INTRODUCTION THE EARLIER HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE THE attraction of medieval literature comes perhaps more strongly from some other countries than from England. In France and Provence, in Germany and Iceland, there were literary adventurers more daring and achievements more distinguished. It was not in England that the most wonderful things were produced; there is nothing in old English that takes hold of the mind with that masterful and subduing power which still belongs to the lyrical stanzas of the troubadours and minnesingers, to Welsh romance, or to the epic prose of the Iceland histories. The Norman Conquest degraded the English language from its literary rank, and brought in a new language for the politer literature. It did not destroy, in one sense it did not absolutely interrupt, English literature; but it took away the English literary standard, and threw the country back into the condition of Italy before Dante-an anarchy of dialects. When a new literary language was established in the time of Chaucer, the Middle Ages were nearly over: and so it happened that for the greatest of the medieval centuries, the twelfth and thirteenth, the centuries of the Crusades, of the Hohenstaufen Emperors, of St. Francis, St. Dominic, and St. Louis, there is in English no great representative work in prose or rhyme. There are better things, it is true, than the staggering rhythms of Layamon, or the wooden precision of Orm: the Ancren Riwle is better. But there is no one who can be taken, as some of the writers in other countries VOL. I. E B can-Crestien de Troies, for instance, or Walther von der Vogelweide, or Villehardouin-there is no one in England who can be taken for a representative poet or orator, giving out what can be recognised at once, and is recognised instinctively, as the best possible literary work of its own day and its own kind. The beauty of medieval poetry and prose is not to be found in England, or only in a faint reflected way. England did not possess the heart of the mystery. To spend much time with the worthy clerks who promoted Christian and useful knowledge in the thirteenth and fourteenth century dialects of Lincoln or Yorkshire, Kent or Dorset, is to acquire an invincible appetite for the glory of other countries not quite so tame, for the pride of life of the castles and gardens of Languedoc or Swabia, for the winds of the forest of Broceliande. Not in the English tongue were the great stories told. Almost everything in the literature of the Middle Ages that is out of the common, that is in any sense magical or inspired, comes from beyond the English borders. For all this want of distinction there is some compensation. The early English literature, if not representative of what is keenest and strongest, or most exalted, in the intellect of Europe in these times, is admirably fitted to convey to after generations both the common sense and the commonplaces of Western civilisation, from the ninth century onward. A study of English literature alone would give a very false and insufficient idea of the heights attained in the progress of European literature as a whole for there were worlds of imagination and poetical art which were open to some of the other nations, and not at all or very imperfectly to the English. But English literature contains and preserves, in a better and completer form than elsewhere, the common ideas, the intellectual and educational ground-work of the Middle Ages; and that is something. The average mind at any rate is well represented. Prose and its development can be observed very fully and satisfactorily from a very early date. One of the chief interests of the early literature is that it reflects the process by which the native Teutonic civilisation of the English became metamorphosed by the intrusion of alien ideas, either Latin or transmitted through Latin; by the struggles of the English mind to overcome and assimilate the civilisation of the Roman Empire. Sometimes it is easy, sometimes not so easy, to distinguish the two kinds of thinking, native and foreign. The alliterative heroic poetry of the Anglo-Saxons is inherited, not imported; it is the product of centuries during which the German tribes were educating themselves, and making experiments in poetry (among other things) till they gradually formed the established epic type, which in essentials, in style and phrasing, and even in subject matter, is common to Continental Germany and Scandinavia, in early times, along with England. It may be compared, even by temperate critics, to the Homeric poetry of Greece, and the comparison need not be misleading. The AngloSaxon prose, on the other hand, much of which is contemporaneous with the heroic poetry, is generally derivative and Latin in spirit, repeating and adapting ideas that are very far removed from simplicity. While on the one hand there are analogies with the Homeric age and the Homeric poems in Anglo-Saxon society and poetry, on the other hand there are many things in the work of the Anglo-Saxon writers which make one think of the way European ideas are now being taken up, without preparation, in the East of the wholesale modern progress of Japan, and its un-Hellenic confusion. The spectacle is sometimes painful; it cannot be called dull. The same sort of thing, the conflict of the two realms of ideas, German and Latin, went on in all modern nations, beginning in the first encounter of the Northern tribes with the intellectual and spiritual powers of Rome. This conflict is really the whole matter of early modern history. In England its character is brought out more plainly than elsewhere, and, in spite of the Norman Conquest and other interfering circumstances, the process or progress is continuous. For which reason, if for nothing else, it is convenient to begin at the beginning in dealing with the history of English poetry or prose. The work for which prose was needed first of all was mainly that of instruction; and of the early didactic prose a great part is translation or adaptation. From the time of Ulfilas to the time of Wycliffe and the time of Caxton, and since, there has been ceaseless activity of the workers who have had to quarry into, and break up, and make portable and useful, the great mass left by the older civilisations for the Goths and their successors to do their best with. The early English literature is strong in translations. Translations were the books most necessary for people who wanted to know about things, and who knew that the most important questions had already been answered by the Latin authors, so that it was a waste of time for the English or other simple folk to try to find out things for themselves. The quarry of Latin learning was worked zealously, and the evidences left by that activity are more than respectable. The Anglo-Saxon Bible versions, and Alfred's library of text-books-Orosius, Boetius, Gregory, and the translation of Bede's history-are works which in point of style have attained the virtues of plain narration or exposition, and even something more; and the matter of them is such as was not antiquated for many centuries after Alfred. It was long before the other nations were as well provided in their own languages with useful hand-books of instruction. Besides the translations, there were other didactic works in different departments. There is a considerable stock of sermons-some of them imaginative and strong in narrative, like the one on the Harrowing of Hell in the Blickling Homilies, and others, like the Sermones Catholici of Ælfric, more soft and gentle in their tone, more finished in their rhetoric. These may not appeal to every reader; but the same might be said of the works of many later divines than Elfric. The old English educational literature-hand-books and homilies had merits that were of lasting importance. The history of English prose cannot afford to ignore the books which, whatever may have been their shortcomings, established good habits of composition, made it fairly easy, for those who would, to put English words together into sentences, and gave more than one good pattern of sentence for students to copy. The rhetorical value of the didactic prose will be rated high by any one who values a sound convention or tradition of ordinary prose style for ordinary useful purposes. There are higher kinds of literature than the useful; but it is something to have different kinds of useful prose at one's command, and this in the tenth century was singular and exceptional among the vernacular tongues of the North and West. In so far as the intellectual problem for the early English prose writers was the reproduction of Latin learning, they took the right way to solve it, and were more than fortunate in the machinery they invented and used to adapt and work up the old Latin materials. The difficulty of the problem may easily be underestimated. There were many things to hinder the adoption of a decent prose convention. There was on the one hand the danger of a close and slavish imitation of the foreign models. One is reminded by a clumsy participle absolute here and there that the temptation |