this our English King, inured to the hardships of war, no doubt having felt at times the need of shelter from storms, but yet with a burning desire for peace and strong faith and hope and love and the other Christian graces, approaches the translation of St. Augustine's work. Under the figure of building a house or fort from the timbers cut and with the tools fashioned from the forests of the thoughts and writings of the Fathers, he begins:

'[I] gathered for myself cudgels, and stud-shafts, and horizontal shafts, and helves for each of the tools that I could work with, and bow-timbers and bolt-timbers