Cellic 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 that of the gradual approximation and interfusion of constituents seemingly irreconcilable, and the occasional attempts, fortunately unsuccessful, 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, literature, 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 conquered 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, descriptive 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 vassalage, vestiges at least, probably much more, of their religion must have survived among them. We therefore feel absolved from any consideration of Celtic elements as appreciable factors in the early literature of England. Celtic monks, indeed, as will be seen, contributed to the civilisation of Northumbria, and thus indirectly 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 literature; while the blending of Celtic with Saxon blood, a comparatively modern phenomenon except in the western districts, has been fortunate for both But these circumstances do not affect the substantially Teutonic guage in Britain THE CELT, THE ROMAN, AND THE SAXON 3 and Scandinavian character of the English race and language, or alter Latin lanthe fact that all important modifications of English literature have come 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-Saxon 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 and the vestiges of Imperial Rome, with which, in their material aspect, Anglo-Saxons 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 learning. For the first time a classical and hieratic language was brought to their knowledge, a tongue no longer the living speech of any people, but acquaintance with which, and in some measure with its literary monuments, was henceforth to distinguish the man of culture from the mere warrior and the boor. For the first time an erudite caste was established among them, men of the book, deeply demarcated from the rest of the community by costume and rule of life. The monastery was to bring the school in its train, and, ere long, prose literature was to arise among a people who had hitherto known no literature but the poetical. King Ethelbert's instinct had not wholly misled him when he shunned to meet the first missionaries from dread of their incantations, though the spirits they were actually to raise came in another shape than any he could have foreseen. At the time of Augustine's mission the Saxons appear to have had no other written character than runes, understood by so few that they were regarded as magical, and proscribed as such by the missionaries. Pre-Christian Before considering the influence of the new creed upon the Angloremains of Saxon mind as manifested in its literature, it will be expedient to dispose Anglo-Saxon of the few literary relics of the pre-Christian age. The position of by far the most important of these is anomalous. The epic of Beowulf, one of the few commanding peaks of Anglo-Saxon literature, is and is not preChristian. Modern criticism, at least, seems almost to have established that it was composed more than a century after the mission of Augustine, and traces of Christianity-perhaps interpolated-are not absent from it. On the other hand, its spirit is that of the old heroic age, it bodies forth unchristened chivalry in its intensest form, it is a near neighbour of the Eddas, and consequently very remote from Bede, Caedmon, and other lights of Christianised Anglo-Saxondom. If the poet really wrote so late as now generally believed, he dwelt spiritually in a romantic past, and cherished ideals extinct among the Saxons, though still flourishing in Scandinavia. His poem, therefore, should be treated rather with reference to its spirit than to the actual date of its composition, even were this absolutely certain. Before examining it, it will be convenient to deal with the inconsiderable fragments of early Anglo-Saxon literature which are probably pre-Christian in every point of view. Remains of Pre-Christian literature As in Latin, the earliest written remains of Anglo-Saxon are not literary. They consist mainly of charms, resembling, but surpassing in dignity, the ancient Roman incantations preserved in Cato the Censor's work on agriculture. Being earlier than the knowledge of writing, and transmitted orally from generation to generation, they have come down to us in a mutilated and adulterated form, having been largely interpolated by monastic transcribers in order to eradicate the traces of their original heathenism, which are nevertheless obvious. The earliest, as it would seem to be, is probably the oldest specimen of English extant : |