Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 07.djvu/127

* ENGLISH LITERATURE. 105 ENGLISH LITERATURE. vey. Nor will the method of treatment followed here allow anything like a complete enumeration of the authors who have adorned one period or another; it is considered, for the present purpose, of far greater importance to show tendencies and trace the outline of gradual development. Upon this principle, consequently, not upon any at- tempt at appraisal of absolute values, will be ha -c.l the proportion of space allotted to the writers for a discussion of whose work there is room. We need not consider here the songs of the British bards, whose race and language were driven into the outlying bill countries by the Teutonic invasion, and who, save in the one notable instance of their contribution to the Arthurian legend, gave practically nothing to the literature now under discussion. By the terms of our definition we are also dispensed from dwelling on the work produced in Eatin, the common language of scholars, before and after the Norman Conquest. The development of early English poetry on its external side was not much unlike the same his- tory elsewhere. It was the one intellectual amuse- ment of a race of hardy fighters and hunters. They gathered in the long winter evenings about the fire, to listen to tales of the adventures which bad come to other men like themselves. As on the Conti- nent, there were two classes of singers — the scop, the real poet (maker, French trouvcre), who took the raw material of history or legend and shaped it into more or less artistic form ; and the gleoman, who, like the Greek rhapsodist or the French jongleur, simply sang from place to place what be had learned from others. From these lays sprang the most important relic of the poetry of the pagan period, the epic of Beowulf, which, although the only extant manuscript is of the tenth century, goes back for its inspira- tion and its subject to the sixth, and is there- fore Continental in its origin. It is impressive in its movement and imagery, and possesses tho dignity, if not the fullness, of the epic. Three other fragments from this period are of consider- able interest — Widsith, or the Wanderer, prob- ably the oldest of all: Waldliere; and The Fight at Finnsburg. The characteristic of this early verse is its sombre grimness, and its picture of a life of constant combat, either with savage hu- man foes or with nature in its sterner aspects, overshadowed by the approach of inevitable destiny. But this fierce and gloomy tone was modified by the introduction of the gentler spirit of Chris- tianity from Rome and from Ireland. The poetry written under this new influence, whose remains cluster about the ill-defined personalities of Cffid- mon and Cynewulf, finds a reason for a more cheerful view of life in the replacing of Fate by an all-loving and almighty Father. For its sub- jects it turns now to the Bible and to the legends of the saints; though even in these, as in Judith, for example, the old savage joy in 'goodly fight' still conies out. A few short poems of a lyrical or lyrico-dramatic nature are of still wider in- terest, as connecting the work of these early singers definitely with the far-away Tennyson and Shelley. The tenderness and grace of The Lover's Message and The Wanderer remind us to take account of an imponderable but real admix- ture of Celtic elements in the people from whom they proceeded. Prose grew up under Alfred, after he had set up a bulwark against barbarian invasion. Like loo^t early prose, ii is written on practical pur- poses — lo convey instruction either in the truths of religion or in the fact, of history, lie tran lated from Latin the treatise of Bogthius On ihr Consolation of Philosophy, one of the favorite philosophical works of the .Middle Ages; thi Venerable Bede's Ecclesiastical History, the best historical work that England bad yet produced; the History of the World, by Orosius, then con- sidered a standard authority; aid I lie I'lixluriU Care of Saint Gregory the Great. More impor- tant still is (he expansion under bis direction of the meagre records of the monasteries into a clear and connected narrative, the Anglo-Saxon Chron- icle, which continued without a break for two generations after the Conquest. The name of .Elfric must be mentioned a, that of a man who showed signs of a real literary spirit in the ser- mons which are his principal work. But the narrow and somewhat monotonous feeling of the Anglo-Saxon race could not have continued to evolve into a really great literature without pre- cisely such an admixture of other elements as was to follow the Conquest and the resultant fusion of the two nationalities. While the process was going on, classical and theological learning made considerable progress. Monasteries were busy, and the English universi- ties had begun to crystallize around their orig- inal small nucleus. Lanfranc and Anselm, Alex- ander of Hales and Duns Scotus, attained emi- nence in speculative philosophy; but they wrote in Latin, as did the historians of the same period, of whom the chief were William of Malmesbury, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Giraldus Cambrensis, and Matthew Paris. The English tongue was under- going such serious grammatical and phonetic changes as to unfit it for a vehicle of literary expression. The first indication of reviving life is the appearance of Layamon's Brut just after 1200. Influenced by the mass of French romance, he essayed for the first time to give his own language something of the same character, and his position in the development of the Arthurian legend is of no small importance. After he had shown the way, numbers of English romances ap- peared, mostly translated or adapted from the French, though one of the most charming, Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight, is of native workmanship. Besides the necessary delay in the interfusion of the two languages, there was also a question for the poets to settle as to which of two widely different verse-forms should prevail. Saxon poetry had been based upon alliteration and ac- cent ; with its varying length of line, it was loose and flexible in structure. The French verse, on the other hand, depended for its effect upon rhyme, and upon uniform line-length, and was thus exact and measured. The latter finally pre- vailed, after a period of great confusion; allitera- tion as a rule was dropped, to be used later only as an occasional ornament by masters of effect like Swinburne; while accent could no longer wander at will when the French prosody kept watch over it. By the time that the language and its literary forms had accomplished their union, the life of the people also had completed a similar process. It was no longer Saxon here and Norman there, but was beginning to stand out as a new, inde- pendent, and finely molded nationality. For-