The Project Gutenberg eBook, English Lands Letters and Kings: From Celt to Tudor, by Donald Grant Mitchell

ENGLISH LANDS LETTERS
AND KINGS

From Celt to Tudor

ENGLISH LANDS LETTERS AND KINGS

By Donald G. Mitchell

Each 1 vol., 12mo, cloth, gilt top, $1.50

AMERICAN LANDS AND LETTERS

From the Mayflower to Rip Van Winkle

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ENGLISH LANDS LETTERS
AND KINGS

From Celt to Tudor

BY
Donald G. Mitchell

NEW YORK
Charles Scribner’s Sons
MDCCCXCVII

Copyright, 1889, by
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS.

TROW’S
PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY,
NEW YORK

PREFACE.

This little book is made up from the opening series of a considerable range of “talks,” with which—during the past few years—I have undertaken to entertain, and (if it might be) instruct a bevy of friends; and the interest of a few outsiders who have come to the hearings has induced me to put the matter in type. I feel somewhat awkwardly in obtruding upon the public any such panoramic view of British writers, in these days of specialists—when students devote half a lifetime to the analysis of the works of a single author, and to the proper study of a single period.

I have tried, however, to avoid bad mistakes and misleading ones, and shall reckon my commentary only so far forth good—as it may familiarize the average reader with the salient characteristics of the writers brought under notice, and shall put these writers into such a swathing of historic and geographic enwrapments as shall keep them better in mind.

When I consider the large number of books recently issued on similar topics, and the scholarly acuteness, and the great range belonging to so many of them, I am not a little discomforted at thought of my bold scurry over so wide reach of ground. Indeed, I have the figure before me now—as I hint an apology—of an old-time country doctor who has ventured with his saddle-bags and spicy nostrums into competition with a half score of special practitioners—with their microscopy and their granules dosimetriques; but I think, consolingly, that possibly the old-time mediciner—if not able to cure, can at the least induce a pleasurable slumber.

Edgewood, 1889.

CONTENTS.

ENGLISH LANDS, LETTERS, & KINGS.

CHAPTER I.

I have undertaken in this book a series of very familiar and informal talks with my readers about English literary people, and the ways in which they worked; and also about the times in which they lived and the places where they grew up. We shall have, therefore, a good deal of concern with English history; and with English geography too—or rather topography: and I think that I have given a very fair and honest descriptive title to the material which I shall set before my readers, in calling it a book about English Lands and Letters and Kings.

It appears to me that American young people have an advantage over British-born students of our History and Literature—in the fact that the localities consecrated by great names or events have more illuminating power to us, who encounter them rarely and after voyage over sea, than to the Englishman who lives and grows up beside them. Londoners pass Bolt Court, Fleet Street, and Dr. Johnson’s tavern a hundred times a year with no thought but of the chops and the Barclay’s ale to be had there. But to the cultivated American these localities start a charming procession, in which the doughty old Dictionary-maker, with his staff and long brown coat and three cornered hat, is easily the leader.

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,—

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:—

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

And again,—that you may make for yourselves comparison with the treatment and method of Milton,—I quote this picture of Satan in hell:—

There is but one known MS. copy of this poem. It is probably of the tenth, certainly not later than the eleventh century, and is in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. It is illuminated, and some scenes represented seem to have been taken from the old miracle plays.[9] It was printed in 1655: in this form a copy is said to have reached the hands of Milton, through a friend of the printer: and it may well be that the stern old Puritan poet was moved by a hearing of it,—for he was blind at this date,—to the prosecution of that grand task which has made his name immortal.

Beda.

We might, however, never have known anything of Cædmon and of Saint Hilda and all the monasteries north and south, except for another worthy who grew up in the hearing of the waves which beat on the cliffs of north-eastern England. This was Beda,—respected in his own day for his industry, piety, straightforward honesty—and so followed by the respect of succeeding generations as to get and carry the name of the Venerable Beda. Though familiar with the people’s language,[10] and with Greek, he wrote in monkish Latin—redeemed by classic touches—and passed his life in the monastery at Jarrow, which is on the Tyne, near the coast of Durham, a little to the westward of South Shields. An ancient church is still standing amid the ruins of the monastic walls, and a heavy, straight-backed chair of oak (which would satisfy the most zealous antiquarian by its ugliness) is still guarded in the chancel, and is called Beda’s Chair.

Six hundred pupils gathered about him there, in the old days, to be taught in physics, grammar, rhetoric, music, and I know not what besides. So learned and true was he, that the Pope would have called him to Rome; but he loved better the wooded Tyne banks, and the gray moorlands, and the labors of his own monastery. There he lived out an honest, a plodding, an earnest, and a hopeful life. And as I read the sympathetic story of its end, and of how the old man—his work all done—lifted up a broken voice—on his last day—amidst his scholars, to the Gloria in Excelsis—I bethink me of his last eulogist, the young historian, who within a few months only after sketching that tender picture of his great forerunner in the paths of British history, laid down his brilliant pen—his work only half done, and died, away from his home, at Mentone, on the shores of the Mediterranean.

