ACKNOWLEDGMENT For permission to use selections we are indebted to the following: Hilaire Belloc for An Unknown Country; Edmund Blunden for The Barn; F. W. Bourdillon for Light; Robert Bridges for The Winnowers, So Sweet Love Seemed, Nightingales; T. E. Brown for My Garden; Jonathan Cape, Limited, for A Great Time, Early Spring, The Moon, Leisure, Rich Days, Sheep, by W. H. Davies; J. M. Dent and Sons for Abraham Lincoln as Orator and Letter-Writer, by James Bryce, and for On the Essays of Elia, by Augustine Birrell; Dodd, Mead and Company for The Soldier, by Rupert Brooke; a selection from Charles Dickens, by G. K. Chesterton; Messmates, The Adventurers, He Fell Among Thieves, Drake's Drum, Vitai Lampada, Clifton Chapel, by Henry Newbolt; Harper and Brothers for The Novel of Today, by H. G. Wells; Henry Holt and Company for The Listeners, Nod, Haunted, Dreams, The Stranger, All That's Past, by Walter de la Mare; Houghton Mifflin Company for For the Fallen, by Laurence Binyon; and The Midlands and Clouds, by John Drinkwater; Mitchell Kennerley for Ramblings in Cheapside, by Samuel Butler; T. Sturge Moore for Kindness; G. P. Putnam's Sons for On Style, by A. T. Quiller-Couch, and a selection from The Upton Letters, by A. C. Benson; J. C. Squire for To a Bull-Dog; Frederick A. Stokes Company for A Song of England, The Moon Is Up, Forty Singing Seamen, by Alfred Noyes; Francis Brett Young for February; The Macmillan Company of New York for Flannan Isle, Raining, In the Meadow, The Swing, by Wilfrid Wilson Gibson; The Bull, by Ralph Hodgson; Beauty, Cargoes, The Seekers, SeaFever, Laugh and Be Merry, The West Wind, by John Masefield; The Snare, by James Stephens; Down by the Salley Gardens, Lake Isle of Innisfree, The Sorrow of Love, When You Are Old, Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven, The Song of Wandering Aengus, The Rose of the World, The White Birds, by W. B. Yeats; The Macmillan Company of London for The Character of Burke, by John Morley; The Coming of the End, When I Set Out for Lyonnesse, Beenie Cliff, The Souls of the Slain, The Oxen, Beyond the Last Lamp, In Time of "the Breaking of Nations," by Thomas Hardy; Frolic, by George Russell; Charles Scribner's Sons for The Passing, Unconquerable, and Pro Rege Nostro, by W. E. Henley; The Spirit of Shakespeare, The Old Chartist, Love in the Valley, The Lark Ascending, The Woods of Westermain, by George Meredith; Parted, The Lady Poverty, The Shepherdess, by Alice Meynell; The Hound of Heaven, To a Snowflake, by Francis Thompson; Castles in Spain, by John Galsworthy; A. P. Watt & Son for If, by Rudyard Kipling. [ xvi ] THE FIRST ENGLISH WRITERS LITERATURE in English as they called the language even in those days — does not appear before the people who had brought the language from their Continental homes had been upward of two centuries and a half in Britain. It appears first in Northumbria after that region had been Christianized by Irish missionaries from the monastery of Iona; and the first discernible figure is that of Cædmon (died about 680), whose story is told by his younger contemporary and neighbor, Bede. The dozen lines of a hymn which he sang in his sleep at the direction of a supernatural visitant happen to survive in Northumbrian form. The scriptural paraphrases, Genesis, Exodus, and Daniel, which were ascribed to Cadmon by his first editor, Junius, a friend of Milton's, are now recognized to be by various later hands. In the next generation or so, in the North, scriptural verse was carried to a high degree of technical development by Cynewulf; whoever he was, a poet of imaginative lift and of intensity and power of expression. His name is known through the runic signatures worked into four of his poems: Juliana and Elene, both saint's lives; Christ, a series of liturgical celebrations of the Advent, the Ascension, and Doomsday; and the Fates of the Apostles, an unassuming catalogue which follows in the manuscript the Andreas, a life of St. Andrew. Cynewulf had many imitators and a considerable body of verse of both the Cadmonian and Cynewulfian sort was later done over into the West Saxon dialect, in which form it survives. The first English, too, delighted in tales of the old heroes, the memory of whose adventures were treasured throughout the Northern world. Only a small portion of what must have been current among them has happened to reach us. The minstrel Widsith, the "far wanderer," of the tribe of the "Myrgings," tells of his journey in the train of Ealhild, daughter of the Lombard king, Audoin, and sister of Alboin, to the court of the great Gothic king, Eormanric, and of the treasure which he received for his singing. Alboin and Eormanric were not contemporaries, but such dislocations of chronology are characteristic of heroic story. Worked into this story are long lists, perhaps older, of famous figures in history and saga, and moral reflections of the somewhat obvious sort, for the sake of which the Old English poet is always ready to drop his narrative. The poem took its present form in England, but the materials are older. The poem of Beowulf is the unique survival of Northern epic. It cannot be said to