Outlines of English and American Literature
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William J. Long >> Outlines of English and American Literature
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It is obvious that great literature, which appeals to all classes of men
and to all times, cannot go far afield for rare subjects, or follow new
inventions, or concern itself with fashions that are here to-day and gone
to-morrow. Its only subjects are nature and human nature; it deals with
common experiences of joy or sorrow, pain or pleasure, that all men
understand; it cherishes the unchanging ideals of love, faith, duty,
freedom, reverence, courtesy, which were old to the men who kept their
flocks on the plains of Shinar, and which will be young as the morning to
our children's children.
Such ideals tend to ennoble a writer, and therefore are great books
characterized by lofty thought, by fine feeling and, as a rule, by a
beautiful simplicity of expression. They have another quality, hard to
define but easy to understand, a quality which leaves upon us the
impression of eternal youth, as if they had been dipped in the fountain
which Ponce de Leon sought for in vain through the New World. If a great
book could speak, it would use the words of the Cobzar (poet) in his "Last
Song":
The merry Spring, he is my brother,
And when he comes this way
Each year again, he always asks me:
"Art thou not yet grown gray?"
But I. I keep my youth forever,
Even as the Spring his May.
A DEFINITION. Literature, then, if one must formulate a definition, is the
written record of man's best thought and feeling, and English literature is
the part of that record which belongs to the English people. In its
broadest sense literature includes all writing, but as we commonly define
the term it excludes works which aim at instruction, and includes only the
works which aim to give pleasure, and which are artistic in that they
reflect nature or human life in a way to arouse our sense of beauty. In a
still narrower sense, when we study the history of literature we deal
chiefly with the great, the enduring books, which may have been written in
an elder or a latter day, but which have in them the magic of all time.
One may easily challenge such a definition, which, like most others, is far
from faultless. It is difficult, for example, to draw the line sharply
between instructive and pleasure-giving works; for many an instructive book
of history gives us pleasure, and there may be more instruction on
important matters in a pleasurable poem than in a treatise on ethics.
Again, there are historians who allege that English literature must include
not simply the works of Britain but everything written in the English
language. There are other objections; but to straighten them all out is to
be long in starting, and there is a pleasant journey ahead of us. Chaucer
had literature in mind when he wrote:
Through me men goon into that blisful place
Of hertes hele and dedly woundes cure;
Through me men goon unto the wells of grace,
Ther grene and lusty May shal ever endure:
This is the wey to al good aventure.
CHAPTER II
BEGINNINGS OF ENGLISH LITERATURE
Then the warrior, battle-tried, touched the sounding glee-wood:
Straight awoke the harp's sweet note; straight a song uprose,
Sooth and sad its music. Then from hero's lips there fell
A wonder-tale, well told.
_Beowulf_, line 2017 (a free rendering)
In its beginnings English literature is like a river, which proceeds not
from a single wellhead but from many springs, each sending forth its
rivulet of sweet or bitter water. As there is a place where the river
assumes a character of its own, distinct from all its tributaries, so in
English literature there is a time when it becomes national rather than
tribal, and English rather than Saxon or Celtic or Norman. That time was in
the fifteenth century, when the poems of Chaucer and the printing press of
Caxton exalted the Midland above all other dialects and established it as
the literary language of England.
[Sidenote: TRIBUTARIES OF LITERATURE]
Before that time, if you study the records of Britain, you meet several
different tribes and races of men: the native Celt, the law-giving Roman,
the colonizing Saxon, the sea-roving Dane, the feudal baron of Normandy,
each with his own language and literature reflecting the traditions of his
own people. Here in these old records is a strange medley of folk heroes,
Arthur and Beowulf, Cnut and Brutus, Finn and Cuchulain, Roland and Robin
Hood. Older than the tales of such folk-heroes are ancient riddles, charms,
invocations to earth and sky:
Hal wes thu, Folde, fira moder!
Hail to thee, Earth, thou mother of men!
With these pagan spells are found the historical writings of the Venerable
Bede, the devout hymns of Cadmon, Welsh legends, Irish and Scottish fairy
stories, Scandinavian myths, Hebrew and Christian traditions, romances from
distant Italy which had traveled far before the Italians welcomed them. All
these and more, whether originating on British soil or brought in by
missionaries or invaders, held each to its own course for a time, then met
and mingled in the swelling stream which became English literature.
