The play from which I have quoted may have excess of elaboration and an over-finesse in respect of details: but there are great bold reaches of descriptive power, a nobility of sentiment, and everywhere tender and winning touches, which will be very sure to give to the drama of Tennyson permanence and historic dignity, and keep it always a literary way-mark in the fields we have gone over. The scene of that decisive contest is less than a two hours’ ride away from London (by the Southeastern Railway) at a village called Battle—seven miles from the coast line at Hastings—in the midst of a beautiful rolling country, with scattered copses of ancient wood and a great wealth of wild flowers—(for which the district is remarkable) sparkling over the fields.
The Conqueror built a great abbey there—Battle Abbey—whose ruins are visited by hundreds every year. A large portion of the old religious house, kept in excellent repair, and very charming with its growth of ivy and its embowering shade, is held in private hands—being the occasional residence of the Duke of Cleveland. Amid the ruins the usher will guide one to a crypt of the ancient chapel—whose solid Norman arches date back to the time of the Conqueror, and which is said to mark the very spot on which Harold fell, wounded to the death, on that memorable day of Hastings.
CHAPTER II.
I recur a moment to what was said in our opening talk—as a boy will wisely go back a little way for a better jump forward. I spoke—the reader will remember—of ringing, Celtic war-songs, which seemed to be all of literature that was drifting in the atmosphere, when we began: then there came a gleam of Christian light and of monkish learning thro’ St. Augustine in Southern England; and another gleam through Iona, and Lindisfarne, from Irish sources; then came Cædmon’s Bible singing,—which had echo far down in Milton’s day; next the good old Beda, telling the story of these things; then—a thousand years ago,—the Great Alfred, at once a book-maker and a King. Before him and after him came a dreary welter of Danish wars; the great Canute—tradition says—chirping a song in the middle of them; and last, the slaughter of Hastings, where the Saxon Harold went down, and the conquering Norman came up.
Geoffrey of Monmouth.
We start to-day with an England that has its office-holding and governing people speaking one language—its moody land-holders and cultivators speaking another—and its irascible Britons in Wales and Cumbria and Cornwall speaking yet another. Conquered people are never in much mood for song-singing or for history-making. So there is little or nothing from English sources for a century or more. Even the old Saxon Chronicle kept by monks (at Peterboro in this time), does not grow into a stately record, and in the twelfth century on the year of the death of King Stephen, dies out altogether.
But there is a Welsh monk—Geoffrey of Monmouth[13]—living just on the borders of Wales, and probably not therefore brought into close connection with this new Norman element—who writes (about one hundred years after the Conquest) a half-earnest and mostly-fabulous British Chronicle. He professes to have received its main points from a Walter—somebody, who had rare old bookish secrets of history, derived from Brittany, in his keeping. You will remember, perhaps, how another and very much later writer—sometimes known as Geoffrey Crayon—once wrote a History of New York, claiming that it was made up from the MSS. of a certain Diedrich Knickerbocker: I think that perhaps the same sense of quiet humor belonged to both these Geoffreys. Certainly Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Chronicle bears about the same relation to British matters of fact which the Knickerbocker story of New York bears to the colonial annals of our great city.
The fables which were told in this old Monmouth Chronicle are more present in men’s minds to-day than the things which were real in it: there was, for instance, the fable about King Lear (who does not know King Lear?): then, there were the greater fables about good King Arthur and his avenging Caliburn (who does not know King Arthur?). These two stories are embalmed now in Literature, and will never perish.