Page images
PDF
EPUB
[blocks in formation]

with whom Kemble and Thorpe identify him, flourished at least two centuries later. There can be little doubt that the poet wrote about the middle of the eighth century, and that his home was Northumbria. As already observed, the existence of his poems as we now have them in the Wessex dialect is no objection to the latter supposition, since the transcriber invariably employed his own form of speech. It is a striking proof of the decay of Anglo-Saxon literature after the Danish invasion that the poems of so remarkable a writer should exist only in a single copy, the Exeter and Vercelli MSS. not containing the same pieces, and that, but for the precaution of a cryptogram, his name would be entirely unknown.

Cynewulf is undoubtedly a fine poet. He has two especial notes, earnest- Poetical genius ness and subjectivity. He feels intensely what he writes, and whether of Cynewulf describing an event or a piece of scenery after Scripture, or dealing in exhortation, or expressing his own feelings, always labours to make his utterance as energetic as possible. Though seldom speaking in his own person, he is full of personal feeling: and, as remarked by Mr. Brooke, views his landscape in the hue cast upon it by his own fleeting emotions. In this he entirely differs from Caedmon, who is purely objective. A great step had thus been taken; had a second Cynewulf appeared to carry poetry beyond the sphere of biblical and ecclesiastical history, England might have led Europe in the paths of poetry. There were, as we shall find, decided evidences in the eighth century of an elegiac tendency that had almost ripened into lyric, and it is by no means improbable that such a genius might have arisen, but for the calamities which desolated Northumbria towards the end of the eighth century.

Cynewulf's most important poem is the Crist, a metrical narrative of the leading events of Christ's ministry upon earth, including his return to judgment, which is treated with much grandeur but also with great prolixity. The following passage, in Mr. Gollancz's version, is an average specimen of the poem :

Now 'tis most like as if we fare in ships
On the ocean flood, over the water cold,

Driving our vessels through the spacious seas
With horses of the deep. A perilous way is this
Of boundless waves, and there are stormy seas
On which we toss here in this feeble world
O'er the deep paths. Ours was a sorry plight
Until at last we sailed unto the land,
Over the troubled main. Help came to us
That brought us to the haven of salvation,
God's Spirit-Son, and granted grace to us

That we might know e'en from the vessels deck
Where we must bind with anchorage secure
Our ocean steeds, old stallions of the waves.

After the Crist, the most important of the undoubted poems of Cynewulf is the Elene, on the Invention of the Cross by the Empress Helena, a piece so full of dramatic incident that it might easily have been converted

General characteristics of Anglo

into a miracle play. The other two have less poetical merit than some of the doubtful poems, especially the second part of the Guthlac and the Andreas and The Dream of the Rood. The Andreas, indeed, is a poem of rare spirit, which might almost be called a Christian Beowulf, and founded upon a Greek legend of the adventures of St. Matthew and St. Andrew in Mermedonia, which, in the author's time, must have also existed in a Latin version. This, as we have seen, is attributed to Cynewulf in the MS. There seems nothing in any of the other pieces actually compelling us to ascribe them to another hand; in the absence, however, of any direct authentication, it is perhaps safest to regard them as vestiges of an eighthcentury school of Northumbrian sacred poetry, such as may well have arisen around a master like Cynewulf.

The general character of Anglo-Saxon Christian poetry of the period before Alfred is excellently conveyed by its French historian. It is, M. Saxon poetry Jusserand points out, essentially Northern and Teutonic. "The full infusion of the Latin element, which is to transform the Anglo-Saxons into English, will take place several centuries hence, and will be the result of a last invasion. The genius of the Teutonic invaders continues nearly intact, and nothing proves this more clearly than the Christian poetry composed in the native tongue, and produced in Britain after the conversion. The same impetuosity, passion, and lyricism, the same magnificent apostrophes which gave its character to the old pagan poetry are found again in Christian songs, as well as the same recurring alternatives of deep melancholy and noisy exultation. The Anglo-Saxon poets describe the saints of the Gospel, and it seems as though the companions of Beowulf stood again before us. One of them, St. Andrew, arrives in an uninhabited. country; not a desert in Asia, nor a solitude in Greece; it might be the abode of Grendel. Then was the saint in the shades of darkness, warrior hard of courage, the whole night long with various thoughts beset; snowbound the earth with winter casts; cold grew the storms, with hard hail showers; and rime and frost, the hoary warriors, locked up the dwellings of men, the settlements of the people; frozen were the lands with cold icicles, shrunk the water's might; over the river-streams the ice made a bridge, a pale water-road.'"

Northumbrian minstrelsy

There was no want of poetical spirit among the Northumbrian bards of the eighth century. If their performances were not more distinguished, the causes were the rudeness and poverty of the language, the want of adequate metrical structure, and, above all, the general restriction of the poets' themes to a narrow cycle. The time for engrafting foreign forms and naturalising foreign diction had not arrived, and the poets could only make the best of the resources they had. In speaking of the monotony of a literature whose themes were almost exclusively biblical or ecclesiastical, we are proceeding, as we must, by the maxim de non apparentibus. It is not improbable that a copious secular literature may have existed which the monastic transcribers, alone empowered to grant passports for

[graphic][subsumed][ocr errors][subsumed][subsumed][ocr errors][subsumed][subsumed][ocr errors][subsumed][subsumed][ocr errors][ocr errors][subsumed][ocr errors][ocr errors][ocr errors][ocr errors][ocr errors][ocr errors][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][ocr errors][subsumed][merged small]

From the Gospel Book of St. Augustine in the Library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge

Elegiac poems

posterity, did not care to preserve. Cynewulf appears to have been a minstrel all his life, and it is not probable that his gay youth was devoted to the composition or recital of poems like his Crist. If, however, he and his companions chanted the deeds of heroes in the fashion of the singer of Beowulf, their lays have perished for want of a penman. Some specimens of what may be termed domestic poetry alone remain to attest that the books of nature and humanity were not entirely neglected for the tomes of ecclesiastical legend.