[Illustration: STONEHENGE, ON SALISBURY PLAIN
Probably the ruins of a temple of the native Britons]
To trace all these tributaries to their obscure and lonely sources would
require the labor of a lifetime. We shall here examine only the two main
branches of our early literature, to the end that we may better appreciate
the vigor and variety of modern English. The first is the Anglo-Saxon,
which came into England in the middle of the fifth century with the
colonizing Angles, Jutes and Saxons from the shores of the North Sea and
the Baltic; the second is the Norman-French, which arrived six centuries
later at the time of the Norman invasion. Except in their emphasis on
personal courage, there is a marked contrast between these two branches,
the former being stern and somber, the latter gay and fanciful. In
Anglo-Saxon poetry we meet a strong man who cherishes his own ideals of
honor, in Norman-French poetry a youth eagerly interested in romantic tales
gathered from all the world. One represents life as a profound mystery, the
other as a happy adventure.
* * * * *
ANGLO-SAXON OR OLD-ENGLISH PERIOD (450-1050)
SPECIMENS OF THE LANGUAGE. Our English speech has changed so much in the
course of centuries that it is now impossible to read our earliest records
without special study; but that Anglo-Saxon is our own and not a foreign
tongue may appear from the following examples. The first is a stanza from
"Widsith," the chant of a wandering gleeman or minstrel; and for comparison
we place beside it Andrew Lang's modern version. Nobody knows how old
"Widsith" is; it may have been sung to the accompaniment of a harp that was
broken fourteen hundred years ago. The second, much easier to read, is from
the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which was prepared by King Alfred from an older
record in the ninth century:
Swa scrithende
gesceapum hweorfath,
Gleomen gumena
geond grunda fela;
Thearfe secgath,
thonc-word sprecath,
Simle, suth oththe north
sumne gemetath,
Gydda gleawne
geofam unhneawne.
So wandering on
the world about,
Gleemen do roam
through many lands;
They say their needs,
they speak their thanks,
Sure, south or north
someone to meet,
Of songs to judge
and gifts not grudge.
Her Hengest and Aesc, his sunu, gefuhton wid Bryttas on thaere
stowe the is gecweden Creccanford, and thaer ofslogon feower
thusenda wera. And tha Bryttas tha forleton Cent-lond, and mid
myclum ege flugon to Lundenbyrig.
At this time Hengist and Esk, his son, fought with the Britons at
the place that is called Crayford, and there slew four thousand
men. And the Britons then forsook Kentland, and with much fear fled
to London town.
BEOWULF. The old epic poem, called after its hero Beowulf, is more than
myth or legend, more even than history; it is a picture of a life and a
world that once had real existence. Of that vanished life, that world of
ancient Englishmen, only a few material fragments remain: a bit of linked
armor, a rusted sword with runic inscriptions, the oaken ribs of a war
galley buried with the Viking who had sailed it on stormy seas, and who was
entombed in it because he loved it. All these are silent witnesses; they
have no speech or language. But this old poem is a living voice, speaking
with truth and sincerity of the daily habit of the fathers of modern
England, of their adventures by sea or land, their stern courage and grave
courtesy, their ideals of manly honor, their thoughts of life and death.
Let us hear, then, the story of _Beowulf_, picturing in our
imagination the story-teller and his audience. The scene opens in a great
hall, where a fire blazes on the hearth and flashes upon polished shields
against the timbered walls. Down the long room stretches a table where men
are feasting or passing a beaker from hand to hand, and anon crying _Hal!
hal!_ in answer to song or in greeting to a guest. At the head of the
hall sits the chief with his chosen ealdormen. At a sign from the chief a
gleeman rises and strikes a single clear note from his harp. Silence falls
on the benches; the story begins:
Hail! we of the Spear Danes in days of old
Have heard the glory of warriors sung;
Have cheered the deeds that our chieftains wrought,
And the brave Scyld's triumph o'er his foes.
Then because there are Scyldings present, and because brave men
revere their ancestors, the gleeman tells a beautiful legend of how
King Scyld came and went: how he arrived as a little child, in a
war-galley that no man sailed, asleep amid jewels and weapons; and
how, when his life ended at the call of Wyrd or Fate, they placed
him against the mast of a ship, with treasures heaped around him
and a golden banner above his head, gave ship and cargo to the
winds, and sent their chief nobly back to the deep whence he came.
So with picturesque words the gleeman thrills his hearers with a
vivid picture of a Viking's sea-burial. It thrills us now, when the
Vikings are no more, and when no other picture can be drawn by an
eyewitness of that splendid pagan rite.
