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CHAPTER I

THE BEGINNINGS

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LITERATURE is the daughter of Language. For the study, therefore, of a literature it is essential to possess a clear view of any features of the idiom in which it is conveyed which may contribute to impress it with a peculiar character.

The most exceptional characteristic of the English language as spoken Duality of and written for centuries past is the dual constitution of its vocabulary, in English Speech which it differs from all the other leading languages of Europe, and can only be paralleled with those tongues of Eastern and Western Asia which have respectively become pervaded with Chinese or Arabic influence. All European languages, indeed, have borrowed largely, and Spanish might almost seem a compound of three or four distinct tongues spoken by widely differing races. Yet even here Latin is distinctly the paramount speech, and the others are but its satellites. In English alone two constituents, one indigenous, the other engrafted, practically balance each other. Both are essential to the language; one as forming the original nucleus of personality without which English would be a mere dialect of some foreign idiom; the other as possessing that sure criterion of vitality, the capacity of growth and modification. This our original Anglo-Saxon speech has lost, and recent endeavours to restore it have only served to prove the loss perpetual. The indigenous portion, therefore, of our vocabulary is the more nationally characteristic, the engrafted is the more flexible and copious. The stability of one element is admirably balanced by the plasticity of the other. Their union in one speech, frequently permitting choice between two words equally appropriate, has largely contributed to render the English vocabulary opulent and to impart colour and music to English style.

The circumstance on which we have thus briefly dwelt may be con- Native and sidered as the key to the history of English literature, which appears as gredients in foreign ina constant struggle between innate and exotic constituents. As regards English the mere vocabulary of the language this struggle did not commence until the Norman Conquest, but as concerns the spirit of the literature it had begun much sooner. The epic of Beowulf shows the direction which

VOL. I.

A

Celtic

influences

Anglo-Saxon literature might have taken without Latin interference; almost
all its other monuments show what, under that interference, it actually
became. The distinction is not in the outer vesture of words, but in the
inner spirit. With the Norman Conquest it comes to prevail in both, and
the history of both language and literature ever since may be described
as that of the gradual approximation and interfusion of constituents
seemingly irreconcilable, and the occasional attempts, fortunately un-
successful, of one of these to expel the other. It may almost be said
that the same duality repeats itself in every English institution, civil
and ecclesiastical, so closely does the national speech represent the
national mind.

The mere fact of a spirit of compromise pervading our language, litera-
ture, and institutions, suffices to show that Celtic influence cannot be very
potent in any of them. Attempts have been made to prove the English
people substantially Celtic; but if this had been the case their language
would have been Celtic also. When an uncivilised nation subdues a
civilised one it must either exterminate the vanquished, or assimilate much
of their language and institutions. Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit. The
Normans afford a case in point; they did not expel or destroy the con-
quered French, and are consequently found within a generation or two
ignorant of their ancestral language and fluent in that of their subjects.
Their laws, their manners, their religion, all are changed. Nothing of the
kind happens in England. The borrowings from the old British language
are indeed extensive, but they nearly all consist of common words, descrip-
tive of ordinary things, and unconnected with any intellectual process.
Nothing can more decisively establish the subordinate condition and limited
proportion of the British element in the community. The population is
further shown to have been, when not pure Saxon, a mingled breed,
children of Saxon fathers and British mothers, by the complete dying out
of Christianity. Had the original inhabitants remained a recognisable Celtic
element of the population, in however ignominious a condition of vassal-
age, vestiges at least, probably much more, of their religion must have
survived among them. We therefore feel absolved from any considera-
tion of Celtic elements as appreciable factors in the ely literature of
England. Celtic monks, indeed, as will be seen, contributed to the
civilisation of Northumbria, and thus indi ectly contributed to the growth
of a Christian literature in that kingdom, but they infused no recognisable
Celtic spirit into it. England (a term used here for convenience sake, but,
when not obviously restricted to South Britain, always to be understood
as denoting the British Empire) does indeed owe an unspeakable debt to
the illustrious Celts who have written in English for the "natural magic"
and other specifically Celtic gifts which they have infused into her litera-
ture; while the blending of Celtic with Saxon blood, a comparatively modern
phenomenon except in the western districts, has been fortunate for both
races. But these circumstances do not affect the substantially Teutonic

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THE CELT, THE ROMAN, AND THE SAXON

Britain

3 and Scandinavian character of the English race and language, or alter Latin lanthe fact that all important modifications of English literature have come guage in not from Celtic but from Latin sources. England and Scotland, with the exception of the Highlands and possibly of Cornwall, remain as essentially Teutonic in blood and speech as Wales continues Welsh. The "AngloCeltic race," if such there be, must be sought not in Great Britain, but among the extremely mixed population of Ireland.

