CHAPTER VIII

SERMONS AND HISTORIES, IN VERSE AND PROSE

It is one of the common difficulties in studying ancient literature that the things preserved are not always what we would have chosen. In modern literature, criticism and the opinion of the reading public have generally sorted out the books that are best worth considering; few authors are wrongfully neglected, and the well-known authors generally deserve their reputation. But in literature such as that of the thirteenth century, or the fourteenth before the time of Chaucer, not much has been done by the opinion of the time to sift out the good from the bad, and many things appear in the history of literature which are valuable only as curiosities, and some which have no title to be called books at all. The _Ayenbite of Inwit_ is well known by name, and passes for a book; it is really a collection of words in the Kentish dialect, useful for philologists, especially for those who, like the author of the book, only care for one word at a time. The _Ayenbite of Inwit_ was translated from the French by Dan Michel of Northgate, one of the monks of St. Augustine’s at Canterbury, in 1340; it is extant in his own handwriting; there is no evidence that it was ever read by any one else. The method of the author is to take each French word and give the English for it; if he cannot read the French word, or mistakes it, he puts down the English for what he thinks it means, keeping his eye firmly fixed on the object, and refusing to be distracted by the other words in the sentence. This remarkable thing has been recorded in histories as a specimen of English prose.

The _Ormulum_ is another famous work which is preserved only in the author’s original handwriting. It is a different thing from the _Ayenbite_; it is scholarly in its own way, and as far as it goes it accomplishes all that the author set out to do. As it is one of the earliest books of the thirteenth century, it is immensely valuable as a document; not only does it exhibit the East Midland language of its time, in precise phonetic spelling (the three G’s of the _Ormulum_ are now famous in philology), but it contains a large amount of the best ordinary medieval religious teaching; and as for literature, its author was the first in English to use an exact metre with unvaried number of syllables; it has been described already. But all those merits do not make the _Ormulum_ much more than a curiosity in the history of poetry—a very distinct and valuable sign of certain common tastes, certain possibilities of education, but in itself tasteless.

One of the generalities proved by the _Ormulum_ is the use of new metres for didactic work. The Anglo-Saxon verse had been taken not infrequently for didactic purposes—at one time for the paraphrase of _Genesis_, at another for the moral emblems of the _Whale_ and the _Panther_. But the Anglo-Saxon verse was not very well fitted for school books; it was too heavy in diction. And there was no need for it, with Anglo-Saxon prose established as it was. After the Norman Conquest, however, there was a change. Owing to the example of the French, verse was much more commonly used for ordinary educational purposes. There is a great deal of this extant, and the difficulty arises how to value it properly, and distinguish what is a document in the history of general culture, or morality, or religion, from what is a poem as well.

One of the earliest Middle English pieces is a Moral Poem which is found in several manuscripts and evidently was well known and popular. It is in the same metre as the _Ormulum_, but written with more freedom, and in rhyme. This certainly is valuable as a document. The contents are the ordinary religion and morality, the vanity of human wishes, the wretchedness of the present world, the fearfulness of Hell, the duty of every man to give up all his relations in order to save his soul. This commonplace matter is, however, expressed with great energy in good language and spirited verse; the irregularity of the verse is not helplessness, it is the English freedom which keeps the rhythm, without always regularly observing the exact number of syllables.

Ich am eldrè than ich was, a winter and eke on lorè, Ich weldè morè than ich dyde, my wit oughtè be morè.

i.e.—

I am older than I was, in winters and also in learning; I wield more than I did [I am stronger than I once was], my wit ought to be more.

The first line, it will be noticed, begins on the strong syllable; the weak syllable is dropped, as it is by Chaucer and Milton when they think fit. With this freedom, the common metre is established as a good kind of verse for a variety of subjects; and the _Moral Ode_, as it is generally called, is therefore to be respected in the history of poetry. One vivid thing in it seems to tell where the author came from. In the description of the fire of Hell he says—

Ne mai hit quenchè salt water, ne Avene stream ne Sture.

