As Fulgentius and Venantius have stood for the sixth, so Isidore and Bede[[516]] may stand for the seventh century, while Bede’s flourishing time stretches into the eighth.
Isidore’s treatment of Grammar[[517]] is much fuller than his handling of her showier sister Rhetoric.[[518]] It fills the whole of |Isidore of Seville again.| the First Book of the curious Encyclopædia called the Origines, and is much more liberally arranged than the usual grammatical treatise, including a great deal of applied matter of various kinds, visibly filching Tropes and Figures from Rhetoric herself, and, besides dealing with Prosody, even devoting sections to the Fable and to History under more than one head. There is much interesting (if not for us strictly relevant) matter in the earlier chapters, where we read that literæ are quasi legiteræ, and that Greek and Latin appear to have arisen out of Hebrew. The vitia, from barbarism and solœcism downwards, are pure Rhetoric, containing, as they do, things like tapeinosis and amphibology, with which Grammar, as such, has certainly nothing to do; and they are near the rhetorical side of Criticism herself. The Metaplasms which follow, as purely verbal, may be claimed by the elder sister, but the schemata and the tropi are unquestioned usurpations. And thereafter, with Chapter Thirty-Seven De Prosa, we are almost on our own ground.
Isidore, if not (save in his title) very original, is judicious in his selections from the public stock, and puts them together in a much more useful fashion than some authors of “composition-books” a good deal his juniors. Prose is “a straightforward form of speech freed from metre.” Metres (he has given “feet” a good deal earlier) are the fixed arrangements of feet which constitute verse. Their names are classified and accounted for, as are, subsequently, the chief forms of poetry in which they appear. The origination of these is claimed for various sacred persons—of the Hymn for David, “who was long before Ennius,” of the Epithalamium for Solomon. Not a few of the definitions, though desultory and oddly selected, are noteworthy, and the considerable space given to that of the Cento is characteristic of the age.
Fable, as has been said, has a section to itself, an honour which is prophetic of—and considering Isidore’s influence may, to some extent, have caused—the great attention paid in the Middle Ages to that kind. The History sections, though four in number, are much shorter—indeed, scarcely so long together as the single one allotted to Fable, which fact also is true, as the needle is, to the pole of the time. It is much better, Isidore thinks, that a man should only write of what he has actually seen. But History is not useless reading. Strictly, it is of our own time; “Annals” of the past; while Ephemeris is a diurnal and Kalendarium a monthly history. Finally the book ends with a contrast of historia, argumentum, and fabula. The first is of true things really done; the second of things which, though they have not been done, might be; the third of things which neither have been done nor can be, because they are contrary to nature. Here argumentum clearly looks towards oratory: with regard to the difference between historia and fabula, it must be admitted that the ages which followed very scrupulously forgot their teacher’s warning.
But even this does not exhaust our indebtedness to a very agreeable work, full of good sense and sound learning. The Sixth Book, which begins with an account of the Old and New Testament, diverges to the consideration of books generally. A note on famous libraries leads Isidore to record the chief authorities on Biblical Exegesis, from whom he passes to Latin libraries, to others (those of the Martyr Pamphilus and of Jerome), and thence to authors. Much writing attracts him first: and Varro, the Greek Chalcenterus, Origen, and St Augustine are picked out, the not entirely single-edged compliment being paid to the last, that not only could nobody write his books by working day and night, but nobody could read them completely by a similar expenditure of time and labour. An odd division of works follows, into excerpta or scholia, “homilies,” and “tomes” or books,[[519]] or volumes: and this is followed by a string of remarks, as before rather desultory, on different kinds of books and writings, commentaries, prefaces, and what not. Then Isidore passes to the material side, and discusses waxen and wooden tablets, parchment, paper, with something about format. The staff and the plant of libraries follow; and then, returning from things profane to things divine, the book finishes with an account of the Calendar and the Offices of the Church.
Those to whose taste and intellect this kind of thing appears despicable must, of course, be permitted to despise it. Others will prefer to recognise, with interest and sympathy, the combination of an extremely strong desire for knowledge, and the possession of no small quantity thereof, not merely with great disadvantages of resource and supply, but with a most curious and (if it were not so healthy and so promising) pathetic inability to distinguish, to know exactly where to plant the grip, what to discard, what simply to neglect. And they, once more, will see in this whole attitude, in this childhood crying for the light, something more encouraging than the complacent illumination of certain other ages, with which, perhaps, they may be more fully acquainted.