King Alfred.

A half century after the death of Beda began the Danish invasions, under which, monasteries churches schools went down in a flood of blood and fire. As we read of that devastation—the record covering only a half-page of the old Saxon Chronicle (begun after Beda’s time)—it seems an incident; yet the piratic storm, with intermittent fury, stretches over a century and more of ruin. It was stayed effectively for a time when the great Alfred came to full power.

I do not deal much in dates: but you should have a positive date for this great English king: a thousand years ago (889) fairly marks the period when he was in the prime of life—superintending, very likely, the building of a British fleet upon the Pool, below London. He was born at Wantage, in Berkshire, a little to the south of the Great Western Railway; and in a glade near to the site of the old Saxon palace, is still shown what is called Alfred’s Well. In the year 1849 his birthday was celebrated, after the lapse of a thousand years—so keen are these British cousins of ours to keep alive all their great memories. And Alfred’s is a memory worth keeping. He had advantages—as we should say—of foreign travel; as a boy he went to Rome, traversing Italy and the Continent. If we could only get a good story of that cross-country trip of his!

We know little more than that he came to high honor at Rome, was anointed king there, before yet he had come to royalty at home. He makes also a second visit in company with his father Ethelwolf: and on their return Ethelwolf relieves the tedium of travel by marrying the twelve-year old daughter of Charles the Bald of France. Those were times of extraordinary daring.

The great king had throughout a most picturesque and adventurous life: he is hard pushed by the Danes—by rivals—by his own family; one while a wanderer on the moors—another time disguised as minstrel in the enemy’s camp; but always high-hearted, always hopeful, always working. He is oppressed by the pall of ignorance that overlays the lordly reach of his kingdom: “Scarce a priest have I found,” says he, “south of the Thames who can render Latin into English.” He is not an apt scholar himself, but he toils at learning; his abbots help him; he revises old chronicles, and makes people to know of Beda; he has boys taught to write in English; gives himself with love to the rendering of Boëthius’ “Consolation of Philosophy.” He adopts its reasoning, and plants his hope on the creed—

1st. That a wise God governs.

2d. That all suffering may be made helpful.

3d. That God is chiefest good.

4th. That only the good are happy.

5th. That the foreknowledge of God does not conflict with Free-will.

These would seem to carry even now the pith and germ of the broadest theologic teachings.

It is a noble and a picturesque figure—that of King Alfred—which we see, looking back over the vista of a thousand years; better it would seem than that of King Arthur to weave tales around, and illumine with the heat and the flame of poesy. Yet poets of those times and of all succeeding times have strangely neglected this august and royal type of manhood.

After him came again weary Danish wars and wild blood-letting and ignorance surging over the land, save where a little light played fitfully around such great religious houses as those of York and Canterbury. It was the dreary Tenth Century, on the threshold of which he had died—the very core and kernel of the Dark Ages, when the wisest thought the end of things was drawing nigh, and strong men quaked with dread at sight of an eclipse, or comet, or at sound of the rumble of an earthquake. It was a time and a condition of gloom which made people pardon, and even relish such a dismal poem as that of “The Grave,” which—though bearing thirteenth century form—may well in its germ have been a fungal outgrowth of the wide-spread hopelessness of this epoch:—

From the death of Alfred (901) to the Norman Conquest (1066) there was monkish work done in shape of Homilies, Chronicles, grammars of Latin and English—the language settling more and more into something like a determined form of what is now called Anglo-Saxon. But in that lapse of years I note only three historic incidents, which by reason of the traditions thrown about them, carry a piquant literary flavor.

Canute and Godiva.

The first is when the famous Canute, king of both England and Denmark, and having strong taste for song and music and letters, rows by the towers of a great East-England religious house, and as he drifts with the tide, composes (if we may trust tradition) a snatch of verse which has come down to us in a thirteenth century form, about the pleasant singing of the Monks of Ely. Wordsworth has embalmed the matter in one of his Ecclesiastic Sonnets (xxx.):

I think you will never go under the wondrous arches of Ely Cathedral—and you should go there if you ever travel into the eastern counties of England—without thinking of King Canute and of that wondrous singing of the monks, eight hundred years ago.

The second historic incident of which I spoke, is the murder of King Duncan by Macbeth in the year 1039, some twenty-five years before the Norman Conquest. I don’t think you want any refreshing about Macbeth.

The third incident is of humbler tone, yet it went to show great womanly devotion, and lifted a tax from the heads of a whole towns-people. I refer to the tradition of Earl Leofric of Mercia and the Lady Godiva of Coventry, based in the main, without doubt, upon actual occurrence, and the subject for centuries of annual commemoration.[11] Tennyson tells, in his always witching way, how