He is thinking of the rivers of Christchurch, and the sea beyond, as Dante in Hell remembers the clear mountain waters running down to the Arno.

Layamon’s _Brut_ shows how difficult it might be for an Englishman in the reign of King John to find the right sort of verse. The matter of the _Brut_ is Geoffrey of Monmouth’s history, originally in Latin prose. This had been translated into French, and of course into rhyme, because nothing but rhyme in French was thought a respectable form. Layamon has the French rhyming version before him, and naturally does not think of turning it into prose. That would be mean, in comparison; once the historical matter has been put into poetical form, it must not be allowed to fall back into any form less honourable than the French. Layamon, however, has no proper verse at command. He knows the old English alliterative verse, but only in the corrupt variety which is found in some of the later Anglo-Saxon pieces, with an increasing taste for rhyme; Layamon, of course, had also in his head the rhymes of the French couplets which he was translating; and the result is a most disagreeable and discordant measure. The matter of Layamon in many places compensates for this; much of it, indeed, is heavy and prosaic, but some of it is otherwise, and the credit of the memorable passages is at least as often due to Layamon as to the original British history. He found the right story of the passing of Arthur, and that makes up for much of his uncomfortable verse and ranks him higher than the mere educational paraphrasers.

The _Bestiary_ and the _Proverbs of Alfred_ are two other works which resemble the _Brut_ more or less in versification, and are interesting historically. It ought to be said, on behalf of the poorer things in this early time, that without exception they prove a very rich colloquial idiom and vocabulary, which might have been used to good effect, if any one had thought of writing novels, and which is in fact well used in many prose sermons, and, very notably, in the long prose book of the _Ancren Riwle_.

Looking at the _Ancren Riwle_ and some other early prose, one is led to think that the French influence, so strong in every way, so distinctly making for advance in civilization, was hurtful to the English, and a bad example, in the literature of teaching, because the French had nothing equal to the English prose. French prose hardly begins till the thirteenth century; the history of Villehardouin is contemporary with the _Ancren Riwle_. But the English prose authors of that time were not beginners; they had the Anglo-Saxon prose to guide them, and they regularly follow the tradition of Ælfric. There is no break in the succession of prose as there is between Anglo-Saxon and Plantagenet verse; Anglo-Saxon prose did not lose its form as the verse did, and Ælfric, who was copied by English preachers in the twelfth century, might have taught something of prose style to the French, which they were only beginning to discover in the century after. And there might have been a thirteenth-century school of English prose, worthy of comparison with the Icelandic school of the same time, if the English had not been so distracted and overborne by the French example of didactic rhyme. French rhyme was far beyond any other model for romance; when it is used for historical or scientific exposition it is a poor and childish mode, incomparably weaker than the prose of Ælfric. But the example and the authority of the French didactic rhyme proved too strong, and English prose was neglected; so much so that the _Ancren Riwle_, a prose book written at the beginning of the thirteenth century, is hardly matched even in the time of Chaucer and Wycliffe; hardly before the date of Malory or Lord Berners.