represent such poetry at its best, for it uses the great traditional heroic material the tragic history of the Danish dynasty of the Scyldings, the war between the Swedes and the Geats, and the historical and fatal raid of the Geat king, Hygelac, against the Franks and Frisians largely as background on which to project a romantic story, drawn from folk-lore, of a hero of great strength (Beowulf) who cleansed a haunted house and later lost his life in a contest with a fire-breathing dragon. Such a combination could not fail to delight an audience of eighth-century Englishmen gathered in the great hall to hear the poem read. Still mindful of their Continental backgrounds, they would thrill to the poet's allusive summaries of its traditional stories. The shuddering approach of the monster Grendel, Beowulf's strength as he wrestles with him and tears off his arm, the hero's courage as he dives into the uncanny mere and all but loses his life in the encounter with the hardly less formidable mother of the monster, would have had for them a freshness of appeal which we can hardly appreciate. I Not less the audience would have relished the moral observations of the poet and the picture which he presents of large and gracious leisure at the king's court and the patterns of heroic conduct that adorn it. The composer of this poem as it stands expressly repudiates the old religion, but his interest in the new religion is in the characteristics common to the two rather than in doctrines specifically Christian. The historical backgrounds of the poem are of the early sixth century and the field of action is the coasts of Denmark, Sweden, and the Netherlands. There is no mention of England. Yet the whole poem is composed in the characteristic English manner, with a sense for the tragic side of things that is reflective rather than dramatic and which yet says less than it means to imply. It was composed, presumably, in the north of England, not far from the beginning of the eighth century. The manuscript in which it is found is more than two centuries younger, during which time the poem was made over into West Saxon. The mood of melancholy introspection, not without mild hope of consolation, which the Wanderer shares with pretty much all personal utterance in Old English verse, is a mood that is recurrent in later English literature. Charles Lamb's Old Familiar Faces perfectly expresses the temper of Old English "lyric." The Northern warrior owed unquestioning allegiance to his lord, who, in turn, was bound to give him generous entertainment; in the event of the lord's death, it was a retainer's duty to compass revenge or die in the attempt. A fine exemplification of the old spirit may be seen in the Battle of Maldon (p. 18). The Wanderer sets forth the melancholy situation of a man who, perhaps through no fault of his own, has outlived his lord and the band of retainers of which he was one. Under Alfred (849-901) and his successors literature again revived and the older Northumbrian poems were redone in the dialect of the now dominant West Saxon region. Alfred's literary work was only part of his many-sided activity on behalf of his people; organizing resistance to the Danes on sea and on land, fostering industry in fabrics and enamel, arranging the laws and the Old English Chronicle, he found time also to interest himself effectively in both clerical and lay education. The original Preface to his translation of Pastoral Care of Pope Gregory (c. 540-604) (see p. 12), gives a vivid picture of the decay of learning in the island and his method of setting about the task of restoring it. The translation of the Ecclesiastical History of the English People, by the Venerable Bede (672-735), here represented by the account of the poet Cædmon, is so literal as to suggest the possibility that it lacks the smoothing hand of the royal author. The translations of Boethius (480-524) and Orosius (c. 415) are made with the utmost freedom. Into the latter's History of the World, he introduced accounts of the voyages of two seamen, Ohthere and Wulfstan, just as they had related them to him. Aelfric (c. 955 c. 1020) was the sort of man whom Alfred would have felt proud to have had a share in producing. Scholar, teacher, preacher, he devoted himself not only to the task of furthering a better regulated life in the religious establishments, but also to the business of making learning accessible to the people. Homilies, Lives of Saints, a Grammar, and a partial translation of the Old Testament, make up the bulk of his writings. He has been very plausibly identified with the Aelfric who was Abbot of Eynsham. The selection is from his life of Gregory, who, as pope, dispatched the first Christian mission to Kent in 595. The The Battle of Brunanburh (937) is the most considerable of the half dozen poetical entries in the Old English Chronicle. It is a swift and exulting account of the victory of Athelstan, grandson of Alfred, over a force of Danes from Ireland and of Scots. site of the battle is not to be determined. Its rapid, summary manner stands in contrast with the ampler, epic style of the Battle of Maldon. The translation is by Lord Tennyson. |