Читать книгу The Pageant of English Literature - Sir Edward Parrott - Страница 19
ОглавлениеALFRED THE GREAT.
“A thousand years the Earth cried, Where art thou? And then the shadow of thy coming fell On Saxon Alfred's olive-cinctured brow.”—Shelley.
The busy activities of Bede's monastery at Jarrow furnish us with a picture of intellectual life that seems full of promise for the future of learning in England. Dotted over the land, like green oases in a desert of semi-barbarism, were many similar institutions filled with men who gave their nights and days to the study of everything that could possibly increase the influence of the Church. Books were multiplied, libraries grew, and the two great monastic schools at Canterbury and York were thronged with eager and zealous students. It is true that Latin was the language in which they wrote, and that they only employed the native speech for the simple admonition of their flocks, but there was good hope that in an atmosphere of learning other and more glorious Cædmons might ere long appear. The dawn of better things had apparently arrived.
Alcuin, who was born in the year of Bede's death, filled the place which his far greater predecessor had vacated. He himself was a writer, though not a great one, and the numerous poems, letters, controversial and church books which he indited are of less importance in the history of our literary progress than the inspiration which he breathed into men by his spoken word. He quitted York, happy in the hour of his departure, for the court of Charlemagne. A few years later a long and devastating storm broke upon England, blotting out the rising sun from the heavens and plunging the land into a tumult of strife that almost destroyed its civilization and wellnigh exterminated its learning and literature.
Heathendom had flung itself in a last desperate rally on the Christian world. Thor and Wodin were arrayed against Christ, and for the best part of a century the pagan gods rode in the whirlwind and directed the storm. The Vikings had begun those raids which were to end in conquest, and at their coming men's hearts failed them for fear. In character, disposition, and mode of life they were the English before England, ferocious barbarians, ruthless, piratical sea-rovers, nursing a Berserk frenzy of hatred for the new faith which their kinsmen had adopted.
Crossing the North Sea in their long ships, they sailed up the river mouths, threw up stockaded earthworks, and scoured the country far and wide for booty. They carved blood-eagles on the backs of priests, plundered and defiled churches, and gave to the flames all the priceless treasures of minster and monastery. The whole civilized world groaned beneath this scourge of God, and the rumoured approach of the raiders sent terrified peasants to their altars with the pitiful appeal, “From the fury of the Northmen, Good Lord deliver us.”
History seemed to be repeating itself. The English conquest of Britain in the fifth century seemed to be reproducing itself in the Viking conquest of England in the ninth century. Raid was succeeded by conquest and settlement, and one hundred and forty years after the death of Bede all opposition seemed to be at an end, and the English king was forced to take refuge in the marshes of Athelney.
“Scattered are his stalwart yeomen;
Danish Guthrum holds his halls;
Loud the shouts of boasting foemen
Echo round his palace walls;
'Ours,' they cry, 'these meads and rills,
English bones bleach on the hills!'”
But the darkest hour precedes the dawn. The English made one last despairing effort, and victory smiled upon their banners. The Vikings were forced to consent to a peace which recognized East Anglia as their domain. There the more reposeful of them settled down, and as the years rolled by they became Englishmen, and added a new strain of dogged courage, adventurous daring, and trading instinct to the national character.
The one great figure of this long, weary struggle is Alfred, best loved and perhaps greatest of all English kings. We now see him building up anew the kingdom which he had brought with great tribulation out of the shadow of death into the light of peace and prosperity. He is seated at a desk in the monastery which he has erected in the marshes where he sought refuge from the victorious Dane. Around him sit Plegmund, the archbishop, Asser, the bishop, Grimbald, the priest, and John, the old Saxon, scholars whom he has enlisted in his great work of national regeneration. His face is pale and lined with care; his health is feeble, but he has no mercy on his infirmity. His countenance is noble, and nobler still is the secret desire of his heart. For eight hours every day he labours with consuming zeal to build up the walls of his Jerusalem.
