Or take that other marvelous example of the expression of emotion in terms of bodily sensation, the lyric of the Greeks. Its clarity and unity, its dislike of vagueness and excess, its finely artistic restraint, are characteristic of the race. The simpler Greek lyrical measures were taken over by Catullus, Horace and Ovid, and though there were subtle qualities of the Greek models which escaped the Roman imitators, the Greco-Roman or "classic" restraint of over-turbulent emotions became a European heritage. It is doubtless true, as Dr. Henry Osborn Taylor has pointed out, [Footnote: See his Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages, chap. 9, and particularly the passage quoted in the "Notes and Illustrations" to chap. v of this volume.] that the Greek and Roman classical metres became in time inadequate to express the new Christian spirit "which knew neither clarity nor measure." "The antique sense of form and proportion, the antique observance of the mean and avoidance of extravagance and excess, the antique dislike for the unlimited or the monstrous, the antique feeling for literary unity, and abstention from irrelevancy, the frank love for all that is beautiful or charming, for the beauty of the body and for everything connected with the joy of mortal life, the antique reticence as to hopes or fears of what was beyond the grave,—these qualities cease in medieval Latin poetry."
4. Lyrics of Western Europe
The racial characteristics of the peoples of Western Europe began to show themselves even in their Latin poetry, but it is naturally in the rise of the vernacular literatures, during the Middle Ages, that we trace the signs of thnic differentiation. Teuton and Frank and Norseman, Spaniard or Italian, betray their blood as soon as they begin to sing in their own tongue. The scanty remains of Anglo-Saxon lyrical verse are colored with the love of battle and of the sea, with the desolateness of lonely wolds, with the passion of loyalty to a leader. Read "Deor's Lament," "Widsith," "The Wanderer," "The Sea-farer," or the battle-songs of Brunanburh and Maldon in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. [Footnote: See Cook and Tinker, Select Translations from Old English Poetry (Boston, 1902), and Pancoast and Spaeth, Early English Poems (New York, 1911).] The last strophe of "Deor's Lament," our oldest English lyric, ends with the line:
"Thaes ofereode, thisses swa maeg" "That he surmounted, so this may I!"
The wandering Ulysses says something like this, it is true, in a line of the Odyssey, but to feel its English racial quality one has only to read after it Masefield's "To-morrow":
"Oh yesterday our little troop was ridden through and through,
Our swaying, tattered pennons fled, a broken beaten few,
And all a summer afternoon they hunted us and slew;
But to-morrow,
By the living God, we 'II try the game again!"
When Taillefer, knight and minstrel, rode in front of the Norman line at the battle of Hastings, "singing of Charlemagne and of Roland and of Oliver and the vassals who fell at Roncevaux," he typified the coming triumphs of French song in England. [Footnote: See E. B. Reed, English Lyrical Poetry, chap. 2. 1912.] French lyrical fashions would have won their way, no doubt, had there been no battle of Hastings. The banners of William the Conqueror had been blessed by Rome. They represented Europe, and the inevitable flooding of the island outpost of "Germania" by the tide of European civilization. Chanson and carole, dance-songs, troubadour lyrics, the ballade, rondel and Noël, amorous songs of French courtiers, pious hymns of French monks, began to sing themselves in England. The new grace and delicacy is upon every page of Chaucer. What was first Provençal and then French, became English when Chaucer touched it. From the shadow and grimness and elegiac pathos of Old English poetry we come suddenly into the light and color and gayety of Southern France. [Footnote: See the passage from Legouis quoted in the "Notes and Illustrations" for this chapter.] In place of Caedmon's terrible picture of Hell—"ever fire or frost"—or Dunbar's "Lament for the Makers" (Oxford, No. 21) with its refrain:
"Timor Mortis conturbat me,"
or the haunting burden of the "Lyke-Wake Dirge" (Oxford, No. 381),
"This ae nighte, this ae nighte,
—Every nighte and alle,
Fire and sleet and candle-lighte,
And Christe receive thy saule,"