"My good Simeon, you ought to be ashamed of yourself! God forbid that one should decry such a man as Alfred was. But the pedantry of Freeman and his sect, who tried to make 'English' a conterminous name and substitute for 'Anglo-Saxon,' was only by one degree less offensive than the ignorance of your modern journalist who degrades Englishmen by writing them down (or up, the poor fool imagines) as Anglo-Saxons. In truth, King Alfred was a noble fellow. No one in history has struggled more pluckily to rekindle fire in an effete race or to put spirit into an effete literature by pretending that both were of the prime."
"Come, come," murmured Mr. Simeon, smiling. "I see you are off upon one of your hobbies.… But you will not tell me that the fine rugged epic of Beowulf, to which the historians trace back all that is noblest in our poetry, had lost its generative impulse even so early as Alfred's time. That were too extravagant!"
"Brekekekèx, ten brink, ten brink!" snapped Brother Copas. "All the frogs in chorus around Charon's boat! Fine rugged fiddlestick—have you ever read Beowulf?"
"In translation only."
"You need not be ashamed of labour saved. I once spent a month or two in mastering Anglo-Saxon, having a suspicion of Germans when they talk about English literature, and a deeper suspicion of English critics who ape them. Then I tackled Beowulf, and found it to be what I guessed—no rugged national epic at all, but a blown-out bag of bookishness. Impulse? Generative impulse?—the thing is wind, I tell you, without sap or sinew, the production of some conscientious Anglo-Saxon whose blue eyes, no doubt, watered with the effort of inflating it. I'll swear it never drew a human tear otherwise.… That's what the whole Anglo-Saxon race had become when Alfred arose to galvanise 'em for a while—a herd of tall, flabby, pale-eyed men, who could neither fight, build, sing, nor enforce laws. And so our England—wise as Austria in mating—turned to other nuptials and married William the Norman. Behold then a new breed; the country covered with sturdy, bullet-headed, energetic fellows, who are no sooner born than they fly to work—hammers going, scaffolds climbing; cities, cathedrals springing up by magic; and all to a new song that came with some imported workmen from the Provence—"
'Quan la douss' aura venta
Deves vostre paÿs'—
'Quan la douss' aura venta
Deves vostre paÿs'—
"And so—pop!—down the wind goes your pricked bladder of a Beowulf: down the wind that blows from the Mediterranean, whence the arts and the best religions come."
Mr. Simeon rubbed the side of his jaw thoughtfully.
"Ah," said he, "I remember Master Blanchminster saying something of the sort the other day. He was talking of wine."