“In Job x. 22 we also find a similar idea:—‘A land of darkness, as darkness itself; and of the shadow of death without any order, and where the light is as darkness.’ They are all powerful, all dreadful, but Cædmon’s ‘without light, and full of flame,’ is much the strongest. It is an Inferno in a line.”—Robert Spence Watson, “Cædmon,” p. 44.
[71] “Paradise Lost,” i., 221:—
“Forthwith upright he rears from off the pool
His mighty stature; on each hand the flames,
Driv’n backward, slope their pointing spires, and roll’d
In billows, leave i’ th’ midst a horrid vale.”
[72] Wright, “Biographia Literaria,” Anglo-Saxon Period, p. 353.
[73] The new start of literature under Charles is briefly and brilliantly stated in the first paragraph of Adolf Ebert’s second volume.
CHAPTER VI.
THE PRIMARY POETRY.
We have now seen something of a culture that was introduced from abroad, and guided by foreign models. But our people had a native gift of song, and a tradition of poetic lore, which lived in memory, and was sustained by the profession of minstrelsy. The Christian and literary culture obtained through the Latin tended strongly to the suppression and extinction of this ancient and national vein of poetry. But happily it has not all been lost, and it will be the aim of this chapter to present some specimens of that poetry which is rooted in the native genius of the race, and which we may call the primary poetry. The poetry which is manifestly of Latin material we will call the secondary poetry. It is not asserted that we have two sorts of poetry so entirely separate and distinct the one from the other, that the one is purely native and untinged with foreign influence, while the other springs from mere imitation. The two sorts are not so utterly contrasted as that. Even the secondary poetry is not without originality. On the other hand the primary poetry betrays here and there the Latin culture and the Christian sentiment; and yet if is quite sufficiently distinct and characterised to justify the plan of grouping it apart from the general body of the poetical remains.
The chief features of the Saxon poetry may conveniently be arranged under three heads: 1. The mechanical formation. 2. The rhetorical characteristics. 3. The imaginative elements.
1. Of these the first turns on Alliteration, Accent, and Rhythm; and this part, which is generally held to belong rather to grammar than to literature, I have described elsewhere.[74]