The entire dissimilarity of speech, indeed, must have rendered it im- Celtic and possible for Celts to have bestowed a literature upon the Anglo-Saxons, Anglo-Saxor except through the medium of Latin. Such a literature would have been hardly distinguishable from that actually created by the contact of Saxon converts with Roman clergy; it would have been mainly biblical and ecclesiastical, and devoid of specially Celtic characteristics. Celtic missionaries certainly might have sown the seeds of civilisation during the century and a half which elapsed between Hengist and Augustine, but the inveterate hatred of race appears to have effectually restrained them. Not from the successors of St. Columba or St. Patrick did light come to Saxondom, but from the successors of St. Peter.

It might have seemed more likely that learning would spring up from Romans ana the vestiges of Imperial Rome, with which, in their material aspect, Anglo-Sax/n› Britain continued to be thickly strewn. Many towns which survived into Saxon times had originally been Roman; Roman roads still connected them; Roman fortresses and villas, even if dilapidated, still remained to bear witness to the higher civilisation of the Latin colonist. All these seem to have gone for nothing with the Saxon: in a fine poem of the seventh century, indeed, the minstrel muses among Roman ruins and deplores the magnificence of the past, but without an idea that any link save that of human feeling connects him with it. It must be thought that even before the Saxon's advent, whatever visible traces of Roman dominion might remain, Roman influence was verging towards extinction in Britain. The condition of the remains of several Roman cities at this day attests their destruction by a barbarous people, not Saxon, but probably Pictish or Cymric. It may well be conceived that the Roman residents who escaped would seek security on the Continent,1 and that their speech would depart with them. Two languages must have existed side by side in Romanised Britain-Latin as the language of refined society, British as the speech of the common people. The former would naturally die out in the absence of any sufficient motive for keeping it up. The transition is certainly most striking. Up to the time of the Roman withdrawal a British gentleman wishing to go beyond the ordinary purposes of life would undoubtedly have expressed himself in Latin. His children, or at all events his grandchildren, would have been unable to express elevated sentiment in any language: unless, indeed, 1 Ornaments found in the soil of caverns in Yorkshire show that these also formed a refuge for Romans or Romanised Britons.

Christianity and Anglo

ture

British was reduced into literary form more perfectly than it can well be thought to have been. How different it might have been if Carausius, near the end of the third century, had succeeded in his bold design of establishing an independent British kingdom! How interesting the speculation whether, if Roman and Celt had been left to work out their destiny without Saxon interference, Britons would at this day be speaking a Romance or a Celtic language! A momentous question had it arisen, for, if united by affinity of speech to the Latin nations of the Continent, we should have been far more obnoxious to foreign influences than has been the case; if, on the other hand, our speech had been Celtic, we should have been cut off from the majority of mankind.

The man who gave the first decided impulse to the transformation of Saxon litera- Anglo-Saxon literature was Pope Gregory the Great, and the day from which it dates is that on which the beauty of the captive Saxon youths extorted from him the world-famous exclamation, Non Angli sed angeli. Evidence, nevertheless, is not wanting that Gregory was but, in French phrase, driving in a door already ajar. A century and a half had now elapsed since the first Saxon settlement in Britain (449); and half a century since the death of King Arthur about 544, a date which, even if imaginary as regards the particular event coupled with it by tradition, may be fairly taken to denote that of the final victory of the Saxon over the Celt in South Britain. A generation of comparative tranquillity must have contributed to dim the old ideals; and that these were really obsolescent is shown by the extremely rapid progress of the new religion, and the slight opposition it received from any quarter. Though priests existed among the Saxons, there can have been no endowed hierarchy deeply interested in the maintenance of the ancient order of things; and the success of the missionaries (A.D. 597) was probably promoted by their dissociation from the ancient Celtic church still extant in the unsubdued west and north of Britain, which the Saxons abhorred as inimical and the Roman missionaries as schismatical. While the sole visible token of Christianity among the Saxons prior to the mission of Augustine is the private chapel of Queen Bertha, it is still probable that King Ethelbert and his spouse were far from a solitary instance of the union of heathen husbands with Christian women from beyond sea. In any case, Christianity never made an easier conquest, and the ideals of a converted people never underwent a more complete metamorphosis. It was indeed a displacement of the original centre of gravity when saints and martyrs eclipsed warriors in the popular veneration, and the traditions of Teutons gave way to the traditions of Hebrews, Greeks, and Latins. The natural development of Anglo-Saxon literature was destroyed, and every prognostic concerning it which might have seemed reasonable a century earlier was brought to nought.

Influence

of Latin learning

Contemporaneously with this revolution appeared another development of which the Anglo-Saxons could have had no idea, the introduction of

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