The Preface.
‘I gathered me then staves, and props, and bars, and helves for each of my tools, and boughs; and for each of the works that I could work, I took the fairest trees, so far as I might carry them away. Nor did I ever bring any burden home without longing to bring home the whole wood, if that might be; for in every tree I saw something of which I had need at home. Wherefore I exhort every one who is strong and has many wains, that he direct his steps to the same wood where I cut the props. Let him there get him others, and load his wains with fair twigs, that he may weave thereof many a goodly wain, and set up many a noble house, and build many a pleasant town, and dwell therein in mirth, and ease, both winter and summer, as I could never do hitherto. But He who taught me to love that wood, He may cause me to dwell more easily, both in this transitory dwelling … while I am in the world, and also in the eternal home which He has promised us through … the holy fathers. And so I believe He will do for their merits, both make this [earthly] way better than it was ere this, or at least enlighten the eyes of my mind, that I may find the right way to the eternal home, and to the eternal country, and to the eternal rest, which is promised to us through the holy fathers. So be it.’
Significance of this Preface. It is the Epilogue to Alfred’s literary works.
§ 116. It is Alfred looking back over the whole of his storm-tossed life, and realising that the calm haven is close at hand[912], and that he must leave it to others to carry on the work which he had begun. Professor Wülker, in the interest of the theory alluded to above, says that this preface refers to a larger collection than any to be found in these three books of ‘Blooms[913].’ True; most true. But the larger collection to which it refers is not this, or any other single work of his, however hypothetically enlarged; but the whole of his literary works. And just as the Preface to the Pastoral Care is in some sense a Prologue to the whole collection, so this is, in a very real sense, the Epilogue. We may not, here in Oxford, claim Alfred as our founder; but surely our hearts may be uplifted at the thought, that in all that we do here in the cause of true learning and of genuine education, we are carrying on the work which Alfred left us to do.
The most mature of Alfred’s works.
The book is in other ways also the most mature of Alfred’s works. It is very closely related to the Boethius both in thought and diction[914]. And just as in the Orosius we had a foretaste of the discussion on fate which holds so prominent a place in the Boethius[915], so the subject of the immortality of the soul, which is only just touched on in the Boethius[916], is here developed at length[917]. And here, as in the Boethius, Alfred’s conclusion is much more distinctly Christian than that of his original. The Soliloquies is one of Augustine’s earliest works, written at a time when a good deal of the gentile rhetorician still hung about him[918]. It must be confessed that his philosophical arguments on this subject are not very convincing, but in Alfred they are strongly reinforced by the authority of Scripture and of the fathers.
Wealth of similes.
Here, too, many of the additions which Alfred makes to his original consist of those similes and parables[919] which he loved so well; the most beautiful perhaps being one in which the soul made fast to God is compared to a ship riding securely on her anchor[920].
Confusion of author and translator.
§ 117. I have said that in the third book Alfred casts into a dialogue form materials which have not that shape in the original. The interlocutors still remain as before, Augustine and Reason. It is a quaint proof of the completeness with which Alfred lost the sense of translation in the consciousness of authorship, that in a passage where the De uidendo Deo is spoken of, the Augustine of the dialogue is made to say: ‘I have not now leisure to go through all that book[921],’ although the historical Augustine was the actual author of it.