English Literature
seen or heard in his native speech. There he always speaks of his beloved
"Englelond" and of his brave "Englisc" people. In the sixteenth century,
when the old name of Englishmen clung to the new people resulting from the
union of Saxon and Norman, the name Anglo-Saxon was first used in the
national sense by the scholar Camden[21] in his _History of Britain_; and
since then it has been in general use among English writers. In recent
years the name has gained a wider significance, until it is now used to
denote a spirit rather than a nation, the brave, vigorous, enlarging spirit
that characterizes the English-speaking races everywhere, and that has
already put a broad belt of English law and English liberty around the
whole world.
THE LIFE. If the literature of a people springs directly out of its life,
then the stern, barbarous life of our Saxon forefathers would seem, at
first glance, to promise little of good literature. Outwardly their life
was a constant hardship, a perpetual struggle against savage nature and
savage men. Behind them were gloomy forests inhabited by wild beasts and
still wilder men, and peopled in their imagination with dragons and evil
shapes. In front of them, thundering at the very dikes for entrance, was
the treacherous North Sea, with its fogs and storms and ice, but with that
indefinable call of the deep that all men hear who live long beneath its
influence. Here they lived, a big, blond, powerful race, and hunted and
fought and sailed, and drank and feasted when their labor was done. Almost
the first thing we notice about these big, fearless, childish men is that
they love the sea; and because they love it they hear and answer its call:
... No delight has he in the world,
Nor in aught save the roll of the billows; but always a longing,
A yearning uneasiness, hastens him on to the sea.[22]
As might be expected, this love of the ocean finds expression in all their
poetry. In _Beowulf_ alone there are fifteen names for the sea, from the
_holm_, that is, the horizon sea, the "upmounding," to the _brim_, which is
the ocean flinging its welter of sand and creamy foam upon the beach at
your feet. And the figures used to describe or glorify it--"the swan road,
the whale path, the heaving battle plain"--are almost as numerous. In all
their poetry there is a magnificent sense of lordship over the wild sea
even in its hour of tempest and fury:
Often it befalls us, on the ocean's highways,
In the boats our boatmen, when the storm is roaring,
Leap the billows over, on our stallions of the foam.[23]
THE INNER LIFE. A man's life is more than his work; his dream is ever
greater than his achievement; and literature reflects not so much man's
deed as the spirit which animates him; not the poor thing that he does, but
rather the splendid thing that he ever hopes to do. In no place is this
more evident than in the age we are now studying. Those early sea kings
were a marvelous mixture of savagery and sentiment, of rough living and of
deep feeling, of splendid courage and the deep melancholy of men who know
their limitations and have faced the unanswered problem of death. They were
not simply fearless freebooters who harried every coast in their war
galleys. If that were all, they would have no more history or literature
than the Barbary pirates, of whom the same thing could be said. These
strong fathers of ours were men of profound emotions. In all their fighting
the love of an untarnished glory was uppermost; and under the warrior's
savage exterior was hidden a great love of home and homely virtues, and a
reverence for the one woman to whom he would presently return in triumph.
So when the wolf hunt was over, or the desperate fight was won, these
mighty men would gather in the banquet hall, and lay their weapons aside
where the open fire would flash upon them, and there listen to the songs of
Scop and Gleeman,--men who could put into adequate words the emotions and
aspirations that all men feel but that only a few can ever express:
Music and song where the heroes sat--
The glee-wood rang, a song uprose
When Hrothgar's scop gave the hall good cheer.[24]
It is this great and hidden life of the Anglo-Saxons that finds expression
in all their literature. Briefly, it is summed up in five great
principles,--their love of personal freedom, their responsiveness to
nature, their religion, their reverence for womanhood, and their struggle
for glory as a ruling motive in every noble life.
In reading Anglo-Saxon poetry it is well to remember these five principles,
for they are like the little springs at the head of a great river,--clear,
pure springs of poetry, and out of them the best of our literature has
always flowed. Thus when we read,
Blast of the tempest--it aids our oars;
Rolling of thunder--it hurts us not;
Rush of the hurricane--bending its neck
To speed us whither our wills are bent,
we realize that these sea rovers had the spirit of kinship with the mighty
life of nature; and kinship with nature invariably expresses itself in
poetry. Again, when we read,
Now hath the man
O'ercome his troubles. No pleasure does he lack,
Nor steeds, nor jewels, nor the joys of mead,
Nor any treasure that the earth can give,
O royal woman, if he have but thee,[25]
we know we are dealing with an essentially noble man, not a savage; we are
face to face with that profound reverence for womanhood which inspires the
greater part of all good poetry, and we begin to honor as well as
understand our ancestors. So in the matter of glory or honor; it was,
apparently, not the love of fighting, but rather the love of honor
resulting from fighting well, which animated our forefathers in every
campaign. "He was a man deserving of remembrance" was the highest thing
that could be said of a dead warrior; and "He is a man deserving of praise"
was the highest tribute to the living. The whole secret of Beowulf's mighty
life is summed up in the last line, "Ever yearning for his people's
praise." So every tribe had its scop, or poet, more important than any
warrior, who put the deeds of its heroes into the expressive words that
constitute literature; and every banquet hall had its gleeman, who sang the
scop's poetry in order that the deed and the man might be remembered.
