“It is thus the monks speak with monotonous dryness”! And so speak they often in their Chronicle. The death of Byrhtnoth referred to by M. Taine in note 2, p. 36, is also from the Saxon Chronicle, and Mr. Morley specifies numerous other poetical passages in it. Nevertheless, we find that M. Taine is not at all embarrassed by his somewhat uncertain and limited command of Anglo-Saxon literature. On the contrary, he qualifies as amusing (p. 30) a discussion on a point of Anglo-Saxon history by two such distinguished scholars as Dr. Lingard and Sharon Turner! These historians “amuse” M. Taine!
“What is your first remark,” asks Mr. Taine, “in turning over the great, stiff leaves of a folio, the yellow sheets of a manuscript? This, you say, was not created alone. It is but a mould, like a fossil shell, an imprint, like one of those shapes embossed in stone by an animal which lived and perished. Under the stone there was an animal, and behind the document there was a man. Why do you study the shell, except to represent to yourself the animal? So do you study the document only in order to know the man” (Introduction, p. 1).
In this we almost agree with our author. It is well to study shells, and well to study men in the shells of leaves, sheets, manuscripts, or other literary exuviæ they may have left. Our objection to M. Taine is that he has piles and heaps of such shells, which he resolutely refuses to study, behind which he persistently refuses to look. The trouble with him lies here. Behind every shell is a monk, a priest, or a bishop, whose piety and whose virtues are not subjects of agreeable contemplation to a writer who announces his belief that religion is a mere human invention; that man makes a religion as he paints a portrait or constructs a steam-engine. Thus M. Taine states it: “Let us take first the three chief works of human intelligence—religion, art, philosophy” (p. 15).
Accordingly, of the great minds of Anglo-Saxon England during whole centuries we see nothing in M. Taine’s pages. They are carefully kept out of sight. One of the most majestic figures in all literary history, that of the Venerable Bede, is absent from his chapters, being referred to only twice by name, once as “Bede, their old poet”! The learned Aldhelm is made a mere gleeman on the highway. Roger Bacon’s name is not mentioned—the name of the man who was a prodigy of learning, and who announced the principles of the inductive system nearly four hundred years before Lord Verulam appropriated the glory of its discovery.[6] Augustine, Paulinus, Wilfred, Cuthbert, and scores of others are not referred to. These men and their companions were at once monks, preachers, schoolmasters, book-makers, scribes, authors, physicians, architects, builders, surveyors, and farmers. Laborare est orare, Labor is prayer, was their device. Barren moors, repulsive marshes, fever-bearing fens, and wasted tracts they cultivated, and made glad fields of gloomy swamps.
The sandy plains and barren heaths of Northumbria, and the marshes of East Anglia and Mercia, the monks transformed by intelligent labor and enduring toil from uninhabited deserts into rich fields yielding abundant harvests. Around these isolated monasteries soon sprang up, as around so many centres of life, schools, workshops, and settlements. The wilderness blossomed. And the monks wrote Christianity and civilization on the hearts of the people and on the soil of England. Not to mention the grand literary monuments dedicated to the record of their pious labors by Count Montalembert in his Monks of the West, all these victories for humanity are clearly discernible to scores of modern Protestant writers, who have borne eloquent testimony to the noble devotion and glorious services of these holy men, whose real merits have been too long obscured by the historical conspiracy against truth. They have looked behind shells and manuscripts, and found something to reward their search.
Thus Carlyle finds a man behind the old MS. of Jocelin of Brakelond:
“A personable man of seven-and-forty, stout made, stands erect as a pillar; with bushy eyebrows, the face of him beaming into you in a really strange way: the name of him Samson: a man worth looking at.... He was wont to preach to the people in the English tongue, though according to the dialect of Norfolk, where he had been brought up. There preached he: a man worth going to hear.... Abbot Samson built many useful, many pious edifices; human dwellings, churches, steeples, barns;—all fallen now and vanished, but useful while they stood. He built and endowed ‘the Hospital of Babwell’; built ‘fit houses for the St. Edmunsbury schools.’ ... And yet these grim old walls are not a dilettantism and dubiety; they are an earnest fact. It was a most real and serious purpose they were built for? Yes, another world it was, when these black ruins, white in their new mortar and fresh chiselling, first saw the sun as walls, long ago. Gauge not, with thy dilettante compasses, with that placid dilettante simper, the Heaven’s-Watchtower of our Fathers, the fallen God’s Houses, the Golgotha of true Souls departed”!
With the advantage of eleven hundred years of accumulated knowledge in his favor, the cultivated M. Taine can well afford to sneer at “a kind of literature” with which he credits these monks. The “kind of literature” they most affected, and in which they unceasingly labored, was the kind known as “the Scriptures.” Of a verity, strange occupation for “sons of Odin,” for the most meagre summary of Anglo-Saxon, monastic labor in this field is a magnificent memorial of their imperishable glory.
In default of types and power-presses, volumes of the Scriptures were multiplied by copying, and every talent and gift of man was enlisted to preserve, beautify, and bring them within the reach and comprehension of the great body of the people. Its light was not hidden in the obscurity of an unfamiliar tongue. In the fourth century, on the banks of the Danube, Ulphilas had translated the entire Scriptures into the then barbarous Mœso-Gothic. In England, Cædmon had sung the Scripture story of God’s power and mercy, and put into verse all of Genesis and Exodus, with other portions of the Old Testament, besides the life and passion of our Lord and the Acts of the Apostles. The Venerable Bede had translated St. John’s Gospel, and written numerous expositions of the Old and New Testaments. Aldhelm had translated the Psalms. The entire four Gospels have come down to us in the Anglo-Saxon of King Alfred’s day. Ælfric translated the whole of the Pentateuch and the Book of Job. The Normans in England had various translations besides their metrical romance, and a verse translation of the Bible. In 1327, William of Shoreham translated the Psalter into English. A few years later, Richard Rolle translated the Psalms and part of the Book of Job into the dialect of Northumberland. The four Gospels issued in 1571 by Parker, with a dedication to Queen Elizabeth by Foxe, the martyrologist, are copied from two Anglo-Saxon versions of the tenth and eleventh centuries. From the original copy, Tha Halgan Godspel on Englisc, they appear to have been divided and arranged for reading aloud to the people. Many of these, it will be noticed, are versions adorned and heightened by literary labor and poetic inspiration. Plain prose Bible translations existed in large numbers, which, as being more exposed, were the first to perish from the effects of time, the elements, and the wilful destruction of bigotry. The metrical versions were generally better bound and better cared for in special libraries, and in the hands of the wealthy. And yet of these how few copies survive! And who shall tell us of scores of hundreds more of which we have never heard? An immense body of Anglo-Saxon Scriptural literature has perished and left no trace.
But M. Taine, it may be objected, was surely under no obligation to write the history of your Anglo-Saxon monks! Certainly not. But he was under some sort of obligation not to represent the product of Christianity, viz., the Anglo-Saxon man, as the product of pure paganism. That he has done so, we have shown from the remarkable manner in which he has spoken of the products of Anglo-Saxon literature, and we have not taken into account the full and rich material at command, written in the Latin language by the Anglo-Saxons.