Whom the spear doth strike of the Spirit of the rain. I beginning make of this gruesome war When I rush on high Through their thundering throng to press with a triumph great, O'er the breast of torrents! 1 Bursts out with a roar Then my crest again I bow, Low the Lift-helm under, to the land anearer; And now he ends with a passage which, with a fine art, collects together all the action of the Tempest, and brings it back to its cavern, having had a great joy, in obedient quiet — often strive in war! then again I must 67. So do I, a strongful servant, Far and wide I go, Say what I am called, when I may no longer rest; when I'm still again. Such was the way a great Northern gale impressed a Northern poet who had dwelt by the sea, and who himself, as I believe, had gone down into the sea in ships and battled with the storm. The passages, out of the Elene and the Christ, with which I close this chapter, and which we are certain Cynewulf wrote, not only go far to prove that their writer was the writer of 1 The word I here translate torrents is byrnan ("of burns or brooks"). Torrents is quite fair, for the word is connected with byrnan ("to burn"). The upsurging and boiling of fire is attributed to the fountain and stream. Cynewulf is not thinking of the quiet brooks of the land, but of the furious leaping rivers which he conceives as hidden in the storm clouds over which the storm giant passes on his way. 2 Hlod-gecrod. Hlod is the name given to a "band of robbers from seven to thirty-five," hence any troop or band of men. Gecrod is "a crowd," 66 a multitude." Thus compounded the word means, I think, a crowd made up of troops; of troops of clouds! Then the word "high" put with hlod-gecrod and the context prove sufficiently that Cynewulf was thinking of the piled-up clouds of the storm; and no doubt the notion of ravaging and slaughter connected with Hlod pleased his imagination, for his Tempest is a Destroyer. I quote the line from Shelley which suggested my use of the word " congregated." The two lines which follow may also be compared with the previous passage (11. 42-48) Compare also Vaulted with all thy congregated might Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere The triumphal arch through which I march this fourth riddle, so closely do they parallel it, but are also examples of the symbolic use of the sea and the storm in Christian illustration; of the use by the poet in his old age of the wonderful things he had observed when young. The first, like the passage in the Riddle, thinks of the giant wind pressed down in his cavern, and perhaps of the mythic wild-hunt in the clouds. Wealth below the sky shall fail ; all the splendour of the land to the Wind most like When he, over heroes, high and loudly mounts the sky; In his prison cave narrowly pressed down, Overwhelmed with woes. Elene, 1. 1269. The last I give is full of personal interest, of an old man's remembrance of his sea-voyages; of his troubles like the troubles of the world's stormy sea, of gratitude to God who piloted his bark to the haven where he would be, of longing such as age may have for the fulness of his rest Mickle is our need That in this unfruitful time, ere that fearful Dread, On our spirits' fairness Now most like it is O'er the water cold we should studiously bethink us! as if we on lake of ocean, in our keels are sailing, And through spacious sea, with our stallions of the Sound, Of immeasurable surges that we sail on here, Through this wavering world, through these windy oceans, Perilous our state of life Ere that we had sailed (our ship) to the shore (at last), Then there reached us help, homeward led us on And he dealt us grace, from the vessel's deck, we might stay with ropes, ancient horses of the waves ! O'er the rough sea-ridges. Let us in that haven then all our hope establish, 1 It has been said that elaborate similes are not to be found in Anglo-Saxon poetry. It should be understood that the remark only applies to the earlier poetry. Cynewulf uses a number, of which the two above are examples. There are many more in his work. There is one also in the Genesis, but its age is doubtful. I give here another which belongs to the subject of this chapter, and which is to be found in the Gnomic Verses. I daresay it is of the ninth century As the sea is smooth, When the wind waketh it not, So are the people at peace, when they have settled their strife! Gn. V. (Exon.) 1. 55. Which the ruler of the Ether there has roomed for us, Christ, 1. 