Where the Vikings have trod, there the embers of learning have been stamped out. Truly will men carve upon Alfred's monument a thousand years later, “He found learning dead, and he restored it; education neglected, and he revived it.” From the days of his boyhood he has loved books and the society of scholars, and with a large unselfishness, not always characteristic of the learned, he now desires to make his unlettered fellows participate in his blessings. But what books shall he give to his people? All the great and worthy books are in Latin; there are no prose books in the English tongue. The King ponders deeply, and then addresses his colleagues as follows:—
“It seemeth to me that we should take those books that are most needful for all men to be acquainted with, and that we should turn them into the speech which all can understand, that all the youth that now is in England of free men, of those who have the means to be able to go in for it, be set to learning while they are fit for no other business, until such time as they can read English writing; afterwards further instruction may be given in the Latin language to such as are intended for a more advanced education, and are to be prepared for higher office.”
All approve this wise speech, and then comes the choice of a work to be translated. After much discussion the lot falls on Pope Gregory's “Pastoral Care,” a spiritual guide for priests. English priests are now so woefully ignorant that not one can be found south of the Humber to understand his Breviary. The needs of the priests are clamant, so the scholars fall to the work of expounding to the King the Latin text of Gregory's book “word by word, sense by sense;” and when Alfred is fully assured that he thoroughly understands it in letter and in spirit, he begins the humble and laborious work of translation. He is not careful to reproduce the original with accuracy; his aim is to supply a version which shall enlighten his unlettered subjects.
Gregory's “Pastoral Care” was the first of the series of books which Alfred thus turned into the English of Wessex speech. A very popular book known as the “Consolation of Boëthius” followed, and a “History of the World” by Orosius succeeded, but the most important work which he made accessible to English readers was Bede's “Ecclesiastical History.” For the first time it was possible for Englishmen other than monks to taste the delights of reading. But Alfred did much more than add a new resource to life; he gave the despised English tongue of Wessex a new dignity; he demonstrated to all men that the speech of croft and byre and market-place was capable of expressing the deepest thoughts of the human mind and the tenderest feelings of the human heart, and by so doing he laid the foundations of our English prose.
Gratitude, sincere and abundant, should flow out to Alfred. He might have gratified a pardonable vanity by original authorship in Latin, and so built for himself a literary monument to his name and deeds. This temptation he resisted, and out of a great modesty and a disinterested affection for his people chose rather to interpret for them the wisdom of saints and sages in the homely words of their daily life.
One other achievement of this great and good king must not pass without mention. Before the deluge of blood and strife swept away the old learning, it had been customary for the scribes of the chief monasteries to keep brief records of the important local events which came to their notice. Alfred conceived the idea of a national chronicle which should record year by year, from the earliest times, the story of his kingdom, and under his guidance the work was begun. The volume was chained to a desk in Winchester Cathedral, and added to from time to time. It was continued for two and a half centuries after his death, long after the last English king had been slain and the old tongue banished from court and school. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, as we now possess it, may be described as the finest existing record of the early history of any nation.
Written by many hands and at successive periods, it varies greatly in literary merit. Sometimes it is as bald and monotonous as the simple record of a child; sometimes its narrative is fired with glowing eloquence; sometimes the pages are illuminated with the most spirited poetry. The gloomy story of the years following Alfred's death is nowhere better told than in the Chronicle. It is a story of almost continuous struggle, of burning, plundering, and slaying, of Danish triumphs and rare English victories. The finest poem in the Chronicle, translated into modern verse by Tennyson, celebrates the defeat of a great league of Danish, Scots, Welsh, and Irish Vikings by Athelstane at Brunanburh in the year 927.
“Five lay
On that battle-stead,
Young kings
By swords laid to sleep;
So seven eke
Of Olaf's earls,
Of the country countless
Shipmen and Scots.”
Later on, the grim and tragic story of Byrthnoth, an English champion who falls in glorious fray ringed round by the spears of his comrades, is sung in strains worthy of Homer or the “Song of Roland.” In this warfare defeats are more common than victories, and the poetic outbursts of despair are more truly inspired than the songs of triumph.
In these pitiless years of war and tumult letters and learning are again crushed out, save for the time of comparative peace following the victory at Brunanburh, when new monasteries arise and the old life of piety and learning is renewed for a space. In this period Ælfric, Wulfstan, and others appear as writers of English prose. Then war breaks out once more, and England goes down before her Viking conquerors. The minstrels, however, still sing in homestead and hall, and keep the tradition of English poetry alive. English prose, however, disappears and awaits the new birth which is as yet afar off.