[Sidenote: THE STORY OF HEOROT]
One of Scyld's descendants was King Hrothgar (Roger) who built the
hall Heorot, where the king and his men used to gather nightly to
feast, and to listen to the songs of scop or gleeman. [Footnote:
Like Agamemnon and the Greek chieftains, every Saxon leader had his
gleeman or minstrel, and had also his own poet, his scop or
"shaper," whose duty it was to shape a glorious deed into more
glorious verse. So did our pagan ancestors build their monuments
out of songs that should live in the hearts of men when granite or
earth mound had crumbled away.] "There was joy of heroes," but in
one night the joy was changed to mourning. Out on the lonely fens
dwelt the jotun (giant or monster) Grendel, who heard the sound of
men's mirth and quickly made an end of it. One night, as the thanes
slept in the hall, he burst in the door and carried off thirty
warriors to devour them in his lair under the sea. Another and
another horrible raid followed, till Heorot was deserted and the
fear of Grendel reigned among the Spear Danes. There were brave men
among them, but of what use was courage when their weapons were
powerless against the monster? "Their swords would not bite on his
body."
For twelve years this terror continued; then the rumor of Grendel
reached the land of the Geats, where Beowulf lived at the court of
his uncle, King Hygelac. No sooner did Beowulf hear of a dragon to
be slain, of a friendly king "in need of a man," than he selected
fourteen companions and launched his war-galley in search of
adventure.
[Sidenote: THE SAILING OF BEOWULF]
At this point the old epic becomes a remarkable portrayal of daily
life. In its picturesque lines we see the galley set sail, foam
flying from her prow; we catch the first sight of the southern
headlands, approach land, hear the challenge of the "warder of the
cliffs" and Beowulf's courteous answer. We follow the march to
Heorot in war-gear, spears flashing, swords and byrnies clanking,
and witness the exchange of greetings between Hrothgar and the
young hero. Again is the feast spread in Heorot; once more is heard
the song of gleemen, the joyous sound of warriors in comradeship.
There is also a significant picture of Hrothgar's wife, "mindful of
courtesies," honoring her guests by passing the mead-cup with her
own hands. She is received by these stern men with profound
respect.
When the feast draws to an end the fear of Grendel returns.
Hrothgar warns his guests that no weapon can harm the monster, that
it is death to sleep in the hall; then the Spear Danes retire,
leaving Beowulf and his companions to keep watch and ward. With the
careless confidence of brave men, forthwith they all fall asleep:
Forth from the fens, from the misty moorlands,
Grendel came gliding--God's wrath he bore--
Came under clouds until he saw clearly,
Glittering with gold plates, the mead-hall of men.
Down fell the door, though hardened with fire-bands,
Open it sprang at the stroke of his paw.
Swollen with rage burst in the bale-bringer,
Flamed in his eyes a fierce light, likest fire.
[Sidenote: THE FIGHT WITH GRENDEL]
Throwing himself upon the nearest sleeper Grendel crushes and
swallows him; then he stretches out a paw towards Beowulf, only to
find it "seized in such a grip as the fiend had never felt before."
A desperate conflict begins, and a mighty uproar,--crashing of
benches, shoutings of men, the "war-song" of Grendel, who is trying
to break the grip of his foe. As the monster struggles toward the
door, dragging the hero with him, a wide wound opens on his
shoulder; the sinews snap, and with a mighty wrench Beowulf tears
off the whole limb. While Grendel rushes howling across the fens,
Beowulf hangs the grisly arm with its iron claws, "the whole
grapple of Grendel," over the door where all may see it.
Once more there is joy in Heorot, songs, speeches, the liberal
giving of gifts. Thinking all danger past, the Danes sleep in the
hall; but at midnight comes the mother of Grendel, raging to avenge
her son. Seizing the king's bravest companion she carries him away,
and he is never seen again.
Here is another adventure for Beowulf. To old Hrothgar, lamenting
his lost earl, the hero says simply:
Wise chief, sorrow not. For a man it is meet
His friend to avenge, not to mourn for his loss;
For death comes to all, but honor endures:
Let him win it who will, ere Wyrd to him calls,
And fame be the fee of a warrior dead!
Following the trail of the _Brimwylf_ or _Merewif_
(sea-wolf or sea-woman) Beowulf and his companions pass through
desolate regions to a wild cliff on the shore. There a friend
offers his good sword Hrunting for the combat, and Beowulf accepts
the weapon, saying:
ic me mid Hruntinge
Dom gewyrce, oththe mec death nimeth.