The _Ancren Riwle_ (the _Rule of Anchoresses_) is a book of doctrine and advice, like many others in its substance. What distinguishes it is the freshness and variety of its style. It is not, like so many excellent prose works, a translation. The writer doubtless took his arguments where he found them, in older books, but he thinks them over in his own way, and arranges them; and he always has in mind the one small household of religious ladies for whom he is writing, their actual circumstances and the humours of the parish. His literary and professional formulas do not get in his way; he sees the small restricted life as it might have appeared to a modern essayist, and writes of it in true-bred language, the style in which all honest historians agree. The passages which are best worth quoting are those which are oftenest quoted, about the troubles of the nun who keeps a cow; the cow strays, and is pounded; the religious lady loses her temper, her language is furious; then she has to beseech and implore the heyward (parish beadle) and pay the damages after all. Wherefore it is best for nuns to keep a cat only. But no one quotation can do justice to the book, because the subjects are varied, and the style also. Much of it is conventional morality, some of it is elementary religious instruction. There are also many passages where the author uses his imagination, and in his figurative description of the Seven Deadly Sins he makes one think of the ‘characters’ which were so much in fashion in the seventeenth century; there is the same love of conceits, though not carried quite so far as in the later days. The picture of the Miser as the Devil’s own lubberly boy, raking in the ashes till he is half blind, drawing ‘figures of augrim’ in the ashes, would need very little change to turn it into the manner of Samuel Butler, author of _Hudibras_, in his prose _Characters_; so likewise the comparison of the envious and the wrathful man to the Devil’s jugglers, one making grotesque faces, the other playing with knives. Elsewhere the writer uses another sort of imagination and a different style; his description of Christ, in a figure drawn from chivalry, is a fine example of eloquent preaching; how fine it is, may be proved by the imitation of it called the _Wooing of Our Lord_, where the eloquence is pushed to an extreme. The author of the _Ancren Riwle_ felt both the attraction and the danger of pathos; and he escaped the error of style into which his imitator fell; he kept to the limits of good prose. At the same time, there is something to be said in defence of the too poetic prose which is exemplified in the _Wooing of Our Lord_, and in other writings of that date. Some of it is derived from the older alliterative forms, used in the _Saints’ Lives_ of found something Ælfric; and this, with all its faults and excesses, at any rate kept an idea of rhythm which was generally wanting in the alliterative verse of the thirteenth century. It may be a wrong sort of eloquence, but it could not be managed without a sense of rhythm or beauty of words; it is not meagre or stinted, and it is in some ways a relief from the prosaic verse in which English authors copied the regular French couplets, and the plain French diction.

One of the best pieces of prose about this time is a translation from the Latin. _Soul’s Ward_ is a homily, a religious allegory of the defence of Man’s Soul. The original Latin prose belongs to the mystical school of St. Victor in Paris. The narrative part of the English version is as good as can be; the mystical part, in the description of Heaven and the Beatific Vision, is memorable even when compared with the greatest masters, and keeps its own light and virtue even when set alongside of Plotinus or Dante. Here, as in the _Ancren Riwle_, the figures of eloquence, rhythm and alliteration are used temperately, and the phrasing is wise and imaginative; not mere ornament. By one sentence it may be recognized and remembered; where it is told how the souls of the faithful see ‘all the redes and the runes of God, and his dooms that dern be, and deeper than any sea-dingle’.

The greatest loss in the transition from Anglo-Saxon to Norman and Angevin times was the discontinuance of prose history, and the failure of the Chronicle after the accession of Henry II. It made a good end. The Peterborough monk who did the reign of Stephen was much worse off for language than his predecessors either in the time of Edward the Elder or Edward the Confessor. His language is what he chooses to make it, without standard or control. But his narrative is not inferior in style to the best of the old work, though it is weaker in spelling. It is less restrained and more emotional than the Anglo-Saxon history; in telling of the lawlessness under King Stephen the writer cannot help falling into the tone of the preachers. In the earlier Chronicle one is never led to think about the sentiments of the writer; the story holds the attention. But here the personal note comes in; the author asks for sympathy. One thinks of the cold, gloomy church, the small depressed congregation, the lamentable tones of the sermon in the days when ‘men said openly that Christ slept and his saints’. With the coming of Henry of Anjou a new order began, but the Chronicle did not go on; the monks of Peterborough had done their best, but there was no real chance for English prose history when it had come to depend on one single religious house for its continuance. The business was carried on in Latin prose and in French rhyme; through the example of the French, it became the fashion to use English verse for historical narrative, and it was long before history came back to prose.

Of all the rhyming historians Robert of Gloucester in the reign of Edward I is the most considerable by reason of his style. Robert Manning of Brunne was more of a literary critic; the passage in which he deals severely with the contemporary rhyming dunces is singularly interesting in a time when literary criticism is rare. But Robert of Brunne is not so successful as Robert of Gloucester, who says less about the principles of rhyme, but discovers and uses the right kind. This was not the short couplet. The short couplet, the French measure, was indeed capable of almost anything in English, and it was brilliantly used for history by Barbour, and not meanly in the following century by Andrew Wyntoun. But it was in danger of monotony and flatness; for a popular audience a longer verse was better, with more swing in it. Robert of Gloucester took the ‘common measure’, with the ordinary accepted licences, as it is used by the ballad poets, and by some of the romances—for example, in the most admirable _Tale of Gamelyn_. He turns the history of Britain to the tune of popular minstrelsy, and if it is not very high poetry, at any rate it moves.

