The evidence is rendered more easy in the present connection by the fact, recognised by the most competent authorities in First English or Anglo-Saxon itself, that for some time before the arbitrary line of the Conquest the productive powers of the literature had been failing, and the language itself was showing signs of change. No poetry of the first cla.s.s seems to have been written in it much after the end of the ninth century, little prose of a very good cla.s.s after the beginning of the eleventh; and its inflexions must in time have given way--were, it is said by some, actually giving way--before the results of the invasion and a.s.similation of French and Latin. The Conquest helped; but it did not wholly cause.
This, however, is no doubt open to argument, and the argument would have to be conducted mainly if not wholly on philological considerations, with which we do not here meddle. The indisputable literary facts are that the canon of pure Anglo-Saxon or Old-English literature closes with the end of the Saxon Chronicle in 1154, and that the "Semi-Saxon," the "First Middle English," which then makes its appearance, approximates, almost decade by decade, almost year by year, nearer and nearer to the modern type. And for our purpose, though not for the purpose of a history of English Literature proper, the contemporary French and Latin writing has to be taken side by side with it.
[Sidenote: _Early Middle English Literature._]
It is not surprising that, although the Latin literary production of the time, especially in history, was at least equal to that of any other European country, and though it is at least probable that some of the greatest achievements of literature, French in language, are English in nationality, the vernacular should for long have been a little scanty and a little undistinguished in its yield. Periods of moulting, of putting on new skins, and the like, are never periods of extreme physical vigour. And besides, this Anglo-Saxon itself had (as has been said) been distinctly on the wane as a literary language for more than a century, while (as has not yet been said) it had never been very fertile in varieties of profane literature. This infertility is not surprising. Except at rare periods literature without literary compet.i.tion and comparison is impossible; and the Anglo-Saxons had absolutely no modern literature to compare and compete with. If any existed, their own was far ahead of it. On the other hand, though the supposed ignorance of Latin and even Greek in the "dark" ages has long been known to be a figment of ignorance itself, circ.u.mstances connected with, though not confined to, the concentration of learning and teaching in the clergy brought about a disproportionate attention to theology. The result was that the completest Anglo-Saxon library of which we can form any well-based conception would have contained about ten cases of religious to one of non-religious books, and would have held in that eleventh but little poetry, and hardly any prose with an object other than information or practical use.
[Sidenote: _Scantiness of its const.i.tuents._]
It could not be expected that the slowly changing language should at once change its habits in this respect. And so, as the century immediately before the Conquest had seen little but chronicles and homilies, leechdoms and laws, that which came immediately afterwards gave at first no very different products, except that the laws were wanting, for obvious reasons. Nay, the first, the largest, and almost the sole work of _belles lettres_ during the first three-fourths of our period, the _Brut_ of Layamon, is a work of _belles lettres_ without knowing it, and imagines itself to be a sober history, while its most considerable contemporaries, the _Ormulum_ and the _Ancren Riwle_, the former in verse, the latter in prose, are both purely religious. At the extreme end of the period the most important and most certain work, Robert of Gloucester"s, is, again, a history in verse. About the same time we have, indeed, the romances of _Havelok_ and _Horn_; but they are, like most of the other work of the time, translations from the French. The interesting _Poema Morale_, or "Moral Ode," which we have in two forms--one of the meeting-point of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, one fifty years later--is almost certainly older than its earliest extant version, and was very likely pure Saxon. Only in Nicholas of Guilford"s _Owl and Nightingale_, about 1250, and perhaps some of the charming _Specimens of Lyric Poetry_, printed more than fifty years ago by Mr Wright, with a very few other things, do we find pure literature--not the literature of education or edification, but the literature of art and form.
[Sidenote: _Layamon._]
Yet the whole is, for the true student of literature, full enough of interest, while the best things are not in need of praising by allowance. Of Layamon mention has already been made in the chapter on the Arthurian Legend. But his work covers very much more than the Arthurian matter, and has interests entirely separate from it.