The beginnings of a school of poetry which might have become great, and perhaps did actually attain a greatness which we are unable to estimate in the wreck of vernacular secular literature, appear in a few elegiac poems of the period, The Ruin, The Wanderer, The Seafarer, The Husband's Message, The Wife's Complaint. These have an interest beyond their intrinsic poetical merit as proofs that two of the most distinctive characteristics of English poetry have been present with it from the very first-thoughtful melancholy and the love of nature. The Ruin, a meditation upon the relics of some desolate Roman city, which the allusions to the hot springs almost proves to have been Bath, reaches out a hand to Caius Marius on one side and to the author of Love among the Ruins on the other :

Brilliant were the burg-steads, burn-fed houses many;

High the heap of hornéd gables, of the host a mickle sound,
Many were the mead-halls, full of mirth of men,

Till the strong-willed Wyrd whirled all that to change.

In a slaughter wide they fell, woeful days of bale came on,
Famine-death fortook fortitude from mer;

All their battle-bulwarks bare foundations were !

Crumbled is the castle-keep; these have cringed to earth

Who set up again the shrines. So the halls are dreary,

And this courtyard's wide expanse. From the raftered woodwork
See, the roof has shed its tiles. To ruin sank the market-place,

Broken up to barrows; many a brave man there,

Glad of yore and gold-bright, gloriously adorned,

Hot with wine and haughty, in war-harness shone ;

Saw upon his silver, on set gems and treasure,

On his welfare and his wealth, on his winsome jewels,
On this brightsome burg of a broad dominion!
There the stone-courts stood; hotly surged the stream,
With a widening whirling; and a wall enclosed it all
With its bosom bright. There the baths were set
Hot within their heart; fit [for health] it was!

A similar note is struck in The Wanderer, which indeed appears to plagiarise from The Ruin. Melancholy and love of nature are beautifully combined in a passage in The Husbana's (or Lover's) Complaint :—

Soon as ever thou shalt listen on the edges of the cliff
To the cuckoo in the copse-wood, chanting of his sorrow,
Then begin to seek the sea, where the sea-mew is at home;
Sit thee in the sea-bark, so that to the southward
Thou mayest light upon thy lover, o'er the ocean pathways
Where thy Lord with longing looks and waits for thee.

[blocks in formation]

More remarkable still is the passion for the sea, prophetic of the future naval glory of the race. In the Seafarer, the old mariner, after a most discouraging description of the hardships he has himself undergone in a maritime life :

All the glee I got me was the gannet's scream,

And the swoughing of the seal, 'stead of mirth of men,

comes back to acknowledge that

Yes, so haughty of his heart is no hero on the earth,
Nor so good in all his giving, nor so generous in youth,
That he has not always yearning unto his seafaring.
To whatever work his Lord may have will to make for him.
For the harp he has no heart, nor for having of the rings,
Nor in woman is his weal, in the world he's no delight,
Nor in anything whatever save the tossing of the waves,
O for ever he has longing who is urged towards the sea.

Not other is the note of this old poet hymning the spell of the sea than that of the modern when he sings the yearning for ideal beauty :

Wer die Schönheit angeschaut mit Augen
Ist dem Tode schon anheimgegeben,
Wird für keinen Dienst auf Erden taugen,
Und doch wird er vor dem Tode beben.
Wer die Schönheit angeschaut mit Augen.

Such poetry undoubtedly springs from maritime Northumbria, and Mr. Stopford Brooke's theory of its origin is probably correct: “I conjecture that in the first twenty or thirty years of the eighth century there were poets living in the courts of the princes and earls of Northumbria, who were Bohemian enough, if I may be permitted that term, not to care for anything but poetry; to whom Christianity was a good thing, but over whom it had no special hold; who were half pagan at heart while Christian in name; and who resembled, but only in the general temper of their minds, the class of literary men whom the Renaissance made in Florence and Rome. It was this class who wrote, I think, these elegies, and it is probable that there were a great many more poems of this kind.”

Latin literature in Ang.

Saxon Eng

The habit of mind thus attributed to these poets would have aided them to excel in Latin composition; but, save for the borrowings of ecclesiastical poets from Latin hymns, which affect the substance rather land than the form of their compositions, and the paraphrase of the Phanix of Lactantius attributed to Cynewulf, there is little trace of classical influence upon the Anglo-Saxon verse of the age. In prose, on the other hand, Anglo-Saxon was almost swallowed up by Latin. The Latin literature of England does not, strictly speaking, fall within our province; but two Latin authors, at least, are too conspicuous as intellectual lights of the time to be omitted from a survey of English literary history.

It was

VOL. I.

one of the chief benefits conferred by Christianity upon

C

« PreviousContinue »