or knows by a glimmering tradition merely; stones, 'not of this building,' but of an older architecture, greater, cunninger, more majestical." The ballad minstrel in our own land was often too a pillager of antiquity, not always employing indeed material of a great or majestic architecture, but the traditions and memories of the simple folk who for many a hundred years in "the dark backward and abysm of time" had lightened their labour and heartened their courage and soothed their grief by the divine enchantments of song. The type of poetry varies with the stage of a people's social and political progress; it varies too with its prevailing interests. Tacitus describes our Teutonic ancestors as a singing folk and as a race of warriors. Such a race would render into song the deeds and praise of heroes, the joy of battle, the glory of victory, the burial of a chief fallen in conflict. And from such material, the lays and hymns that reflected an heroic age, is everywhere drawn the material of authentic epic. But the epic is always a late product, which awaits a fortunate moment. Not one or two races, but many appear to have had their heroic age; how comes it that the epic poetry of the world is so limited? It is true that epic poetry is limited if one thinks of the epic as a complete and rounded whole, an heroic narrative with a beginning, a middle, and an end, its episodes fitly placed, its characters appropriately grouped, its form artistically ordered. But if one's requirements be less stringent, it is barely true. Far from scanty is the epic poetry of Europe, if that title be accorded to narrative in the lofty style, to great stories greatly told.1 For the appearance of that splendid star, the finished epic, man must wait upon the heavens. A rare friendliness of circumstances, a lucky fortune must attend its birth, if the representative child of the race is to be well-favoured and perfect in every limb. At the great festival of Panathenæa, 66 1 See Mr. Chadwick's Heroic Age, already mentioned, for a most interesting note on a living heroic poetry" among the Mohammedan population of Bosnia. Among points worthy of notice are (1) the variety of forms in which a story is told, never repeated," even by the same poet, in exactly the same words; " (2) the reproduction melting into creation; (3) the absence of written texts; (4) the ease with which the longest poems are memorised. held every few years, or at similar earlier festivals, through centuries the Ionian bards recited their heroic lays, and Homer became the Homer we know. At such national gatherings a common worship, a common stock of traditions made vivid the sense of kinship; the spirit of unity was visibly abroad. In their pride and happiness the poets produced their finest wares, and the critical sense of a vastly interested audience exercised through generations-gradually imposed an order and a purpose upon the whole mass of this heroic poetry. A process of acceptance and rejection, the unconscious criticism of assemblies, silently moulded the Iliad as we possess it. No such good fortune has attended any other body of heroic poetry in any quarter of the world. In France the continuity of national life was broken when the northern tribes met Christianity and the influences of Roman civilisation. In Scandinavia the progress of culture was too slow, the conditions of the life-struggle too severe, to permit the artistic development without which the epic cannot realise itself, or reach maturity. There the epic form competed unsuccessfully with the lyric. Among Teutonic peoples the Old English poem of Beowulf approached most nearly to complete and finished epic. In many ways comparable to the Iliad a great and moving work of art-it is yet manifestly far less complex, less elaborate. "We have in Beowulf a half-finished epos, as if frozen in the midst of its development." It is so frozen because at no stage in their history were the people from whom it sprang welded into political unity. Many such poems were doubtless laid under contribution for the Iliad, or, let it be said, that Beowulf, dealing with somewhat the same type of material as Homer, carried it to a different conclusion along a path of its own. There is the same background of war, of clan feuds, of heroic enterprises. But the Iliad was wrought into a national book for the Greek world, it was the literature of those gatherings where the various branches of the Greek race met to celebrate their common ancestry and traditions. Beowulf, never a national Bible, a national treasury, hardly more than a tribal possession, attains as much of unity as was possible to it, not final or complete, yet higher than that attained in the poetry of the Scandinavians or the Franks. And of Ulysses' life, O Jove, make known, Of the lays which preceded Beowulf we learn a little from that poem itself. "At times one of the king's thanes, with memory stored with old tales, invented new words for them, skilfully woven. He began to relate Beowulf's adventure with deft cunning, and happily to tell the story, fitting word to word."1 Of such songs as this, one may safely conjecture, was the cycle composed to which the author of Beowulf was indebted. Some of them are even imbedded in the text as episodes, as is Finnsburh.2 The poem itself is of higher range and rises above such fragments by