Читать книгу The Pageant of English Literature - Sir Edward Parrott - Страница 22
ОглавлениеLAYAMON.
“The first minstrel to celebrate Arthur in English song.”
Like a solitary candle lighting the window of a hut in the darkness of a lonely land, an English book now appears. Long has English, as the language of literature, been submerged; long has it been despised and rejected of all who hold high place and influence in the realm. Not amongst the churchmen of the cloister, nor among the minstrel throng that waits on the pleasure of king and baron, need we look for any encouragement of native prose and verse. The speech of churl and serf is an offence to ears polite, and he who essays to make a book in this tongue must be wanting in worldly ambition, must care nothing for the patronage of the proud and great, must despise the material advantages which it can give or withhold. He must be content with the inarticulate gratitude of the mean and lowly, of those who labour in the sweat of the brow, who guide the plough over the furrow and tend the cattle in the field. He must write for love and not reward; he must sow in faith and never reap his harvest.
Such was the author of the first book of any consequence that broke the long silence of English literature after the Norman Conquest. He was a humble but scholarly priest serving the offices of his Church in the village of Ernley, on the right bank of the Severn, near the Welsh Border, and not thirty miles, as the crow flies, from the Warwickshire town which gave birth to Shakespeare. Layamon was his name, and he was a patriot of patriots. To him the rough Old English tongue made the sweetest music on earth; to him the story of his now stricken land was an inspiration.
He tells us that “it came into his mind” to make a history of England in verse; so he made a pilgrimage in quest of materials, and obtained the “English book made by Baeda,” that is King Alfred's translation, the same book in Latin, as well as Wace's “Brut d'Angleterre.” Then he sat down to write, and the first words which fell from his pen were as follows:—
“Layamon leide theos boc,
& tha leaf wende.
he heom leofliche bi-heold,
lithe him beo drihten.
fetheren he nom mid fingren,
& fiede on boc-felle,
& tha sothe word
sette to-gadere:
& tha thre boc
thrumde to ane.”
“Layamon laid before him these books, and turned over the leaves; lovingly he beheld them. May the Lord be merciful to him! Pen he took with fingers and wrote on book-skin, and the true words set together; and the three books compressed into one.”
In thrumming together these books he made but little use of Bede. His great stand-by was Wace's Brut. It was the work of a Norman clerk who had translated Geoffrey of Monmouth's book into French poetry, and had given his imagination full play in the process. The monkish Latin of Geoffrey became the courtly French of Wace, and Arthur blossomed into a flower of Norman chivalry, surrounded with picturesque detail and rich colour. Layamon borrowed most of his matter from Wace, but eschewed the French spirit of his original, and in scrupulously pure English made his heroes Englishmen. Scores of the old, half-forgotten epics of the gleemen, and many rambling stories of old gaffers and crones on the Celtic borderland, flashed into his mind as he wrote, and found a place in his narrative.
Arthur's “Table Round” appeared in Wace, but it was Layamon who first made the king a child of faery. Elf-land was his home at birth and death; elves received him into the world, gave him his magical sword and spear, and enabled him to shine as the goodliest of knights and the king of men; it was to Argante, the splendid elf, that he went to be healed of his grievous wounds. And Layamon told it all in the Old English alliterative line of Beowulf and Cædmon, though not slavishly, but with a desire to better his verse with the rhythm and rhyme of the French poets.
Let us take leave of Layamon with genuine gratitude. He was a poet, vigorous and graphic, and he rescued the English tongue as a language of literature from the oblivion that threatened it. Thenceforward two currents of literary expression flow on side by side; the French, a glittering stream, the English, a humble peat-brown rill, but growing in volume and intensity day by day, until a seeming miracle is wrought: the French stream mingles its waters with the native flood which rolls onward down the ages in peerless majesty and beauty.
For two centuries after the time of Layamon English literature grew slowly but surely. Orm, an Augustinian canon of the North Midlands, paraphrased the gospels and homilies into a kind of blank verse, and insisted on the proper pronunciation of English; and he was followed by others whose merit is that they exercised themselves in the native language, and thus advanced it in richness of vocabulary and power of expression.
Amongst such works is the “Ancren Riwle,” a book of English prose laying down maxims of life and behaviour for Anchoresses—that is, for ladies who lived in religious communities without taking the veil. These ladies are enjoined not to “speak with any man often or long,” not to flirt, not to believe in luck, in dreams, or witchcraft. They are not to mortify their fair bodies with iron, nor hair-cloth nor hedgehog skins, nor are they to flog themselves unless their confessor permits, and they must take care that their shoes are thick and warm.
Then, too, we have odes such as “The Owl and the Nightingale,” lyrics as fresh and sweet as “Sumer is icumen in,” political songs, metrical chronicles such as that of Robert of Gloucester, devotional books, and scores of romances in rhyme such as those of Tristram, Havelok the Dane, King Horn, Bevis of Hampton, Guy of Warwick, and Gawain and the Green Knight. In the manuscript volume of the last-named romance occurs the poem Pearl, which Tennyson described as “true pearl of our poetic prime.” It tells of a father's grief for an infant daughter who died in her second year. The heart-stricken man thus describes his lost child:—
“Pearl that for princes' pleasure may
Be cleanly closed in gold so clear,
Out of the Orient dare I say,
Never I proved her precious peer:
So round, so rich, and in such array,
So small, so smooth the sides of her were,
Whenever I judged of jewel gay
Shapeliest still was the sight of her.
Alas! in an arbour I lost her here,
Through grass to ground she passed, I wot,
I dwine, forsaken of sweet love's cheer,
O my privy Pearl without a spot.”
Then in a vision he beholds his Pearl, no longer a child, but a queen of heaven, clad in white, her golden hair crowned with pearls and gold, roaming with other maidens in the gardens of Paradise. Across the fordless river that divides him from her, she tells him that she is not lost; she comforts him with the lessons of faith and resignation, and gives him a glimpse of the New Jerusalem. He plunges into the stream, and then awakes to find himself stretched on the child's grave.
There is genuine lyrical emotion in this and other poems of the period, and in form, feeling, and expression we see that English verse is growing in strength and beauty. Two hundred years after Layamon lighted his little candle in the gloom, the “Morning Star of Song” appears, and with him, the slowly-breaking dawn that ushers in the bright day when English Literature begins to shine like a sun in the unclouded heavens.