Layamon, as he tells us,[89] derived his information from Bede, Wace, and a certain Albinus who has not been clearly identified. But he must have added a great deal of his own, and if it could be decided exactly _how_ he added it, the most difficult problem of mediaeval literature would be solved. Thus in the Arthurian part, just as we find additions in Wace to Geoffrey, so we find additions to Wace in Layamon. Where did he get these additions? Was it from the uncertain "Albinus"? Was it, as Celtic enthusiasts hold, that, living as he did on Severn bank, he was a neighbour of Wales, and gathered Welsh tradition? Or was it from deliberate invention? We cannot tell.
[Footnote 89: Ed. Madden, i. 2.]
Again, we have two distinct versions of his _Brut_, the later of which is fifty years or thereabouts younger than the earlier. It may be said that almost all mediaeval work is in similar case. But then the great body of mediaeval work is anonymous; and even the most scrupulous ages have not been squeamish in taking liberties with the text of Mr Anon.
But the author is named in both these versions, and named differently.
In the elder he is Layamon the son of Leovenath, in the younger Laweman the son of Leuca; and though Laweman is a mere variant or translation of Layamon, as much can hardly be said of Leovenath and Leuca. Further, the later version, besides the changes of language which were in the circ.u.mstances inevitable, omits many pa.s.sages, besides those in which it is injured or mutilated, and alters proper names entirely at discretion.
The only explanation of this, though it is an explanation which leaves a good deal unexplained, is, of course, that the sense both of historical criticism and of the duty of one writer to another was hardly born. The curiosity of the Middle Ages was great; their literary faculty, though somewhat incult and infantine, was great likewise: and there were such enormous gaps in their positive knowledge that the sharp sense of division between the certain, the uncertain, and the demonstrably false, which has grown up later, could hardly exist. It seems to have been every man"s desire to leave each tale a little richer, fuller, handsomer, than he found it: and in doing this he hesitated neither at the acc.u.mulation of separate and sometimes incongruous stories, nor at the insertion of bits and sc.r.a.ps from various sources, nor, it would appear, at the addition of what seemed to him possible or desirable, without troubling himself to examine whether there was any ground for considering it actual.
[Sidenote: _The form of the_ Brut.]
Secondly, Layamon has no small interest of form. The language in which the _Brut_ is written has an exceedingly small admixture of French words; but it has made a step, and a long one, from Anglo-Saxon towards English. The verse is still alliterative, still dest.i.tute of any fixed number of syllables or syllabic equivalents. But the alliteration is weak and sometimes not present at all, the lines are of less extreme lawlessness in point of length than their older Saxon representatives, and, above all, there is a creeping in of rhyme. It is feeble, tentative, and obvious, confined to ostentatious pairs like "brother" and "other," "might" and "right," "fare" and "care." But it is a beginning: and we know that it will spread.
[Sidenote: _Its substance._]
In the last comparison, that of matter, Layamon will not come out ill even if he be tried high. The most obvious trial is with the work of Chrestien de Troyes, his earlier, though not much earlier, contemporary. Here the Frenchman has enormous advantages--the advantage of an infinitely more accomplished scheme of language and metre, that of some two centuries of finished poetical work before him, that of an evidently wider knowledge of literature generally, and perhaps that of a more distinctly poetical genius. And yet Layamon can survive the test. He is less, not more, subject to the _cliche_, the stereotyped and stock poetical form, than Chrestien. If he is far less smooth, he has not the monotony which accompanies and, so to speak, dogs the "skipping octosyllable"; and if he cannot, as Chrestien can, frame a set pa.s.sage or show-piece, he manages to keep up a diffused interest, and in certain instances--the story of Rouwenne (Rowena), the Tintagel pa.s.sage, the speech of Walwain to the Emperor of Rome--has a directness and simple appeal which cannot be slighted. We feel that he is at the beginning, while the other in respect of his own division is nearly at the end: that he has future, capabilities, opportunities of development. When one reads Chrestien or another earlier contemporary, Benoit de Sainte-More, the question is, "What can come after this?" When one reads Layamon the happier question is, "What will come after this?"
