The dialogue of Salomon and Saturnus is one of the Anglo-Saxon things belonging to a common European fashion; the dialogue literature, partly didactic, partly comic, which was so useful in the Middle Ages in providing instruction along with varying degrees of amusement. There is more than one Anglo-Saxon piece of this sort, valuable as expressing the ordinary mind; for, generally speaking, there is a want of merely popular literature in Anglo-Saxon, as compared with the large amount later on.
The history of prose is continuous from the Anglo-Saxon onwards; there is no such division as between Anglo-Saxon and Middle English poetry. In fact, Middle English prose at first is the continuation of the English Chronicle, and the transcription of the homilies of Ælfric into the later grammar and spelling.
The English had not the peculiar taste for prose which seems to be dealt by chance to Hebrews and Arabs, to Ireland and Iceland. As in Greece and France, the writing of prose comes after verse. It begins by being useful; it is not used for heroic stories. But the English had more talent for prose than some people; they understood it better than the French; and until the French influence came over them did not habitually degrade their verse for merely useful purposes.
Through the Chronicle, which probably began in King Alfred’s time, and through Alfred’s translations from the Latin, a common available prose was established, which had all sorts of possibilities in it, partly realized after a time. There seems no reason, as far as language and technical ability are concerned, why there should not have been in English, prose stories as good as those of Iceland. The episode of King Cynewulf of Wessex, in the Chronicle, has been compared to the Icelandic sagas, and to the common epic theme of valorous fighting and loyal perseverance. In Alfred’s narrative passages there are all the elements of plain history, a style that might have been used without limit for all the range of experience.
Alfred’s prose when he is repeating the narratives of his sea-captains has nothing in it that can possibly weary, so long as the subject is right. It is a perfectly clean style for matter of fact.
The great success of Anglo-Saxon prose is in religious instruction. This is various in kind; it includes the translation of Boethius which is philosophy, and fancy as well; it includes the Dialogues of Gregory which are popular stories, the homilies on Saints’ Lives which are often prose romances, and which often are heightened above prose, into a swelling, chanting, alliterative tune, not far from the language of poetry. The great master of prose in all its forms is Ælfric of Eynsham, about the year 1000. Part of his work was translation of the Bible, and in this, and in his theory of translation, he is more enlightened than any translator before Tyndale. The fault of Bible versions generally was that they kept too close to the original. Instead of translating like free men they construed word for word, like the illiterate in all ages. Ulphilas, who is supposed by some to have written Gothic prose, is really a slave to the Greek text, and his Gothic is hardly a human language. Wycliffe treats his Latin original in the same way, and does not think what language he is supposed to be writing. But Ælfric works on principles that would have been approved by Dryden; and there is no better evidence of the humanities in those early times than this. Much was lost before the work of Ælfric was taken up again with equal intelligence.
CHAPTER III
THE MIDDLE ENGLISH PERIOD, 1150-1500
INTRODUCTORY
Anglo-Saxon and Middle English literature had many things in common. The educational work of King Alfred was continued all through the Middle Ages. Chaucer translates Boethius, five hundred years after King Alfred’s translation. The same authors are read and adapted. The sermons of Ælfric, A.D. 1000, have the same sort of matter as those of the thirteenth or the fourteenth century, and there is no very great difference of tone. Many of the literary interests of the Plantagenet times are found already among the Anglo-Saxons. The Legends of the Saints are inexhaustible subjects of poetical treatment in the earlier as well as the later days. The poetical expression is, of course, very greatly changed, but earlier or later the Saints’ Lives are used as material for literature which is essentially romantic, whatever its other qualities may be. There are other sources of romance open, long before the French influence begins to be felt in England; particularly, the wonders of the East appear in the Anglo-Saxon version of Alexander’s letter to Aristotle; and later Greek romance (through the Latin) in the Anglo-Saxon translation of Apollonius of Tyre.
The great difference between the two ages is made by the disappearance of the old English poetry. There is nothing in the Plantagenet reigns like Beowulf or the Maldon poem; there is nothing like the Fall of the Angels and the dramatic eloquence of Satan. The pathos of the later Middle Ages is expressed in a different way from the Wanderer and the Ruin. The later religious poetry has little in it to recall the finished art of Cynewulf. Anglo-Saxon poetry, whether derived from heathendom or from the Church, has ideas and manners of its own; it comes to perfection, and then it dies away. The gravity and thought of the heroic poetry, as well as the finer work of the religious poets, are unlike the strength, unlike the graces, of the later time. Anglo-Saxon poetry grows to a rich maturity, and past it; then, with the new forms of language and under new influences, the poetical education has to start again.