Читать книгу History of English Literature from "Beowulf" to Swinburne - Andrew Lang, Robert Kirk - Страница 35

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Thanks to Geoffrey, at last, some time about 1200-1220, came an English poet, Layamon, a true poet (now and then), whose work reminds us occasionally at once of the Greeks whom he had never read, of masters whom he did not know; and of the things most romantic in the verses of the last great poet of England. Layamon, the author of "The Brut," had no ambition; he had no hope of gain; the king and the courtiers would never hear of him.

Layamon was an English priest in a quiet country parish, not far from the Welsh Border, at Ernley, near Radestone, on the Severn, as he tells us. Yet the new French culture had reached him and inspired him; he gave it to Englishmen in their own English language and he is therefore readable: is more than a mere name. It "came into his mind" to tell the history of England, in verse, and he says that he travelled far to get the books of Bede (in Anglo-Saxon), "the fair Austin and St. Albin," in Latin, and the book made in French by a French clerk, Master Wace, "who well could write". "Lovingly he beheld these books," but, in fact, he only used one of them, namely Wace's French version (1155) of Geoffrey of Monmouth's romance. Wace had altered Geoffrey as he pleased, and Layamon took the same liberty with Wace; his book is twice as long as that of the French clerk; he also inserted many things not to be found in the text of Wace as now printed, but derived partly from still unprinted manuscripts of Wace, partly from other sources; perhaps from Welsh legends known to this priest who dwelt beside the Severn. Wace added to Geoffrey's account of Arthur, the story wherever he found it, of "The Table Round," so shaped that the knights could not quarrel about the highest place. Layamon adds that the Fairy ladies came to Arthur's birth—as in a very old belief, found in ancient Greece and ancient Egypt—and that they later carried him away to Avalon, there to be healed of his wounds.

He calls the fairy Queen "Argante," possibly a French corruption of a Breton name. His account of the birth of the enchanter Merlin, "No man's son," is romance itself. Merlin's mother, who had become a nun, knew not who was her child's father, only that in her dreams there came to her "the fairest thing that ever was born, as it were a tall knight, all dight in gold. This thing glided before me and glistened with gold. Oft me it kissed, and oft embraced."

What can be more romantic than this tale of the golden shadow of love that glides through the darkling bower—told by a nun with bowed head, shamefast! We are reminded of the lines in which Io, in Æschylus, tells of the shadowy approaches of Zeus, the king of gods; and the voice that spoke to her in dreams.

The Greeks had another such tale of the gold that fell in the tower of Danaë before the birth of Perseus. The origin of Layamon's story may be in some ancient Celtic myth of the loves of gods and mortal women, and of Merlin, son of a god.

From his shadowy nameless father, Merlin received his gift of prophecy, and, from the first, foretold the Passing of Arthur.

In Layamon's poem we find what does not occur in the older Anglo-Saxon poems, such as "Beowulf," the use of similes in the manner of Homer, whose warriors charge like lions, hungry, and beaten on by wind and snow. Thus, too, in Layamon's verse,

"Up caught Arthur his shield, before his breast, and he 'gan to rush as doth the howling wolf when he cometh from the wood, flecked with snow, and thinketh to seize what beasts he will."

Arthur defeats the Saxons, and drives them from the ford of the river, through the deep marshland,

"And as the wild crane in the fen, when the falcons follow him through air, and he wearies in his flight, but the hounds meet him in the reeds; as he can find no safety whether in field or flood, even so the Saxons were smitten in ford and field, and went blindly wandering."

These similes give clear, vivid pictures of life in fen and forest, and enliven the poem in the true epic way, and Layamon gives, perhaps, the first English picture of an English fox-hunt. In his poem, Guinevere does not love Launcelot, but the traitor Modred, and when Modred is defeated by her husband, Arthur, she flies to Caerleon, where "she hooded her and made her a nun," and her end is unknown.

In the last great battle in the west, both hosts fall—it is a field of the dead and dying. Arthur bears fifteen wounds. He is alone with Constantine, to whom he entrusts his kingdom. "But I will pass to Avalun, to the fairest of all maidens, to Argante the Queen, an elf most beautiful, and she shall make my wounds all whole with draughts of healing. And afterwards I will come again to my kingdom....

"Then came floating from the sea a little boat, and two women therein, shaped wonderfully; and they took Arthur anon, and bore him to that boat, and laid him softly down, and went their way. Bretons believe that he liveth yet, and wonneth in Avalun, with the fairest Queens of Faery."

Do we not already seem to hear the voice of Tennyson's weeping queens, as the king floats into the night?

Romance has come to England, and from the mingling of races and tongues—Celtic, French, English—an English poet has been born: a man who sees with the eyes of imagination, and who can make us share his visions of the golden shadow that was father of Merlin; of the wolf with the snow caked on his matted hide as he rushes from the wood; of the hawking party in the fens; of the battle by the tidal waters of the west.

Layamon is full of promise of good things to come, as in his description of Goneril and her husband, when she begins to grudge to her father, King Lear, the expensive service of his forty knights; while her husband feebly opposes her unnatural avarice. (The story of Lear is also in Geoffrey of Monmouth, and is based on a common folk-tale.)

Again, when Layamon's Arthur laughs over the slain Colgrem, "...Lie there, now, Colgrem; high hadst thou climbed this hill, as if thou wouldst win heaven, now shalt thou fare to hell, and there find thy kinsfolk,..." we are carried back to the boasts over the dead that Greeks and Trojans utter in the Iliad. But these great touches are rare in the 30,000 lines of Layamon, the mass of his poem "is blank enough".

Layamon thought himself a chronicler in rhyme, a historian; in his book he has many tales, not that of Arthur alone; he has dull passages in plenty, none the less the good priest had many qualities of the great poet.

The verse of Layamon is sometimes of the old Anglo-Saxon sort already described, with alliteration and without rhyme; and in other parts consists of rhyming couplets varying in length, all intermixed. A rhyming couplet is

Thet avere either other

luvede alse if brother. That ever either other Loved as if brother.

In the words the tendency is to drop the old inflections, the language is shaking off its original grammar and approaching modern English. In the later of two manuscripts of the poem this tendency is much more strong. Thus the older manuscript has

He wes a swithe aehte gume

And he streonde (begat) threo snelle sunen.

The later copy has

He was a strong gome

And he streonede threo sones.

The word "snell" in the older version still survives in Scots,

"There cam a wind out o' the East

A sharp wind and a snell,"

snell meaning "keen".