its greater elaboration and far greater dignity, its later heightened and lordly style, its emphasis on character, its wider sweep of interest which includes and transcends the single episode. Strange it is that in that well-defined type, whose counterparts in early Germanic days preceded Beowulf, the heroic lay, our literature is lacking. It is lacking too in the literature of Germany. To find it one must go to Denmark, to that very district in which probably the lays from which Beowulf emerged had their origin. The Danish heroic ballads are numerous, and like Beowulf they are concerned with the sea and sea-faring. Castles and armour and weapons with which the English epic makes us familiar are there; there too gifts are interchanged between heroes; there one hears of martial doings and military expeditions; there, as in Beowulf, names are given to favourite weapons these and many another feature, foreign to our own ballads, the fierce feuds, the combats with dragons and supernatural enemies, recall Beowulf. No traces of this heroic world, curiously enough, remain in our popular literature. We have the heroic epic itself, but the tradition, the stories from which it sprang, were left behind in the land of their ancestors when our forefathers became Englishmen. 1 Beowulf, vv. 867 ff. 2 Vv. 1068 ff. CHAPTER III AUTHENTIC EPIC-BEOWULF THE branch of the Teutonic peoples to whom Beowulf, a poem of the migrations, belongs, came to England in the fifth century. The early Angles and Saxons knew nothing of any civilisation existing in Britain; they discovered it for themselves in the fourth century, and the sea-rovers pronounced it a good land, rich in booty. By the fifth Rome had withdrawn her protecting legions, and the invaders, at first mere freebooters, who raided and sailed away, began to make winter settlements on the coasts they had pillaged, and to press inland when driven by necessity. Soon little kingdoms grew up, first Kent, then Essex and East Anglia and Northumbria. The pirates, changing their modes of life, turned settlers and farmers, and for six hundred years our literature is Anglo-Saxon. What did they carry with them into England, these newcomers? What poetry or history in which no mention is made of England, but which preserved the earlier traditions of the race? Many an old lay and ballad, many a hymn, many a battle-song no doubt, but little remains. The only indisputable specimens of that literature are Widsith, The Lament of Deor, Brunanburh, Waldhere, Finnsburh, and the incomparable Beowulf. From these the rest must be conjectured, yet from these it is not impossible to frame a conception of the races from which they emanated. When our ancestors came to these shores they were polytheists, whose gods, not omnipotent, though powerful deities, dwelt in Asgard, where Odin, chief of the twelve mighty ones, had his Valhalla, whither he summoned all warriors who fell in battle.1 The constitution of the Saxons was a species of free 1 These are Scandinavian forms. We know little or nothing about English pre-historic religion. monarchy, in which kingship is of the patriarchal type, and the monarch the friend and shepherd of his people. The chief or earl had his followers, the comitatus described by Tacitus, but his own distinguished descent or prowess gave him pre-eminence. Outside the comitatus stood the nation of freemen, less wealthy than the earl's retainers, but more independent, men free to speak and not unwilling to defend their words with blows. An emotional though fierce folk, warriors all, they were little given to agriculture or the peaceful arts; of many tribes probably, but tribes not inhabiting for long any fixed geographical area. These tribes met and mingled or fought, coalesced or separated into new groups, for ever in unrest. They were plunderers, when plundering was possible; they battled as they lived in smaller or larger groups, perpetually swaying back and forward as the tides of war or conquest or defeat determined. One who has read De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars can figure to himself the movements of these untamed northern multitudes, who crossed the Rhine and Danube as the fever of battle, the scourge of famine, or who knows what strange impulse drove them. To rule among such wild and turbulent tribes was to be a wielder of weapons, a master of rude eloquence, a tempest-lover and cloud-compeller. These men knew no towns-no city or town is mentioned in Beowulf-regarding them even in the conquered lands as tombs; they felt imprisoned within walls, praelio gaudentes, they were most at home in the battle-camp or in their galleys threshing over angry seas. Curious it is that of these indubitable ancestors of ours we know almost nothing. There are the accounts given by Tacitus in his Germania, and of Jordanes, himself a Goth, in his De Rebus Geticis, written in the sixth century. But of that long history of the German peoples before they drove their terrible wedges into the vast structure of Roman civilisation, we are almost wholly ignorant. And of documents which teach us anything of their beliefs and ways of life, their methods of warfare, their social and political constitutions, there are, besides Beowulf, but few and fragmentary remains. None of the arts save that of poetry were sufficiently advanced to leave any |