Читать книгу Some Religious Elements in English Literature - Macaulay Rose - Страница 3

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What is a religious element? And, if one comes to that, what is religion? It might be defined, perhaps, as belief in extra-natural agencies with whom the believer thinks he can establish some kind of personal relation. Man, as has been frequently pointed out, is a religious animal; probably, though on this we can only speculate, the most religious animal now or at any other time extant on this planet. He has ever delighted in ceremonious and ritual approach to the superhuman beings, the turba deorum, with whom he has peopled the mysterious and alarming universe about him. Myth, magic, and mystery—from the dimmest dawn of humanity’s thoughts on anything, it would appear that it has thought favourably of these. And from the time that it first wrote of anything (or anyhow in any form that has survived) it appears that it wrote (also favourably) of these. Babylonians, Egyptians, Cretans, Greeks, Romans, Jews, Americans, Teutons, Celts, Slavs, and all the rest of the world’s tribes, the moment they carved words on wood or stone, scribbled, directly or covertly, of their devils and their gods. There is scarcely a race that has not left a mass of religious literature.

Romans, Celts, and Teutons, races less god-obsessed than the Jews or Greeks, have nevertheless from the beginning of their self-expression all added their contributions to the sum of this literature. These contributions are an interesting blend of universal factors and of racial and period differentiations. Universal and common to humanity is the peopling of the universe with spirits, gods, and monsters of good or evil-will, and the blank misgivings of the creature moving about in worlds not realised; that dread sense of the dark and waste countries beyond the bounds, inhabited by fearful creatures, of which the earliest Teutonic literature we possess, and all Celtic literature, and all the earliest Greek stories, are full. “They inhabit the dark land,” says Beowulf, describing the wilderness beyond the mark where dwelt Grendel, the ravening sea monster, and his fierce dam, and other monstrous creatures, serpents and dragons, all waging continuous war against the dwellings of men. These creatures and dragons are common to all sections of the human race; so is the half-divine hero—Beowulf, Theseus, Hercules, Perseus, or another—who slays them in a personal duel.

But the Greek heroes got more help from their gods than ever did the early English from theirs—from Wyrd, the aloof, chilly, and discouraging fate-goddess, and the apparently even more detached Woden, Freia, Thor, and Tiw, bucolic beings whose interests seem to have been confined mainly to weather, agriculture, and the seasons. “Wyrd goes ever as it must,” remarks Beowulf, resigning himself thus to being slain and devoured by Grendel; and again, “Wyrd carried away all my kinsmen at the fated time.” A less helpful protector, obviously, than Apollo, Diana, Aphrodite, Jehovah, or the Christian saints proved in similar emergencies. As so little help was forthcoming from above, it is natural that a dominant note of the earliest English poetry is a depressed, though always courageous and never discouraged, fatalism.

Oddly side by side with this runs the theology of the scribe (or scribes) who wrote Beowulf down after the Christian conversion of England. Retaining Wyrd, he sometimes identifies her with, sometimes overrules her by, God the creator of man. “The truth is made known,” says Beowulf, “that the mighty God has always wielded the affairs of mankind.” “The holy God, the wise Lord, decided the war-victory; the ruler of the heavens easily decided it aright.” Wyrd, become a shadowy and subordinate power, becomes also of doubtful and uncertain character: now she is fighting against God, now for him. The idea of an inexorable destiny is loosened by an overruling Lord, and also by the belief, common to all primitive races of whatever creed, that misfortune is sent to punish sin. When the dragon wastes Beowulf’s land, he reflects that he must have sinned against the Lord, as Jews, Greeks, Egyptians, and all races have reflected in similar circumstances.

This is no place in which to enter, nor am I qualified to enter, on that vexed question of scholarship, the composition of Beowulf. We have to take it as it comes down to us, a typical and fascinating blend of the ancient northern mythology and the new Hebrew monotheism—a blend exemplified after one fashion or another in most Early English verse after the few fragments we have left of pure heathen mythology, such as the incantations to the Mother of earth for blessings on the fields. There is scarcely any pure heathen English literature remaining to us. Probably the English invaders did not spend much of the hundred and fifty years between their invasion and their change of faith in literary pursuits, or, if they did, they or their successors mislaid the results at an early stage.