848. To compare these lines, written when Cynewulf was advanced in years, with the poem of the Hurricane, written when he was young, has more than a transient interest. And no artist can read both at the same time without having a higher pleasure than the ordinary reader. He will feel the same personality in both, but working, with how different a life behind the poetry, with how different an impulse; in how different a fashion and from how changed a character! Youth, moved out of itself by Nature, and looking neither before nor after, is in the earlier poem. The passion in it is untouched by the weight of the sorrows or duties of manhood, or by the sense of sin and the cry for redemption. These pains and burdens, on the contrary, as well as the soul wrapt in self-consciousness, are present in the later verses. Such a contrast makes Cynewulf real to us; and the change — I will not call it artistic progress, though at certain points it is so - does at least enable us to say, This man was an artist. CHAPTER XI CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE THE matters of which we have treated in the three previous chapters do not belong especially either to heathenism or Christianity. They may rather be called secular. All that had to do with the affairs of arms was as much heathen as Christian; and the same may be said with regard to the greater part of the poetry quoted to illustrate the daily life of our forefathers. We cannot altogether say this when we consider the poetry of natural description. I do not think that the remarkable descriptions of the sea and its storms and of various aspects of nature could have been written by the heathen English. The temper of these poems is not at all the old Teutonic temper. They are too contemplative for English heathendom. Nevertheless some of their spirit goes back to other heathendoms than the Teutonic, and goes back through the advent of Christianity. It was the Celtic missionaries who evangelised Northumbria, and through them the Celtic feeling for nature was imported into English poetry. Along with this, Latin Christianity brought with it Roman poetry, and Virgil and Ovid gave to the Northumbrian poets a fresh and kindling impulse to the observation and love of Nature. Beyond these impulses, however, the coming of Christianity poured into the river of the English imagination a multitude of new tributary streams, enlarged its waters, enriched its constituents, purified, mellowed, and deepened it. It did more; these new streams were of various elements, and though, at first, they did not isolate themselves into distinct currents, yet, as time went on, and they assimilated what was necessary for their separate existence, they became self-conscious streams of poetry within the general stream. What Christianity thus did for literature, what it modified of the past, what it originated for the future, what powers it added to that emotional life from which poetry urges itself upwards into form, what it weakened and strengthened, restricted and enlarged, is the subject of this and the following chapter. When we consider Christianity in contact with those heathen elements, so many of which, as pregnant motives of poetry, have continued in our literature, the first thing to be said is that, owing to the manner in which Christianity was propagated in England, it did not root out heathen ideas so much as change them. Its growth was left to the will of the people; to persuasion and not to force. The sword had no part, as on the Continent, as among the Northmen, in the evangelising of England. In no modern land that Jesus won was his conquest so gentle, so marked by tolerance and good sense. Hence Christianity was subject for a long time to interruptions and reactions. For nearly eighty years 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 sagas 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. These two things, both of which were vital influences on English literature, are best illustrated by a brief but necessary account of the various changes which marked the conversion of England. It was in the year 597 that Augustine brought the gospel to Kent, and King Æthelberht (partly prepared by his wife) listened to it graciously. A speech of his, which Erasmus might have fathered, strikes the key-note of the manner in which Christianity was spread in England by the kings, and indeed by the bishops. "Your words," said Æthelberht, "and promises sound very good to me, but they are new to us, and of uncertain meaning; I cannot so far yield to them as to abandon all that I and the whole English people have for so long observed. 1 1 There were but few exceptions. Episcopal violence seems to have been retained between Christian and Christian, not between Christian and heathen. Augustine was gentle enough, though he was a vain man, with Æthelberht and the Kentish heathen, but his manners with the Welsh monks were not of the same type. But then the Welsh were Christians, not heathen, and they were not in harmony with Rome. It would not have been politic for Augustine to have anything to do with the Welsh. It was more easy for Rome to be tolerant to ignorant heathen than to Christians who differed from her formulæ. And the keeping of Easter at a different date from Rome was a very serious thing; it touched the headship of Rome. Even Baeda seems to lose his temper over it. |