[Sidenote: _The_ Ormulum. _Its metre._]
The _Ormulum_ and the _Ancren Riwle_ appear to be--the former exactly and the latter nearly of the same date as Layamon, all being near to 1200. But though they were "good books," their interest is by no means merely one of edification. That of the _Ormulum_[90] is, indeed, almost entirely confined to its form and language; but it so happens that this interest is of the kind that touches literature most nearly.
Orm or Ormin, who gives us his name, but of whom nothing else is known, has left in ten thousand long lines or twenty thousand short couplets a part only of a vast scheme of paraphrase and homiletic commentary on the Four Gospels (the "four-in-hand of Aminadab," as he calls them, taking up an earlier conceit), on the plan of taking a text for each day from its gospel in the calendar. As we have only thirty-two of these divisions, it is clear that the work, if completed, was much larger than this. Orm addresses it to Walter, his brother in the flesh as well as spiritually: the book seems to be written in an Anglian or East Anglian dialect, and it is at least an odd coincidence that the names Orm and Walter occur together in a Durham MS. But whoever Orm or Ormin was, he did two very remarkable things. In the first place, he broke entirely with alliteration and with any-length lines, composing his poem in a metre which is either a fifteen-syllabled iambic tetrameter catalectic, or else, as the reader pleases, a series of distichs in iambic dimeters, alternately acatalectic and catalectic. He does not rhyme, but his work, in the couplet form which shows it best, exhibits occasionally the alternation of masculine and feminine endings. This latter peculiarity was not to take hold in the language; but the quantified or mainly syllabic arrangement was. It was natural that Ormin, greatly daring, and being almost the first to dare, should neither allow himself the principle of equivalence shortly to distinguish English prosody from the French, which, with Latin, he imitated, nor should further hamper his already difficult task with rhyme. But his innovation was great enough, and his name deserves--little positive poetry as there is in his own book--high rank in the hierarchy of British poets. But for him and others like him that magnificent mixed harmony, which English almost alone of languages possesses, which distinguishes it as much from the rigid syllabic bondage of French as from the loose jangle of merely alliterative and accentual verse, would not have come in, or would have come in later. We might have had Langland, but we should not have had Chaucer: we should have had to console ourselves for the loss of Surrey and Wyatt with ingenious extravagances like Gawain Douglas"s Eighth Prologue; and it is even possible that when the reaction did come, as it must have come sooner or later, we might have been bound like the French by the rigid syllable which Orm himself adopted, but which in those early days only served to guide and not to fetter.
[Footnote 90: Ed. White and Holt, 2 vols. Oxford, 1878.]
[Sidenote: _Its spelling._]
His second important peculiarity shows that he must have been an odd and crotchety creature, but one with sense in his crotchets. He seems to have been annoyed by misp.r.o.nunciation of his own and other work: and accordingly he adopts (with full warning and explanation) the plan of invariably doubling the consonant after every _short_ vowel without exception. This gives a most grotesque air to his pages, which are studded with words like "nemmnedd" (named), "forrwerrpenn" (to despise), "tunderrstanndenn" (to understand), and so forth. But, in the first place, it fixes for all time, in a most invaluable manner, the p.r.o.nunciation of English at that time; and in the second, it shows that Orm had a sound understanding of that principle of English which has been set at nought by those who would spell "traveller"
"traveler." He knew that the tendency, and the, if not warned, excusable tendency, of an English tongue would be to p.r.o.nounce this trav_ee_ler. It is a pity that knowledge which existed in the twelfth century should apparently have become partial ignorance close to the beginning of the twentieth.
[Sidenote: _The_ Ancren Riwle.]
The _Ancren Riwle_[91] has no oddities of this kind, and nothing particularly noticeable in its form, though its easy pleasant prose would have been wonderful at the time in any other European nation.