It is, indeed, likely enough that the clergymen who were the scribes and arbiters of our literature between the eighth and thirteenth centuries would feel it unnecessary that such portions of heathen poetry as could not be discreetly christianised, after the charmingly naïve and incongruous manner in which Beowulf, Widsith, and Deor were dealt with, should survive. What did survive of it were the incantations and hymns in common use, prayers to Erce the mother, and Thor the farmers’ god, for fertility:

“Erce, Erce, Erce—Mother of Earth!

May the All-Wielder, Ever-Lord grant thee

Acres a-waxing, upwards a-growing ...

Let be guarded the grain against all the ills

That are sown o’er the land by the sorcery-men,

Nor let cunning woman change it nor a crafty man.”^[1]

Like all primitive races, the island invaders loved music and singing; the justly exasperated Gildas complains bitterly of the disgusting noises made by this destructive people, as they advanced, no doubt shouting their tribal hymns, to ravage Britain. Probably they kept it up day and night, celebrating over the evening mead-cup the savageries of the day’s conquests, and singing to their gods praises or the age-old type chanted by Deborah to the Lord of Hosts. Jehovah, Zeus, Mars, or Woden, it mattered little, as it matters little to the poetry of earth which is left us whether the deities propitiated are called Demeter, Ceres, Thor, Eostre, or the Christ and Mary who crept into the heathen charms after the Saxons’ gradual and piecemeal Christian conversion had begun, and who alternate so pleasantly with the still unexpelled old gods.

They were, I suppose, a religious people, the early English and their Scandinavian cousins, for all primitive people seem to be religious.

It is, I believe, correct to see in Beowulf a form of the primeval and undying legend of the eternal fight between good and evil, darkness and light, winter and summer, of which the conflict between Christ and Satan was one of the types. But more fundamental than allegory, or than the references to Wyrd the fate-goddess, or the touchingly ingenuous interpolations to God the All-ruler, is the melancholy religious sense of the supernatural mystery of the waste-land with which the little life of man is so perilously set about. How far this melancholy poetic sense is peculiarly Teutonic, how far universal, is a question that might well be debated to the length of volumes. I am more inclined to believe in the universality of all those elements which sometimes we think of as racial. If, among Latins, serenity, cheerfulness, and materialism seem to prevail, on the whole, over primitive terror and blank misgiving, one must put it down largely to the Italian weather. Though as to weather, neither Italian, nor even African, could make cheerful, serene, or materialistic, Augustine, Dante, or most of the mediæval theologians. And as to the Greeks and Jews, whose weather was even superior to the Italian, they were, perhaps, the two most tempestuously religious races (except possibly the Ethiopians) which the earth’s vagaries have yet thrown up, the most haunted by the sense of sin and the terror of its consequences. Orestes pursued by furies, David confronted by conscience, Augustine writhing in the throes of postponed conversion, Theresa and Catherine communing with Christ, Cynewulf, Bunyan, and Cowper in penetential abasement before their god, Cardinal Newman distraught by his theological woes—there is little to choose here between racial experiences in religious crisis. Religion, like love, is an affair in which all races appear to meet. Nature-myth, ancestor-worship, sun-worship, the worship of the Father of heaven, the Mother of earth, the Son who minds human destinies, his human mother who bends to earth an even more attentive ear—all these cults seem to evoke much the same emotions in the different beings who practise them; they all tap that tremendous leaping spring in man, the religious sense.

It seems strangely all one stream—the goddess Eostre merging her spring festival into the new Christian Easter; the shrines of the virgin Diana being consecrated to the virgin Mary; the fires lit to the seasonal gods being lit to the seasonal saints; the demi-gods and heroes of heathen mythology changing their names to those of Christ’s thegns, the apostles; the monsters who waged war on them becoming Satan and his legions; the old spirits who thronged earth and air still riding the wind as imps and witches of darkness. Particularly, perhaps, was this continuity of Christian and heathen mythology unbroken in England, where the Christian conversion was, on the whole, and compared with continental conversions (for the Continent is so sudden in its ways), a slow and gentle affair, a peaceful change with many setbacks and reactions.