The same kind of thing was done about the same time with the _Lives of the Saints_—possibly some of them by Robert of Gloucester himself. These are found in many manuscripts, with many variations; but they are one book, the Legend, keeping the order of Saints’ Days in the Christian Year. This has been edited, under the title of the _South English Legendary_, and there are few books in which it is easier to make acquaintance with the heart and mind of the people; it contains all sorts of matter: church history as in the lives of St. Dunstan, St. Thomas of Canterbury and St. Francis ‘the Friar Minor’; and legend, in the common sense of the word, as in the life of St. Eustace, or of St. Julian ‘the good harbinger’. There is the adventure of Owen the knight in St. Patrick’s Purgatory; there is also the voyage of St. Brandan. In one place there is a short rhyming treatise on natural science, thoroughly good and sound, and in some ways very modern. The right tone of the popular science lecture has been discovered; and the most effective illustrations. The earth is a globe; night is the shadow of the earth; let us take an apple and a candle, and everything is plain. Astronomical distances are given in the usual good-natured manner of the lecturer who wishes to stir but not to shock the recipient minds. The cosmography, of course, is roughly that of Dante and Chaucer; seven spheres beneath the eighth, which is the sphere of the fixed stars and the highest visible heaven. The distance to that sphere from the earth is so great that a man walking forty miles a day could not reach it in eight thousand years. If Adam had started at once at that rate, and kept it up, he would not be there yet—

Much is between heaven and earth; for the man that mightè go Every day forty mile, and yet some deal mo, He ne shoulde nought to the highest heaven, that ye alday y-seeth Comen in eighte thousand year, there as the sterren beeth: And though Adam our firstè father had begun anon Tho that he was first y-made, and toward the heaven y-gon, And had each day forty mile even upright y-go He ne had nought yet to heaven y-come, by a thousand mile and mo!

Encyclopedias and universal histories are frequent in rhyme. The Northern dialect comes into literary use early in the fourteenth century in a long book, the _Cursor Mundi_ or _Cursor o Werld_, which is one of the best of its kind, getting fairly over the hazards of the short couplet. In the Northern dialect this type of book comes to an end two hundred years later; the _Monarchy_ of Sir David Lyndsay is the last of its race, a dialogue between Experience and a Courtier, containing a universal history in the same octosyllabic verse as the _Cursor Mundi_. The Middle Ages may be dated as far down as this; it is a curiously old-fashioned and hackneyed form to be used by an author so original as Lyndsay, but he found it convenient for his anti-clerical satire. And it may be observed that generally the didactic literature of the Middle Ages varies enormously not only as between one author and another, but in different parts of the same work; nothing (except, perhaps, the _Tale of Melibeus_) is absolutely conventional repetition; passages of real life may occur at any moment.

The _Cursor Mundi_ is closely related to the Northern groups of _Miracle Plays_. The dramatic scheme of the _Miracle Plays_ was like that of the comprehensive narrative poem, intended to give the history of the world ‘from Genesis to the day of Judgement’. It is impossible in this book to describe the early drama, its rise and progress; but it may be observed that its form is generally near to the narrative, and sometimes to the lyrical verse of the time.

The _Cursor Mundi_ is one of a large number of works in the Northern dialect, which in that century was freely used for prose and verse—particularly by Richard Rolle of Hampole and his followers, a school whose mysticism is in contrast to the more scholastic method of Wycliffe. The most interesting work in the Northern language is Barbour’s _Bruce_. Barbour, the Scottish contemporary of Chaucer, is not content with mere rhyming chronicles; he has a theory of poetry, he has both learning and ambition, which fortunately do not interfere much with the spirit of his story.