What period of time the word presently represents to M. Taine we do not know. It may be an hour, or a day, or a month, but the incident which he refers to as occurring “presently” took place about forty years after the “procession.”
And now it is sought to belittle or decry the victory of the Christian missionaries in two ways: 1st. It was the most natural thing in the world for the brutal, bloody, slave-dealing, drunken barbarian to embrace the new religion, because his paganism so strongly resembled Christianity. 2d. But after conversion they remained, after all, substantially, barbarous pagans as before, and their songs remind M. Taine of “the songs of the servants of Odin, tonsured and clad in the garments of monks.” “The Christian hymns embody the pagan” (p. 46).
To demonstrate this, and to show that the songs of these converted Saxons are “but a concrete of exclamations,” have “no development,” and are nothing but paganism after all, M. Taine gives five prose lines of imperfect translation from a poem by Cædmon. Here is a correct rendering of the opening of the poem in the original metre. Let the reader judge of the amount of pagan inspiration it contains:
“Now must we glorify
The guardian of heaven’s kingdom,
The Maker’s might,
And his mind’s thought,
The work of the worshipped father,
When of his wonders, each one,
The ever-living Lord
Ordered the origin,
He erst created
For earth’s children
Heaven as a high roof,
The holy Creator:
Then on this mid-world
Did man’s great guardian,
The ever-living Lord,
Afterward prepare
For men a mansion,
The Master Almighty.”[4]
M. Taine continues:
“One of them” [those servants of Odin, take notice], “Adhelm, stood on a bridge leading to the town where he lived, and repeated warlike and profane odes alternately with religious poetry, in order to attract and instruct the men of his time. He could do it without changing his key. In one of them, a funeral song, Death speaks. It was one of the last Saxon compositions, containing a terrible Christianity, which seems at the same time to have sprung from the blackest depths of the Edda.”
M. Taine has here given rein to his imagination, and made terrible work with Saxon chronology and other matters. For Adhelm read Aldhelm, in Saxon Ealdhelm, so King Alfred spelt it. The name signifies Old Helmet; Aldhelm was of princely extraction. “Warlike and profane odes” does not correctly translate “carmen triviale.” Aldhelm was a learned priest, a Greek, Latin, and Hebrew scholar, with a profound knowledge of the Holy Scriptures. His present reputation rests on his Latin works. His contemporary reputation was founded on his Anglo-Saxon productions. He composed canticles and ballads in his native tongue, and, remarking the haste of many of the Anglo-Saxon peasants to leave church as soon as the Sunday Mass was over, in order to avoid the sermon, he would lie in wait for them at the bridge or wayside, and, singing to them as a bard, attract their attention, and in the fascination of a musical verse teach them the truths of religion they would not wait to hear from the pulpit. It was not for the pleasure of singing that Aldhelm thus labored: it was to save souls. Without the slightest authority, M. Taine puts in his mouth this beautiful Anglo-Saxon fragment:
“Death speaks to man: ’For thee was a house built ere thou wast born; for thee was a mould shapen ere thou camest of thy mother. Its height is not determined, nor its depth measured, nor is it closed up (however long it may be) until I bring thee where thou shalt remain, until I shall measure thee and the sod of earth. Thy house is not highly built, it is unhigh and low; when thou art in it the heelways are low, the sideways low. The roof is built full nigh thy breast; so thou shalt dwell in earth full cold, dim, and dark. Doorless is that house, and dark it is within; there thou art fast prisoner, and Death holds the key. Loathly is that earth-house, and grim to dwell in; there thou shalt dwell, and worms shall share thee. Thus thou art laid, and leavest thy friends; thou hast no friend that will come to thee, who will ever inquire how that house liketh thee, who shall ever open the door for thee, and seek thee, for soon thou becomest loathly and hateful to look upon.’”
The composition is not by Aldhelm, who, probably, never heard of it. All of Aldhelm’s Anglo-Saxon mss. perished when the magnificent monastery at Malmesbury was sacked under Henry VIII. The Protestant historian, Maitland, thus tells the story: “The precious mss. of his [Aldhelm’s] library were long employed to fill up broken windows in the neighboring houses, or to light the bakers’ fires.”