“For nearly eighty years,” writes Mr. Stopford Brooke, “the heathen and Christian faiths were in close contact, and each preserved its freedom of development. The old battle songs were sung side by side with the Christian hymns, the saga of the English heroes with the saga of Christ; the Christian Church, on the hill or by the river, saw, during a varying term of years and without any fierce religious fury, the heathen temple in the neighbouring grove. There was a long mingling, then, in a peaceful fashion, of Christian and heathen thought; and through the mingling ran a special temper of tolerance and wisdom and good-breeding.”^[2]

Whether or not this broad-minded and optimistic nineteenth-century clergyman exaggerated in his poetic reconstruction of a past probably more intolerant, unwise, and ill-bred than he cared to think, it is at least certain that there was in Early English literature a considerable and charming transference of heathen myths to Christian forms.

“The minor gods and heroes which the various wants of men had created to preside over and to satisfy those wants were replaced by saints who did precisely the same work. The personages were different, but Polytheism, with all its romance, remained. Even the nature-myths were often continued in the legends of the saints.... The most widespread of the heathen myths was the war of Day and Night, the still greater war of Summer and Winter ... become now, in various forms, the war between Christ and Satan, between eternal Light and eternal Darkness, between the Church and heathenism ... whatever shape the changes took, the original myth is preserved.”^[3]

You get the myth in its heathen form in Beowulf; Cædmon and Cynewulf, full of the Harrowing of Hell legend, which had by that time taken possession of the fancy of Christendom, gives it in its Christian rendering. For by the time Cædmon broke into his biblical singing, that tremendous religion from the East which was to transform English thought, had taken its firm hold, and thenceforth for many centuries poetry was so intertwined with references to Christian and Jewish pre-Christian beliefs as to have scarcely any separate existence. What kind of poet, one wonders, would Cædmon have become if, instead of being led, on his strange outbreak into articulateness, to an abbess, and bidden by her to go and put Genesis into verse, he had been taken to the court of an earl and told to sing songs of war? We cannot tell; and neither do we know whether poetry has lost or gained by the religious fervour of an age which used up its poetic genius in narratives of the fall of the rebel angels, the creation of the earth, the fall of man—romantic and exciting stories enough, but becoming monotonous through so frequent repetition. All we can say is that, with Cædmon (or whoever wrote Cædmon’s poems) the English language enters into its share of that great Satanic mythology which begins, in literature, with Avitus’ poem, De Originali Peccato, and culminates in John Milton. Beowulf may be said to share this mythology in spirit:

“So then the people’s men dwelt in prosperity,

Blessed and happy, without one began

Felony to fashion, a fiend out of hell;

That grim guest Grendel hight

A mighty march-stepper, who the moors held

Fen and fastness....

Thence abominations all arose,

Etins and elves, orcneys also,

Likewise giants that with God strove

For many days; that doom he dealt them.”^[4]

The Christian scribes who set down Beowulf could not, with the best will in the world, purge it of its essential paganism. Its religion is a direct appeal to a vague if almighty deity for success, not the statement of a theology. The Teutonic and Scandinavian English had to wait for that until the more formal, inventive, elaborating, and less poetic genius of the Mediterranean peoples gave it to them. Then, in common with all the Christianised races of the world, they took it over. But they made of the story, long since to us so conventionalised that we may easily miss its romantic magnificence and the beauty and wonder with which it first broke on the so recently Christianised Europe, something new, something vital, English and mysterious, full of terror, darkness, and release, the roaring of the sea on the wild Yorkshire coast, the sweep of storm and winds.

“Nor was here as yet save a hollow shadow

Anything created; but the wide abyss

Deep and dim, outspread, all divided from the Lord,

Idle and unuseful....”^[5]

