Isaiah, Juvenal, Dante,—they are virgins. Observe their eyes cast down. There is chastity in the anger of the just against the unjust. The Imprecation can be as holy as the Hosanna; and indignation, honest indignation, has the very purity of virtue. In point of whiteness, the foam has no reason to envy the snow.
CHAPTER III.
History proves the working partnership of art and progress. Dictus ob hoc lenire tigres. Rhythm is a power,—a power that the Middle Ages recognize and submit to not less than antiquity. The second barbarism, feudal barbarism, dreads also this power,—poetry. The barons, not over-timid, are abashed before the poet. Who is this man? They fear lest a manly song be sung. The spirit of civilization is with this unknown. The old donjons full of carnage open their wild eyes, and suspect the darkness; anxiety seizes hold of them. Feudality trembles; the den is disturbed. The dragons and the hydras are ill at ease. Why? Because an invisible god is there.
It is curious to find this power of poetry in countries where unsociableness is deepest, particularly in England, in that extreme feudal darkness, penitus toto divisos orbe Britannos. If we believe the legend,—a form of history as true and as false as any other,—it is owing to poetry that Colgrim, besieged by the Britons, is relieved in York by his brother Bardulph the Saxon; that King Awlof penetrates into the camp of Athelstan; that Werburgh, prince of Northumbria, is delivered by the Welsh, whence, it is said, that Celtic device of the Prince of Wales, Ich dien; that Alfred, King of England, triumphs over Gitro, King of the Danes; and that Richard the Lion-hearted escapes from the prison of Losenstein. Ranulph, Earl of Chester, attacked in his castle of Rothelan, is saved by the intervention of the minstrels, which was still authenticated under Elizabeth by the privilege accorded to the minstrels patronized by the Lords of Dalton.
The poet had the right of reprimand and menace. In 1316, on Pentecost Day, Edward II. being at table in the grand hall of Westminster with the peers of England, a female minstrel entered the hall on horseback, rode all round, saluted Edward II., predicted in a loud voice to the minion Spencer the gibbet and castration by the hand of the executioner, and to the king the hoof by means of which a red-hot iron should be buried in his intestines, placed on the table before the king a letter, and departed; and no one said anything to her.
At the festivals the minstrels passed before the priests, and were more honourably treated. At Abingdon, at a festival of the Holy Cross, each of the twelve priests received fourpence, and each of the twelve minstrels two shillings. At the priory of Maxtoke, the custom was to give supper to the minstrels in the Painted Chamber, lighted by eight huge wax-candles.
The more we advance North, it seems as if the increased thickness of the fog increases the greatness of the poet. In Scotland he is enormous. If anything surpasses the legend of the Rhapsodists, it is the legend of the Scalds. At the approach of Edward of England, the bards defend Stirling as the three hundred had defended Sparta; and they have their Thermopylæ, as great as that of Leonidas. Ossian, perfectly certain and real, has had a plagiary; that is nothing; but this plagiarist has done more than rob him,—he has made him insipid. To know Fingal only by Macpherson is as if one knew Amadis only by Tressan. They show at Staffa the stone of the poet, Clachan an Bairdh,—so named, according to many antiquaries, long before the visit of Walter Scott to the Hebrides. This chair of the Bard—a great hollow rock ready for a giant wishing to sit down—is at the entrance of the grotto. Around it are the waves and the clouds. Behind the Clachan an Bairdh is heaped up and raised the superhuman geometry of basaltic prisms, the pell-mell of colonnades and waves, and all the mystery of the fearful edifice. The gallery of Fingal runs next to the poet's chair; the sea beats on it before entering under that terrible ceiling. When evening comes, one imagines that he sees in that chair a form leaning on its elbow. "It is the ghost!" say the fishermen of Mackinnon's clan; and no one would dare, even in full day, to go up as far as that formidable seat; for to the idea of the stone is allied the idea of the sepulchre, and on the chair of granite no one can be seated but the man of shade.