I with Hrunting
Honor will win, or death shall me take.
[Sidenote: THE DRAGON'S CAVE]
Then he plunges into the black water, is attacked on all sides by
the _Grundwrygen_ or bottom monsters, and as he stops to fight
them is seized by the _Merewif_ and dragged into a cave, a
mighty "sea-hall" free from water and filled with a strange light.
On its floor are vast treasures; its walls are adorned with
weapons; in a corner huddles the wounded Grendel. All this Beowulf
sees in a glance as he turns to fight his new foe.
Follows then another terrific combat, in which the brand Hrunting
proves useless. Though it rings out its "clanging war-song" on the
monster's scales, it will not "bite" on the charmed body. Beowulf
is down, and at the point of death, when his eye lights on a huge
sword forged by the jotuns of old. Struggling to his feet he seizes
the weapon, whirls it around his head for a mighty blow, and the
fight is won. Another blow cuts off the head of Grendel, but at the
touch of the poisonous blood the steel blade melts like ice before
the fire.
Leaving all the treasures, Beowulf takes only the golden hilt of
the magic sword and the head of Grendel, reenters the sea and
mounts up to his companions. They welcome him as one returned from
the dead. They relieve him of helmet and byrnie, and swing away in
a triumphal procession to Heorot. The hero towers among them, a
conspicuous figure, and next to him comes the enormous head of
Grendel carried on a spear-shaft by four of the stoutest thanes.
[Sidenote: THE FIREDRAKE]
More feasting, gifts, noble speeches follow before the hero returns
to his own land, laden with treasures. So ends the first part of
the epic. In the second part Beowulf succeeds Hygelac as chief of
the Geats, and rules them well for fifty years. Then a "firedrake,"
guarding an immense hoard of treasure (as in most of the old dragon
stories), begins to ravage the land. Once more the aged Beowulf
goes forth to champion his people; but he feels that "Wyrd is close
to hand," and the fatalism which pervades all the poem is finely
expressed in his speech to his companions. In his last fight he
kills the dragon, winning the dragon's treasure for his people; but
as he battles amid flame and smoke the fire enters his lungs, and
he dies "as dies a man," paying for victory with his life. Among
his last words is a command which reminds us again of the old
Greeks, and of the word of Elpenor to Odysseus:
"Bid my brave men raise a barrow for me on the headland,
broad, high, to be seen far out at sea: that hereafter
sea-farers, driving their foamy keels through ocean's mist,
may behold and say, ''Tis Beowulf's mound!'"
The hero's last words and the closing scenes of the epic, including
the funeral pyre, the "bale-fire" and another Viking burial to the
chant of armed men riding their war steeds, are among the noblest
that have come down to us from beyond the dawn of history.
Such, in brief outline, is the story of _Beowulf_. It is recorded on a
fire-marked manuscript, preserved as by a miracle from the torch of the
Danes, which is now one of the priceless treasures of the British Museum.
The handwriting indicates that the manuscript was copied about the year
1100, but the language points to the eighth or ninth century, when the poem
in its present form was probably composed on English soil. [Footnote:
Materials used in _Beowulf_ are very old, and may have been brought to
England during the Anglo-Saxon invasion. Parts of the material, such as the
dragon-fights, are purely mythical. They relate to Beowa, a superman, of
whom many legends were told by Scandinavian minstrels. The Grendel legend,
for example, appears in the Icelandic saga of Gretti, who slays the dragon
Glam. Other parts of _Beowulf_ are old battle songs; and still others,
relating to King Hygelac and his nephew, have some historical foundation.
So little is known about the epic that one cannot safely make any positive
statement as to its origin. It was written in crude, uneven lines; but a
rhythmic, martial effect, as of marching men, was produced by strong accent
and alliteration, and the effect was strengthened by the harp with which
the gleeman always accompanied his recital.]
ANGLO-SAXON SONGS. Beside the epic of _Beowulf_ a few mutilated poems
have been preserved, and these are as fragments of a plate or film upon
which the life of long ago left its impression. One of the oldest of these
poems is "Widsith," the "wide-goer," which describes the wanderings and
rewards of the ancient gleeman. It begins:
Widsith spake, his word-hoard unlocked,
He who farthest had fared among earth-folk and tribe-folk.
Then follows a recital of the places he had visited, and the gifts he had
received for his singing. Some of the personages named are real, others
mythical; and as the list covers half a world and several centuries of
time, it is certain that Widsith's recital cannot be taken literally.