Here is the northern melancholy and sense of the misty terrors of the beyond and the wrath of God, that adds edge to the sharp sense of release and joy in the green swards of paradise and the tender mercies of the redeemer. This terror of the waste-land, this sense of the melancholy dark, is the ancient heritage of a people who knew little but bad weather and cold and stormy sea-wastes; a people to whom the late-coming spring and brief and slight summer were as flying dreams of beauty, joy, and consolation, speeding by like the kingfisher, leaving the grey and melancholy world in sadness again. This quite horrible weather that we suffer in this island, and in the other northern lands, may account for much that has always differentiated us from races inhabiting happier climes; it probably made our Saxon forbears the world’s heaviest drinkers; it has possibly, together with the advantages of a language unequalled in richness, grace, and heterogeneity, made the English the most poetical race that the world has yet known (except the Greeks, who had, however, no such reason: and so much for theories of genius), giving them that sharp and profound sense of joy and grief, that soul-searching melancholy, which are a reflection of nature’s moods in a bad climate, and depriving them irrevocably of the content which sustains, one believes, more fortunate peoples. It has also, one may fancy, given an especial element to English religion, suffusing it with that vague and misty twilight which is sometimes called Celtic, but may be as accurately regarded as Saxon; anyhow, it is the atmosphere in which our blended English nation has its being. It is an elf-haunted atmosphere, entirely different from that more lucid climate inhabited by the satyr and the faun.

It would be interesting, were there space, to discriminate in Cædmon and his school, and in Cynewulf and his, between the general Christian mythology in which all the Christian races had part, and which gave monotony to so much early mediæval literature, and the peculiarly English elements in the form in which it was cast. The story of Genesis and the gospel of Nicodemus were the store-houses of the great epic which was echoed round the Christian world. The Scôp and his songs disappeared; but some of his spirit remained, oddly breathing through the framework of the solemn Latin-Christian epic. It is apparent in the vigorous Cædmonic stories of the Hebrew patriarchs, who speak in the manner of sturdy English war-lords surrounded by their thegns. But, as Bede said, “no trivial or vain song came from his lips”; all were godly and Christian. No new element, as regards religion, was added by the English seventh and eighth-century poets to the general scheme. England was drawn into the river of the literature and language of Christendom; at that time a very weak and thin river, trickling through the barbarian wilderness.

With the coming of Augustine to England, laden with Bibles, psalters, and lives of the saints, the influence of the Latin mission began, and the stream of Christian literature began to flow in southern England. Imported by Italians, naturally it flowed in Latin; there was no English literature in the south until Alfred, nothing in the vernacular but a few codes of law, a fragment or two of history. Even the versatile Wessex scholar Ealdhelm devoted himself mainly to Latin prosody and the study of the Latin writers; the austere Gregory would have condemned him bitterly for his familiarity with the lighter pagan classics, for his habit of quoting from Horace, Persius, and Juvenal. He did also, it appears, write and sing songs in English in public thoroughfares to attract those who did not go to church; but these songs have vanished.

For vernacular literature, for the seventh-century budding of English poetry, we have to go to Northumbria.

And here, so much was English literature but a branch of the tree of European Christendom—a tree, however, at that time blasted and stunted by barbarian Gothic maltreatment—that the subject is rather the English element in religious literature than the religious in English. Cædmon and his school, Cynewulf and his, take their places in the literature of contemporary Christian Europe, that strange literature of allegory, Biblical paraphrase, and Christianised pagan myths.

The author or authors of the Cædmonic and Cynewulf poems blazed no new trails, but through paraphrases, allegory, and epics of saintly adventure, sound continually English war-cries, and the surging and breaking of the English sea, and of the wild Northumbrian weather. The swan-road, the whale-road, the fishes’ bath, the gannets’ bath, the country of the sea-mew, the beaker of the waves, the clashing of the sea-currents, the sea-fastness, the sea for ever cold with its salt waves—every kind of characteristically English poetic circumlocution^[6] was lavished on the element which played so strong and so unbiblical a part in the Old English epics of the Bible saints. They are war-like poems; the Cædmon cycle, in particular, has a rough vigour which is reminiscent of the popular minstrel—the Scôp applying himself, with a will, to scriptural subjects, the Saxon heroes christened by Biblical names, and still fighting in the age-old cause of good against evil, but now strengthened and defended by a more potent magic than of old. Christ leads apostolic thegns to battle, and steers apostolic crews through stormy seas; he is the war-lord, the helmsman, and the saviour. The adventures of the children of Israel became sagas, recited before kings and warriors in their halls, the more military parts of the Bible were vigorously retold; Abraham and the rest speak alternately as combative, half-heathen Saxon chiefs, and with the solemn didactism of mediæval Latin Christianity.