Oriental peoples built monuments to perpetuate the memory of their dead;
but our ancestors made poems, which should live and stir men's souls long
after monuments of brick and stone had crumbled away. It is to this intense
love of glory and the desire to be remembered that we are indebted for
Anglo-Saxon literature.
OUR FIRST SPEECH. Our first recorded speech begins with the songs of
Widsith and Deor, which the Anglo-Saxons may have brought with them when
they first conquered Britain. At first glance these songs in their native
dress look strange as a foreign tongue; but when we examine them carefully
we find many words that have been familiar since childhood. We have seen
this in _Beowulf_; but in prose the resemblance of this old speech to our
own is even more striking. Here, for instance, is a fragment of the simple
story of the conquest of Britain by our Anglo-Saxon ancestors:
Her Hengest and Æsc his sunu gefuhton with Bryttas, on thaere
stowe the is gecweden Creccanford, and thær ofslogon feower thusenda wera.
And tha Bryttas tha forleton Cent-lond, and mid myclum ege flugon to
Lundenbyrig. (At this time Hengest and Aesc, his son, fought against the
Britons at the place which is called Crayford and there slew four thousand
men. And then the Britons forsook Kentland, and with much fear fled to
London town.)[26]
The reader who utters these words aloud a few times will speedily recognize
his own tongue, not simply in the words but also in the whole structure of
the sentences.
From such records we see that our speech is Teutonic in its origin; and
when we examine any Teutonic language we learn that it is only a branch of
the great Aryan or Indo-European family of languages. In life and language,
therefore, we are related first to the Teutonic races, and through them to
all the nations of this Indo-European family, which, starting with enormous
vigor from their original home (probably in central Europe)[27] spread
southward and westward, driving out the native tribes and slowly developing
the mighty civilizations of India, Persia, Greece, Rome, and the wilder but
more vigorous life of the Celts and Teutons. In all these
languages--Sanskrit, Iranian, Greek, Latin, Celtic, Teutonic--we recognize
the same root words for father and mother, for God and man, for the common
needs and the common relations of life; and since words are windows through
which we see the soul of this old people, we find certain ideals of love,
home, faith, heroism, liberty, which seem to have been the very life of our
forefathers, and which were inherited by them from their old heroic and
conquering ancestors. It was on the borders of the North Sea that our
fathers halted for unnumbered centuries on their westward journey, and
slowly developed the national life and language which we now call Anglo-
Saxon.
It is this old vigorous Anglo-Saxon language which forms the basis of our
modern English. If we read a paragraph from any good English book, and then
analyze it, as we would a flower, to see what it contains, we find two
distinct classes of words. The first class, containing simple words
expressing the common things of life, makes up the strong framework of our
language. These words are like the stem and bare branches of a mighty oak,
and if we look them up in the dictionary we find that almost invariably
they come to us from our Anglo-Saxon ancestors. The second and larger class
of words is made up of those that give grace, variety, ornament, to our
speech. They are like the leaves and blossoms of the same tree, and when we
examine their history we find that they come to us from the Celts, Romans,
Normans, and other peoples with whom we have been in contact in the long
years of our development. The most prominent characteristic of our present
language, therefore, is its dual character. Its best qualities--strength,
simplicity, directness--come from Anglo-Saxon sources; its enormous added
wealth of expression, its comprehensiveness, its plastic adaptability to
new conditions and ideas, are largely the result of additions from other
languages, and especially of its gradual absorption of the French language
after the Norman Conquest. It is this dual character, this combination of
native and foreign, of innate and exotic elements, which accounts for the
wealth of our English language and literature. To see it in concrete form,
we should read in succession _Beowulf_ and _Paradise Lost_, the two great
epics which show the root and the flower of our literary development.
III. CHRISTIAN WRITERS OF THE ANGLO-SAXON PERIOD
The literature of this period falls naturally into two divisions,--pagan
and Christian. The former represents the poetry which the Anglo-Saxons
probably brought with them in the form of oral sagas,--the crude material
out of which literature was slowly developed on English soil; the latter
represents the writings developed under teaching of the monks, after the
old pagan religion had vanished, but while it still retained its hold on
the life and language of the people. In reading our earliest poetry it is
well to remember that all of it was copied by the monks, and seems to have
been more or less altered to give it a religious coloring.
The coming of Christianity meant not simply a new life and leader for
England; it meant also the wealth of a new language. The scop is now
replaced by the literary monk; and that monk, though he lives among common