Bede,[[520]] a century later than Isidore, presents a changed but not a lesser interest. It is utterly improbable that the Bishop |Bede again.| of Seville found himself in face of any vernacular writing that could be called in the least literary—if any vernacular except Latin and Old Basque can be supposed to have existed in Spain at all. Bede’s circumstances were quite different. The most famous passage in his writings—the story of Cædmon—is sufficient to tell us, even if we did not know it from other testimony, and from his extant death-bed verses, that he was well acquainted with vernacular poetry.
But he seems to have thought it either unnecessary or undesirable to give any critical attention to it. His Ars Metrica[[521]], like his Orthography[[522]] and his Rhetoric,[[523]] concerns |His Ars Metrica.| itself strictly with Latin. That this was on the whole better for the time, and so indirectly for us, who are the offspring of that time; that it was better for the vernaculars to be left to grow and seed themselves, and be transformed naturally without any attempt to train and so to cramp them; that it was, on the other hand, all important that the hand of discipline should be kept on the only “regular” writing, that of Latin—we may not only admit with frankness, but most eagerly and spontaneously advance and maintain. But the carnal man cannot help sighing for a tractate—a tractatule even of the tiniest—on English verse, from the Venerable One. There are, however, in the Ars Metrica one large and several small crumbs of comfort. It is a pity that the learned and accurate Keil should have spoken so scornfully[[524]] of the undoubted truth that, while Bede supplements the precepts of the old grammarians in no whit, his whole usefulness lies in regard to the examination of more recent poets, and, as he calls them, “modern versifiers”; and should, a little further, have still more scornfully declined[[525]] to trouble himself with verifying unnamed references to such persons as Prudentius, Sedulius, Venantius Fortunatus, and others. To despise any age of literature is not literary: and to ignore it (as the motto which I have ventured to borrow from the excellent Leyser hath it in other words) is not safe. I think we may ask Herr Keil this question, “Is it not exactly of the moderni versificatores that Bede can speak to us with advantage?” Do we, except by a supererogation of curiosity, want remarks from him on Virgil and Ovid?
Bede (who addresses the tract to the same Cuthbert whom we have to thank for the charming account of his death) begins with the letter, goes on to the syllable, and then has a chapter of peculiar interest on common syllables—those stumbling-blocks to so many modern students of English prosody. The quantity of syllables in various positions is then dealt with successively, and next the metres, cæsura, elision, &c. One may note as specially interesting the section Quæ sit optima Carminis forma (p. 243), both as showing long before, in reference to the hexameter, the same “striving after the best” which appears in Dante’s extrication of the canzone and the hendecasyllable from meaner forms and lines, and as indicating something like a sense of that “verse-paragraph” which was to be the method of Shakespeare and of Milton. In dealing with these things he sometimes quotes, and still more frequently relies upon, Mallius Theodorus. But the passage which, if it existed alone, would make the book valuable (though in that case, as no doubt in many others, we should be prone to think that we had lost something more precious than it actually is), comes under the head De Rhythmo. After saying that the “Common books of a hundred metres”[[526]] will give many of these which he has omitted, he goes on thus: “But rhythm seems to be like metres, in that it is a modulated arrangement of words, governed not by metrical rule, but by the number of syllables, according to the judgment of the ear. And there can be rhythm without metre, though there can be no metre without rhythm: or, as it may be more clearly defined, metre is rhythm with modulation, rhythm modulation without proportion. But for the most part you will find, by a certain chance, proportion likewise in rhythm: not that any artificial discipline is used, but from the conduct of the sound and the modulation itself; and such as the poets of the people naturally produce in a rustic, learned poets in a learned manner.”[[527]] And then he quotes, as examples of iambic and trochaic rhythms respectively, the well-known hymns, Rex æterne Domine and Apparebit repentina.
Now this, which, though partly a result of, is quite different from, the classical opposition of rhythm and metre, is a thing of the first importance, and could not have been said by any one who had neglected the moderni versificatores: while it would perhaps not have been said so clearly and well by any one who had not known, and paid some attention to, the rising vernaculars. Even if, as Keil thinks, Bede followed such writers as Victorinus and Audax, he confirmed and strengthened this following by his study of recent verse.