In the Cædmonic poems, Christianity and heathendom seem to be fighting, now one element gaining the upper hand, now the other. If a wide gulf divides them from the pagan eighth-century verse—The Wife’s Complaint, The Husband’s Message, The Wanderer, and the first part of The Seafarer—a gulf narrower but definite separates them from the Cynewulf poems. With Cynewulf, the personal, introspective, melancholy, religious element which has characterised so many Christians of all races and ages entered English poetry. Cynewulf is the chief of sinners, the remorse-haunted penitent, and the finally ecstatic redeemed soul. He shudders away from the sins of his careless youth, from the transient glory of this world; he fixes his eyes on a personal saviour, and on the raptures of heaven and the pains of hell, of the vision of which he writes gleefully, echoing sentiments fashionable among mediæval theologians:

“In the baleful gloom

The blissful throng shall contemplate the damned,

Suffering, in penance for their sins, sore pain,

The surging flame and the bitter-biting jaws

Of luring serpents, a shoal of burning things.

Then a winsome joy shall rise within their souls,

Beholding other men endure the ills

That they escaped, through mercy of the Lord.

Then the more eagerly shall they thank God

For all their glory and delight....”^[7]

There is nothing new in all this; nearly all Cynewulfs writings derive, closely or distantly, from Latin sources. The drama of the human soul tormented by its sin and by the fear of retribution is common to all races, all languages, and all faiths. Its first expression in English literature was directly from Latin; indirectly (according to one theory) from Celtic influences working on poets exposed to the rigours of Northumbrian weather, the grandeur of Northumbrian seas. It may be so; anyhow, the Cynewulf cycle of religious poems, signed and anonymous, bears, along with its Latin-Christian impress, a more Gothic adventurousness, a wistful and storm-tossed sadness, poetic strangeness, and close observation of nature. The English saga-spirit, making its marriage with the Celtic genius of romance under wild and sombre climatic conditions, had given birth to its heir, the spirit of English poetry, which was already strong enough to put up a good show against its Latin step-parent, even when drawing on the latter for its subject-matter. From conventional Latin theology comes the framework.

“Thus long ago the great Melchizedek,

So wise of soul, revealed the majesty

Of the eternal ruler; he was the law-bringer.

He gave them precepts, who had awaited long

His advent hither, for it was promised them.”^[8]

Tedious enough. And yet we can discern the moody Anglo-Celtic spirit, as it moved Northumbrian poets of the eighth-century, blowing like a troubling sea-wind through the creaking joints of the weary patristic theology and scriptural narrative, which was derived and often translated from Gregory’s homilies, from hymns, from the Acta Sanctorum and the Breviary. The old Teutonic pagan spirit moves with a clashing of spears, and above all with a breaking of great waves, among the pious legends. The deeds of the Christian saints are wrought by a strange rough English army in ecclesiastical haloes, looking towards hell and paradise as of old the Teutonic heroes had looked up to Valhalla, and, shudderingly, down to Niflheim. The phrases of Latin piety come sometimes oddly from their lips; more natural sound the occasional questionings that surge up from the doubting and fearful English heart—“Mirk and mysterious is that other world. No one returns to tell us of its secret.” Shakespeare was saying this eight hundred years later.

Yet there is a new element, not only of theme, but of spirit, brought into English literature by the new faith—the expression of remorse and sorrow for sin: “Much need have I,” cries Cynewulf, “that this holy one should help me ... when out of my body my soul fares on its journey, I know not whither, to that undiscovered shore.... I think of all the sorrows, all the wounds of sin that I in earlier and later life have wrought within the world; crying woe, woe, I shall bewail it all with tears. Far, far too late it was ere I shamed me of my evil deeds.”^[9]

Latin models set the fashion for this too—if indeed this primitive theme needs a model. To the writer of Christ, The Phœnix, Elene, Juliana, and the Dream of the Rood, it was natural; he wrote of it with personal passion. Which parts of these and the other Cynewulf poems were actually by Cynewulf, and who, if anyone, Cynewulf was, scholars must (or anyhow do) debate. It does not much matter. The uninstructed must (or anyhow do) call these authors, for short, Cynewulf. Less fantastic than the Celt, less heavily and exhaustingly martial than the Norseman, less scholastically theological than the Latin, the Northumbrian school of Latin-Celto-English religious poetry flowered into its surprising day.