Even French prose was only just beginning to take such form, and had not yet severed itself from poetic peculiarities to anything like the same extent. But then the unknown author of the _Ancren Riwle_ had certainly four or five, and perhaps more, centuries of good sound Saxon prose before him: while St Bernard (if he wrote French prose), and even Villehardouin, had little or nothing but Latin. I have called him unknown, and he neither names himself nor is authoritatively named by any one; while of the guesses respecting him, that which identifies him with Simon of Ghent is refuted by the language of the book, while that which a.s.signs it to Bishop Poore has no foundation. But if we do not know who wrote the book, we know for whom it was written--to wit, for the three "anch.o.r.esses" or irregular nuns of a private convent or sisterhood at Tarrant Keynes in Dorsets.h.i.+re.
[Footnote 91: Ed. Morton, for the Camden Society. London, 1853. This edition is, I believe, not regarded as quite satisfactory by philology: it is amply adequate for literature.]
Later this nunnery, which lasted till the dissolution, was taken under the Cistercian rule; but at first, and at the time of the book, it was free, the author advising the inmates, if anybody asked, to say that they were under "the rule of St James"--_i.e._, the famous definition, by that apostle, of pure religion and undefiled. The treatise, which describes itself, or is described in one of its MSS., as "one book to-dealed into eight books," is of some length, but singularly pleasing to read, and gives evidence of a very amiable and sensible spirit in its author, as well as of a pretty talent for writing easy prose. If he never rises to the more mystical and poetical beauties of mediaeval religion, so he never descends to its ferocities and its puerilities. The rule, the "lady-rule," he says, is the inward; the outward is only adopted in order to a.s.sist and help the inward: therefore it may and should vary according to the individual, while the inward cannot. The outward rule of the anch.o.r.esses of Tarrant Keynes was by no means rigorous. They were three in number; they had lay sisters (practically lady"s-maids) as well as inferior servants.
They are not to reduce themselves to bread-and-water fasting without special direction; they are not to be ostentatious in alms-giving; they may have a pet cat; haircloth and hedgehog-skins are not for them; and they are not to flog themselves with briars or leaded thongs. Ornaments are not to be worn; but a note says that this is not a positive command, all such things belonging merely to the external rule. Also they may wash just as often as it is necessary, or as they like!--an item which, absurd as is the popular notion of the dirt of the Middle Ages, speaks volumes for the sense and taste of this excellent anonym.
This part is the last or eighth "dole," as the sections are termed; the remaining seven deal with religious service, private devotion, the _Wesen_ or nature of anchorites, temptation, confession, penance, penitence, and the love of G.o.d. Although some may think it out of fas.h.i.+on, it is astonis.h.i.+ng how much sense, kindliness, true religion, and useful learning there is in this monitor of the anch.o.r.esses of Tarrant Keynes, which place a man might well visit in pilgrimage to do him honour. Every now and then, rough as is his vehicle of speech--a transition medium, endowed neither with the oak-and-rock strength of Anglo-Saxon nor with the varied gifts of modern English--he can rise to real and true eloquence, as where he speaks of the soul and "the heavy flesh that draweth her downwards, yet through the highs.h.i.+p [n.o.bleness] of her, it [the flesh] shall become full light--yea, lighter than the wind is, and brighter than the sun is, if only it follow her and draw her not too hard to its own low kind." But though such pa.s.sages, good in phrase and rhythm, as well as n.o.ble in sense, are not rare, the pleasant humanity of the whole book is the best thing in it. M. Renan oddly enough p.r.o.nounced _Ecclesiastes_, that voice of the doom of life, to be "le seul livre aimable" which Judaism had produced. The ages of St Francis and of the _Imitation_ do not compel us to look about for a _seul livre aimable_, but it may safely be said that there is none more amiable in a cheerful human way than the _Ancren Riwle_.