[Sidenote: MEANING OF WIDSITH]
Two explanations offer themselves: the first, that the poem contains the
work of many scops, each of whom added his travels to those of his
predecessor; the second, that Widsith, like other gleemen, was both
historian and poet, a keeper of tribal legends as well as a shaper of
songs, and that he was ever ready to entertain his audience with things new
or old. Thus, he mentioned Hrothgar as one whom he had visited; and if a
hearer called for a tale at this point, the scop would recite that part of
_Beowulf_ which tells of the monster Grendel. Again, he named Sigard
the Volsung (the Siegfrid of the _Niebelungenlied_ and of Wagner's
opera), and this would recall the slaying of the dragon Fafnir, or some
other story of the old Norse saga. So every name or place which Widsith
mentioned was an invitation. When he came to a hall and "unlocked his
word-hoard," he offered his hearers a variety of poems and legends from
which they made their own selection. Looked at in this way, the old poem
becomes an epitome of Anglo-Saxon literature.
[Sidenote: TYPES OF SAXON POETRY]
Other fragments of the period are valuable as indicating that the
Anglo-Saxons were familiar with various types of poetry. "Deor's Lament,"
describing the sorrows of a scop who had lost his place beside his chief,
is a true lyric; that is, a poem which reflects the author's feeling rather
than the deed of another man. In his grief the scop comforts himself by
recalling the afflictions of various heroes, and he ends each stanza with
the refrain:
That sorrow he endured; this also may I.
Among the best of the early poems are: "The Ruined City," reflecting the
feeling of one who looks on crumbling walls that were once the abode of
human ambition; "The Seafarer," a chantey of the deep, which ends with an
allegory comparing life to a sea voyage; "The Wanderer," which is the
plaint of one who has lost home, patron, ambition, and as the easiest way
out of his difficulty turns _eardstappa_, an "earth-hitter" or tramp;
"The Husband's Message," which is the oldest love song in our literature;
and a few ballads and battle songs, such as "The Battle of Brunanburh"
(familiar to us in Tennyson's translation) and "The Fight at Finnsburgh,"
which was mentioned by the gleemen in _Beowulf_, and which was then
probably as well known as "The Charge of the Light Brigade" is to modern
Englishmen.
Another early war song, "The Battle of Maldon" or "Byrhtnoth's Death," has
seldom been rivaled in savage vigor or in the expression of deathless
loyalty to a chosen leader. The climax of the poem is reached when the few
survivors of an uneven battle make a ring of spears about their fallen
chief, shake their weapons in the face of an overwhelming horde of Danes,
while Byrhtwold, "the old comrade," chants their defiance:
The sterner shall thought be, the bolder our hearts,
The greater the mood as lessens our might.
We know not when or by whom this stirring battle cry was written. It was
copied under date of 991 in the _Anglo-Saxon Chronicle_, and is
commonly called the swan song of Anglo-Saxon poetry. The lion song would be
a better name for it.
LATER PROSE AND POETRY. The works we have just considered were wholly pagan
in spirit, but all reference to Thor or other gods was excluded by the
monks who first wrote down the scop's poetry.
With the coming of these monks a reform swept over pagan England, and
literature reflected the change in a variety of ways. For example, early
Anglo-Saxon poetry was mostly warlike, for the reason that the various
earldoms were in constant strife; but now the peace of good will was
preached, and moral courage, the triumph of self-control, was exalted above
mere physical hardihood. In the new literature the adventures of Columb or
Aidan or Brendan were quite as thrilling as any legends of Beowulf or
Sigard, but the climax of the adventure was spiritual, and the emphasis was
always on moral heroism.
Another result of the changed condition was that the unlettered scop, who
carried his whole stock of poetry in his head, was replaced by the literary
monk, who had behind him the immense culture of the Latin language, and who
was interested in world history or Christian doctrine rather than in tribal
fights or pagan mythology. These monks were capable men; they understood
the appeal of pagan poetry, and their motto was, "Let nothing good be
wasted." So they made careful copy of the scop's best songs (else had not a
shred of early poetry survived), and so the pagan's respect for womanhood,
his courage, his loyalty to a chief,--all his virtues were recognized and
turned to religious account in the new literature. Even the beautiful pagan
scrolls, or "dragon knots," once etched on a warrior's sword, were
reproduced in glowing colors in the initial letters of the monk's
illuminated Gospel.
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