What would have been its growth but for the decay of Northumbria and for the arrival of those restless and discourteous invaders, the Danes? Would its native Gothic vigour have asserted itself over its Roman foster-mother? Would there, when the first glory and excitement of the new faith had dimmed with custom, have been a wider literature, a secular poetry, lyric, ballad, epic and dramatic, following the monasticised Cynewulf literature, and following the plague of riddles, runes, gnomic verses, proverbs, and dialogues that sprang up in its shadow? Would the nature elements and the dramatic elements in eighth-century religious poetry have been the forerunners of a great non-religious English literature? Or would the cultural hand of the Church have closed more and more on English poetry, silencing the last pagan questionings, the last shouts of heathen warriors, the last murmurings of the elf-haunted woods, witch-ridden winds, and storming seas, lighting the twilight of the gods more firmly with the candles of Christendom, smoothing the Teutonic metres into Latin mould?

We can only speculate, for Northumbrian literature decayed with the Northumbrian kingdom; anarchy tore literature in shreds, education perished, and amid “mickle whirlwinds and lightnings, and fiery dragons flying in the air,” “the ravaging of heathen men mournfully overthrew God’s Church at Lindisfarne with rapine and slaughter.” The Danish conquest had begun, and that was the end, for the time, of literature in Northumbria. That strange, charming, and yet irritating product of Gothic myth and spirit, monastic training, Latin learning, Roman, Celtic, and Neo-Platonic Christianity, and north of England weather, ceased to grow, mown down by the barbarian scythes. There is no more English poetry to matter—at least, none that has survived—till the tenth century.

The Wessex prose of the ninth century is conceived in a different air. Alfred, setting himself to restore lost learning to his country, created no new national literature; instead, he set flowing into England in the English speech, the rivers of Latin scholarship, history, philosophy, and religion.

It is little use, either, to search the earlier part of the next century for English literature; all we shall find will be religious homilies, even if adorned with legend and tale. The religious and monastic revival was in full swing. The end of the world drew on apace, and literature was not worth while. Ælfric, great writer of prose as he was, drew his literary impulse from the old ecclesiastical tradition, and composed homilies on the Bible stories, and on Church history and doctrine. There is nothing new, and nothing peculiarly English, in his material; what is interesting and valuable is his application of the vernacular to his themes. Ælfric, like Alfred, carried on the bringing of England into the stream of European religious literature. He was a transmitter of patristic theology to the unlettered, keeping Church teaching alive during those troubled times of war, invasions, and barbarism, when men had no heart for learning, and when the dream of a literature of the humanities that had visited Europe during the Carolingian renaissance had flickered into darkness. There was no religious element in English literature in the tenth and eleventh centuries, for there was scarcely any literature apart from theological or educational writings. And these were almost wholly derivative, except when Archbishop Wulfstan delivered passionate Jeremiads on the national humiliations, decadence, and downfall. It was a literature of monks: inevitably, when the laity could neither read nor write, and the old minstrelsy was dead and the new not yet born. When the monk Byrhtferth wrote mathematical treatises, he felt that he must join them in the same book with tracts on the loosing of Satan, the seven sins, and the four virtues. The Gospels were translated, the early Christian and Jewish legends retold. Apart from the Eastern legend cycles of Alexander and Apollonius of Tyre, and apart from the medical and scientific treatises on beasts, herbs, recipes, star craft, prescriptions, and charms, the English literary world was a world of Christian mythology, decorated by the allegory and symbolism which mediæval Europe found so charming, and so essential to its expounding of either narrative or theology.

What it would have become, and how soon, if left to itself, is a question for speculative historians. One of the points about the British Isles is that they never were left for long to themselves; curious as it may seem, they have always presented an irresistibly tempting appearance to continental invaders. The English were about to receive one of those Visits which have periodically so jolted and disturbed them, and so adulterated the blood and the literature of the true-born Englishman.

[1]	Translation by Stopford Brooke.

[2]	Stopford Brooke, History of Early English Poetry.

[3]	See Footnote 2.

[4]	Translation by C. Scott-Moncrieff.

[5]	Cædmon, Genesis A, translated by Stopford Brooke.

[6]	See H. C. Wyld’s Essay on Anglo-Saxon Poetry.

[7]	Translation by I. Gollancz.

[8]	Cynewulf, Christ, translated by I. Gollancz.

[9]

Juliana.