It would serve no purpose here to discuss in detail most of the other vernacular productions of the first half of the thirteenth century in English.[92] They are almost without exception either religious--the constant rehandling of the time cannot be better exemplified than by the fact that at least two paraphrases, one in prose, one in verse, of one of the "doles" of the _Ancren Riwle_ itself exist--or else moral-scientific, such as the _Bestiary_,[93] so often printed. One of the constantly recurring version-paraphrases of the Scriptures, however--the so-called _Story of Genesis and Exodus_,[94] supposed to date from about the middle--has great interest, because here we find (whether for the first time or not he would be a rash man who should say, but certainly for almost, if not quite, the first) the famous "Christabel" metre--iambic dimeter, rhymed with a wide licence of trisyllabic equivalence. This was to be twice revived by great poets, with immense consequences to English poetry--first by Spenser in the _Kalendar_, and then by Coleridge himself--and was to become one of the most powerful, varied, and charming of English rhythms. That this metre, the chief battle-ground of fighting between the accent-men and the quant.i.ty-men, never arose till after rhymed quant.i.tative metre had met accentual alliteration, and had to a great extent overcome it, is a tell-tale fact, of which more hereafter. And it is to be observed also that in this same poem it is possible to discover not a few very complete and handsome decasyllables which would do no discredit to Chaucer himself.
[Footnote 92: Substantial portions of all the work mentioned in this chapter will be found in Messrs Morris and Skeat"s invaluable _Specimens of Early English_ (Oxford, Part i. ed. 2, 1887; Part ii.
ed. 3, 1894). These include the whole of the _Moral Ode_ and of _King Horn_. Separate complete editions of some are noted below.]
[Footnote 93: Wright, _Reliquiae Antiquae_, i. 208-227.]
[Footnote 94: Ed. Morris, E.E.T.S., London, 1865.]
[Sidenote: _The_ Owl and the Nightingale.]
[Sidenote: _Proverbs._]
But the _Owl and the Nightingale_[95] is another kind of thing. In the first place, it appears to be (though it would be rash to affirm this positively of anything in a form so popular with the French _trouveres_ as the _debat_) original and not translated. It bears a name, that of Nicholas of Guildford, who seems to be the author, and a.s.signs himself a local habitation at Portesham in Dorsets.h.i.+re.
Although of considerable length (nearly two thousand lines), and written in very pure English with few French words, it manages the rhymed octosyllabic couplet (which by this time had become the standing metre of France for everything but historical poems, and for some of these) with remarkable precision, lightness, and harmony.
Moreover, the Owl and the Nightingale conduct their debate with plenty of mother-wit, expressed not unfrequently in proverbial form. Indeed proverbs, a favourite form of expression with Englishmen at all times, appear to have been specially in favour just then; and the "Proverbs of Alfred"[96] (supposed to date from this very time), the "Proverbs of Hendyng"[97] a little later, are not likely to have been the only collections of the kind. The Alfred Proverbs are in a rude popular metre like the old alliteration much broken down; those of Hendyng in a six-line stanza (soon to become the famous ballad stanza) syllabled, though sometimes catalectically, 8 8 6 8 8 6, and rhymed _a a b c c b_, the proverb and the _coda_ "quod Hendyng" being added to each.
The _Owl and the Nightingale_ is, however, as we might expect, superior to both of these in poetical merit, as well as to the so-called _Moral Ode_ which, printed by Hickes in 1705, was one of the first Middle English poems to gain modern recognition.
[Footnote 95: About 600 lines of this are given by Morris and Skeat.
Completely edited by (among others) F.H. Stratmann. Krefeld, 1868.]
[Footnote 96: Ed. Morris, _An Old English Miscellany_. London, 1872.]
[Footnote 97: See _Reliquiae Antiquae_, i. 109-116.]
