Satan rages not so much on account of his own loss as for their gain. If they could only be ruined by the wrath of God, he declares he could be at ease even in the midst of woes; and whoever would achieve this he will reward to his utmost, and give him a seat by his side. Presently we come to the accoutring of the emissary:—
He takes wing and rises in air; and then comes a passage like Milton:—
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Swang thæt fyr on twa feondes cræfte. |
he dashed the fire in two with fiendish craft.[71] |
Arrived at the garden he takes the shape of a serpent, and winds himself round the forbidden tree. The description recalls the familiar picture so vividly that we cannot doubt the same picture was before the eyes of children in the Saxon period as now. He takes some of the fruit and finds Adam, and addresses him in a speech. He gives a naïve reason why he is sent:—
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507. Brade synd on worulde grene geardas, and God siteth on tham hehstan heofna rice ufan. Alwalda nele tha earfethu sylfa habban that he on thisne sith fare, gumena drihten:— ac he his gingran sent to thinre spræce. |
Broad are in the world the green plains, and God sitteth in the highest heavenly realm above. The Almighty will not the trouble himself have, that He should on this journey fare, the Lord of men:— but He sends his deputy to speak with thee. |
These poems are surrounded by interesting questions which it is barely possible here to indicate. Upon the top of the discussion about Milton, which is not by any means exhausted, there comes a much larger and wider field of inquiry as to the relation existing between this Miltonic part (if I may so speak) and the Old Saxon poem of the “Heliand.” The investigation has been admirably started by Mr. Edouard Sievers in a little book containing this portion of the text, and exhibiting in detail the peculiar intimacy of relation between it and the “Heliand,” in regard to vocabulary, phraseology, and versification. This part of Mr. Sievers’ work is complete. Probably no one who has gone through his proofs will be found to question his conclusion, that there is between the “Heliand” and the Saxon “Paradise Lost” such an identity as isolates those two works from all other literature, and makes it necessary to trace them to one source. What remains is only to determine the order of their affiliation. His theory is that our “Cædmon” contains a large insertion which has been borrowed, not, of course, from the “Heliand,” because the “Heliand” is a poem solely on the Gospel history, but from a sister poem to the “Heliand,” a corresponding poem on the Old Testament. Professor George Stephens, of Copenhagen, offered a simpler explanation. He supposed that our piece is a purely domestic remnant of that school of English poetry which Bede described, and that the “Heliand” is a continental offspring of the same school, being a monument of the poetic culture which was planted along the borders of the Rhine by the Anglo-Saxon missionaries.
Alcuin’s name connects the Anglian period with the great Frankish revival of literature under Charlemagne. And as he bears a prominent part in the establishment of literature in its next European seat, so also he had the grief of witnessing the earlier stages of that devastation which extinguished the light in his own country. This is how he writes on hearing of the invasion of Lindisfarne by the northern rovers in 793, to Bishop Hugibald and the monks of Lindisfarne:—
“As your beloved society was wont to delight me when I was with you, so does the report of your tribulation sadden me continually now that I am absent from you. How have the heathen defiled the sanctuaries of God, and shed the blood of the saints round about the altar. They have laid waste the dwelling-place of our hope; they have trodden down the bodies of the saints in the temple of God like mire in the street. What can I say? I can only lament in my heart with you before the altar of Christ, and say: Spare, Lord, spare Thy people, and give not Thy heritage to the heathen, lest the pagans say, Where is the God of the Christians? What confidence is there for the churches of Britain if Saint Cuthbert, with so great a company of saints, defends not his own? Either this is the beginning of a greater sorrow, or the sins of the people have brought this upon them.”[72]