English Lands Letters and Kings: From Celt to Tudor 2

English Lands Letters and Kings: From Celt to Tudor 2

For my own part, when my foot first struck the hard-worked pavement of

London Bridge, even the old nursery sing-song came over me with the force

of a poem,--

 

As I was going over London Bridge

I found a penny and bought me a kid.

 

So, too--once upon a time--on a bright May-day along the Tweed, I was

attracted by an old square ruin of a tower--very homely--scarcely

picturesque: I had barely curiosity enough to ask its name. A

stone-breaker on the high-road told me it was Norham Castle; and

straightway all the dash and clash of the poem of “Marmion”[1] broke

around me.

 

Now I do not think our cousins the Britishers, to whom the loveliest

ruins become humdrum, can be half as much alive as we, to this sort of

enjoyment.

 

I shall have then--as I said--a great deal to say about the topography

of England as well as about its books and writers; and shall try to tie

together your knowledge of historic facts and literary ones, with the yet

more tangible and associated geographic facts--so that on some golden

day to come (as golden days do come) the sight of a mere thread of spire

over tree-tops, or of a cliff on Yorkshire shores, or of a quaint gable

that might have covered a “Tabard Tavern,” shall set all your historic

reading on the flow again--thus extending and brightening and giving

charm to a hundred wayside experiences of Travel.

 

One other preliminary word:--On that great reach of ground we are to

pass over--if we make reasonable time--there must be long strides, and

skippings: we can only seize upon illustrative types--little kindling

feeders of wide-reaching flame. It may well be that I shall ignore and

pass by lines of thought or progress very lively and present to you; may

be I shall dwell on things already familiar; nay, it may well happen that

many readers--young and old--fresh from their books--shall know more of

matters touched on in our rapid survey than I know myself: never mind

that; but remember,--and let me say it once for all--that my aim is not

so much to give definite instruction as to put the reader into such ways

and starts of thought as shall make him eager to instruct himself.

 

 

_Early Centuries._

 

In those dreary early centuries when England was in the throes of its

beginnings, and when the Roman eagle--which had always led a half-stifled

life amongst British fogs, had gone back to its own eyrie in the

South--the old stock historians could and did find little to fasten

our regard--save the eternal welter of little wars. Indeed, those who

studied fifty years ago will remember that all early British history was

excessively meagre and stiff; some of it, I daresay, left yet in the

accredited courses of school reading; dreadfully dull--with dates piled

on dates, and battles by the page; and other pages of battle peppered

with such names as Hengist, or Ethelred and Cerdic and Cuthwulf, or

whoever could strike hardest or cut deepest.

 

But now, thanks to modern inquiry and to such men as Stubbs and Freeman

and Wright, and the more entertaining Green--we get new light on those

old times. We watch the ribs of that ancient land piling in distincter

shape out of the water: we see the downs and the bluffs, and the

fordable places in the rivers; we know now just where great wastes of

wood stood in the way of our piratical forefathers--the Saxons, the

Jutes, and the Angles; these latter either by greater moral weight in

them, or by the accident of numbers (which is the more probable), coming

to give a name to the new country and language which were a-making

together.

 

We find that those old Romans did leave, besides their long, straight,

high-roads, and Roman villas, and store of sepulchral vases, a germ

of Roman laws, and a little nucleus of Roman words, traceable in the

institutions and--to some slight degree--in the language of to-day.

 

We see in the later pages of Green through what forests the rivers

ran, and can go round about the great Roman-British towns (Roman first

and then adopted by Britons) of London[2] and of York; and that other

magnificent one of Cirencester (or Sisister as the English say, with a

stout defiance of their alphabet). We can understand how and why the fat

meadows of Somersetshire should be coveted by marauders and fought for

by Celts; and we behold more clearly and distinctly than ever, under the

precise topography of modern investigators, the walls of wood and hills

which stayed Saxon pursuit of those Britons who sought shelter in Wales,

Cumberland, or the Cornish peninsula.

 

 

_Celtic Literature._

 

Naturally, this flight of a nation to its fastnesses was not without

clamor and lament; some of which--if we may trust current Cymric

traditions--was put into such piercing sound as has come down to our own

day in the shape of Welsh war-songs. Dates are uncertain; but without

doubt somewhat of this Celtic shrill singing was of earlier utterance

than anything of equal literary quality that came from our wrangling

Saxon or West-Saxon forefathers in the fertile plains of England.