[Sidenote: _Robert of Gloucester._]
As the dividing-point of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries approaches, the interest of literary work increases, and requires less and less allowance of historical and accidental value. This allowance, indeed, is still necessary with the verse chronicle of Robert of Gloucester,[98] the date of which is fixed with sufficient certainty at 1298. This book has been somewhat undervalued, in point of strict literary merit, from a cause rather ludicrous but still real. It will almost invariably be found that those mediaeval books which happen to have been made known before the formal beginning of scholars.h.i.+p in the modern languages, are underrated by modern scholars, who not unnaturally put a perhaps excessive price upon their own discoveries or fosterlings. Robert of Gloucester"s work, with the later but companion Englis.h.i.+ng of Peter of Langtoft by Robert Manning of Brunne, was published by Hearne in the early part of the last century. The contemporaries of that publication thought him rude, unkempt, "Gothick": the moderns have usually pa.s.sed him by for more direct _proteges_ of their own. Yet there is not a little attraction in Robert. To begin with, he is the first in English, if not the first in any modern language, to attempt in the vernacular a general history, old as well as new, new as well as old. And the opening of him is not to be despised--
"Engeland is a well good land, I ween of each land the best, Yset in the end of the world, as all in the West: The sea goeth him all about, he stands as an isle, His foes he dares the less doubt but it be through guile Of folk of the self land, as men hath y-seen while."
[Footnote 98: Edited with Langtoft, in 4 vols., by Hearne, Oxford, 1724; and reprinted, London, 1810. Also more lately in the Rolls Series.]
And in the same good swinging metre he goes on describing the land, praising its gifts, and telling its story in a downright fas.h.i.+on which is very agreeable to right tastes. Like almost everybody else, he drew upon Geoffrey of Monmouth for his early history: but from at least the time of the Conqueror (he is strongly prejudiced in the matter of Harold) he represents, if not what we should call solid historical knowledge, at any rate direct, and for the time tolerably fresh, historical tradition, while as he approaches his own time he becomes positively historical, and, as in the case of the Oxford town-and-gown row of 1263, the first Barons" Wars, the death of the Earl-Marshal, and such things, is a vigorous as well as a tolerably authoritative chronicler. In the history of English prosody he, too, is of great importance, being another landmark in the process of consolidating accent and quant.i.ty, alliteration and rhyme. His swinging verses still have the older tendency to a trochaic rather than the later to an anapaestic rhythm; but they are, so to speak, on the move, and approaching the later form. He is still rather p.r.o.ne to group his rhymes instead of keeping the couplets separate: but as he is not translating from _chanson de geste_ form, he does not, as Robert of Brunne sometimes does, fall into complete _laisses_. I have counted as many as twenty continuous rhymes in Manning, and there may be more: but there is nothing of that extent in the earlier Robert.
[Sidenote: _Romances._]
Verse history, however, must always be an awkward and unnatural form at the best. The end of the thirteenth century had something better to show in the appearance of romance proper and of epic. When the study of any department of old literature begins, there is a natural and almost invariable tendency to regard it as older than it really is; and when, at the end of the last century, the English verse romances began to be read, this tendency prevailed at least as much as usual.
Later investigation, besides showing that, almost without exception, they are adaptations of French originals, has, partly as a consequence of this, shown that scarcely any that we have are earlier than the extreme end of the thirteenth century. Among these few that are, however, three of exceptional interest (perhaps the best three except _Gawaine and the Green Knight_ and _Sir Launfal_) may probably be cla.s.sed--to wit, _Horn_, _Havelok_, and the famous _Sir Tristram_. As to the last and best known of these, which from its inclusion among Sir Walter Scott"s works has received attention denied to the rest, it may or may not be the work of Thomas the Rhymer. But whether it is or not, it can by no possibility be later than the first quarter of the fourteenth century, while the most cautious critics p.r.o.nounce both _Havelok the Dane_ and _King Horn_ to be older than 1300.[99]
[Footnote 99: _Tristram_, for editions _v._ p. 116: _Havelok_, edited by Madden, 1828, and again by Prof. Skeat, E.E.T.S., 1868. _King Horn_ has been repeatedly printed--first by Ritson, _Ancient English Metrical Romances_ (London, 1802), ii. 91, and Appendix; last by Prof.
Skeat in the _Specimens_ above mentioned.]