 

Some of these Celtic war strains have been turned into a music by

the poet Gray[3] which our English ears love; Emerson used to find

regalement in the strains of another Welsh bard; and the Mabinogion, a

pleasant budget of old Cymric fable,[4] has come to a sort of literary

resurrection in our day under the hands of the late Sidney Lanier. If

you would know more of things Celtic, I would commend to your attention

a few lectures read at Oxford in 1864-65 by Matthew Arnold in which he

has brought a curious zeal, and his wonted acumen to an investigation

of the influences upon English literature of that old Celtic current.

It was a wild, turbulent current; it had fret and roar in it; it had

passion and splendor in it; and there are those who think that whatever

ardor of imagination, or love for brilliant color or music may belong to

our English race is due to old interfusion of British blood. Certainly

the lively plaids of the Highlander and his bagpipes show love for much

color and exuberant gush of sound; and we all understand that the Celtic

Irishman has an appetite for a shindy which demonstrates a rather lively

emotional nature.

 

 

_Beginning of English Learning._

 

But over that ancient England covered with its alternating fens and

forests, and grimy Saxon hamlets, and Celtic companies of huts, there

streams presently a new civilizing influence. It is in the shape of

Christian monks[5] sent by Pope Gregory the Great, who land upon the

island of Thanet near the Thames mouth (whereabout are now the bustling

little watering places of Ramsgate and Margate), and march two by

two--St. Augustine among them and towering head and shoulders above

the rest--bearing silver crosses and singing litanies, up to the halls

of Ethelbert--near to the very site where now stands, in those rich

Kentish lands, the august and beautiful Cathedral of Canterbury. There,

too, sprung up in those earlier centuries that Canterbury School, where

letters were taught, and learned men congregated, and whence emerged

that famous scholar--Aldhelm,[6] of whom the great King Alfred speaks

admiringly; who not only knew his languages but could sing a song; a

sort of early Saxon Sankey who beguiled wanderers into better ways by

his homely rhythmic utterance. I think we may safely count this old

Aldhelm, who had a strain of royal blood in him, as the first of English

ballad-mongers.

 

From the north of England, too, there was at almost the same date,

another gleam of crosses, coming by way of Ireland and Iona, where St.

Columba,[7] commemorated in one of Wordsworth’s Sonnets, had established

a monastery. We have the good old Irish monk’s lament at leaving his home

in Ireland for the northern wilderness; there is true Irish fervor in

it:--“From the high prow I look over the sea, and great tears are in my

gray eyes when I turn to Erin--to Erin, where the songs of the birds are

so sweet, and where the clerks sing like the birds; where the young are

so gentle, and the old so wise; where the great men are so noble to look

at, and the women so fair to wed.”

 

Ruined remnants of the Iona monastery are still to be found on that

little Western island--within hearing almost of the waves that surge

into the caves of Staffa. And from this island stand-point, the monkish

missions were established athwart Scotland; finding foothold too all down

the coast of Northumberland. Early among these and very notable, was the

famous Abbey of Lindisfarne or the Holy Isle, not far southward from

the mouth of the Tweed. You will recall the name as bouncing musically,

up and down, through Scott’s poem of “Marmion.” A little farther to

the south, upon the Yorkshire coast, came to be established, shortly

afterward, the Whitby monastery; its ruins make now one of the shows of

Whitby town--one of the favorite watering places of the eastern coast

of England, and well known for giving its name to what is called Whitby

jet--which is only a finer sort of bituminous coal, of which there are

great beds in the neighborhood.[8] The Abbey ruin is upon heights, from

which are superb views out upon the German Sea that beats with grand

uproar upon the Whitby cliffs. To the westward is the charming country of

Eskdale, and by going a few miles southward one may come to Robinhood’s

bay; and in the intervening village of Hawsker may be seen the two stones

said to mark the flight of the arrows of Robinhood and Little John, when

they tried their skill for the amusement of the monks of Whitby.

 

 

_Cædmon._

 

Well, in the year of our Lord 637, this Whitby Abbey was founded by

the excellent St. Hilda, and it was under her auspices, and by virtue

of her saintly encouragements, that the first true English poet,

Cædmon, began to sing his Christian song of the creation. He was but

a cattle-tender--unkempt--untaught, full of savagery, but with a fine

phrenzy in him, which made his paraphrase of scripture a spur, and

possibly--in a certain imperfect sense, a model for the muse of John

Milton.

 

Of the chaos before creation, he says:--

 

Earth’s surface was

With grass not yet be-greened; while far and wide

The dusky ways, with black unending night

Did ocean cover.

 

Of the great Over-Lord God-Almighty, he says--

 

In Him, beginning never,

Or origin hath been; but he is aye supreme

Over heaven’s thrones, with high majesty