literature, rank and the duties of rank are the pillars of this society.

The epic hero is always a fighter, a soldier in some good cause. In the medieval French epic he is the champion of the true faith against the Saracen; in Beowulf he is engaged in a no less holy war with the powers of darkness, the enemies of the whole human race. This is not a war of heroes with other heroes, it is a conflict of man with powers hostile to man. Nothing can be clearer than that Beowulf belongs to an age in which nature was felt as unsubdued, in which the elements were unfriendly. His race inhabited the narrow lands, the ridge of unceasing war -the unexplored ocean before him, at his back the equally unexplored and threatening woods. The forest had not yet been cleared nor the protecting walls of the city built. Northern Germany in the pre-Christian centuries can hardly have been a more kindly region than the Central Africa of to-day. The hero in Beowulf stands at bay with Nature, exposed to the attacks of strange, uncouth, silent foes. Neither Grendel nor his dam nor the dragon by whom he is slain make use of any speech, Suddenly and mysteriously they issue from the unknown, suddenly and mysteriously as a plague upon the wind. Everywhere in this poem we have the sense of a savage and menacing world-in the scenery, the stormy seas, the sombre forest, the wild unpenetrated country of the interior. Heroic poetry of this order has small concern with ideas; unlike the chivalric epic, it is desperately occupied with doings. Life is wholly strain and pressure, governed by the simplest emotions, the desire of food and drink, of treasure and good weapons. There is no room for love-episode or protracted courtship, no place for gentleness, for subtleties of thought and feeling, no heart for easy humour, small space for the gay sciences. It reads throughout like a stern record of a painful but necessary undertaking. In this society each group is supporting itself with difficulty against famine, the untamed forces of nature, the raids of rival clans, each individual preserving his existence at the spear's point. These men—

'Fierce in their native hardiness of soul,"

are laying the foundations of civilisation and social order, they keep their foothold only by the exercise of eternal vigilance and native valour. The unfriendliness of the physical environment is far more emphasised than the play of motives or the varieties of emotion and character. We are far nearer the elemental conditions of life, the opening days of human history, than with Homer. The nerve of the narrative, the heart of its interest lies therefore in the vivid presentation of a real struggle against deadly odds. Ringed round with enemies the hero proudly takes pleasure in his strength while his strength lasts, he sells his life dearly. When he dies, he would die like Colonsay's fierce lord in Scott, pierced by the lance of De Argentine

"Nail'd to the earth, the mountaineer

Yet writhed him up against the spear.
And swung his broadsword round!
Stirrup, steel-boot, and cuish gave way,
Beneath that blow's tremendous sway,
The blood gushed from the wound;
And the grim lord of Colonsay

Hath turn'd him on the ground,

And laugh'd in death-pang, that his blade
The mortal thrust so well repaid."

The hero in this epic knows that the day will come when fate will be stronger than he, as it has been stronger than his fathers and kinsmen, when all will seem "too wide for him, the fields and the homestead." And a natural melancholy tinges the poet's mood when he reflects that if not to-day then to-morrow in the battle the chief goes the fated way, that the bravest must, in the end, sleep "den eisernen Schlaf des Todes," the iron sleep of death. The best that can befall, the heart of his desire, is to die the great death, as Beowulf dies, beside the dragon he has slain, or

"With heroes' hot corpses
High heaped for his pillow."

A dark, capricious fate, whose decrees none can foretell, is the ruler of human destiny-" It is not an easy matter to escape it," says the poet, or "Fate did not thus ordain for him." Yet courage may shield him from the impending blow, "Often does Wyrd save an earl undoomed when his valour avails."

The

Beowulf temper is that of the born fighter, the man born never to yield, "the temper of the fighter who feels that the very Norns themselves must cringe at last before the simple courage of men standing naked and bare of hope, whether of heaven or hell or doom.'

"The harder shall thought be, the bolder the heart,
The mood the more, as lessens our might." 1

It was the temper of that long roll of Englishmen, soldiers, sailors, adventurers, explorers, to whom retreat was more bitter than death, who, rather than turn back from the task undertaken, challenged the fates themselves-to pluck, how often, glorious success from the very heart of failure. Beowulf itself does not end, as it is sometimes demanded the epic should end, upon a note of success and triumph. Or if it end upon a note of triumph, it is triumph touched, as are all human triumphs, with a sense of the invincible hardness of the world. It is at best a losing battle in which mankind is engaged, and Beowulf is throughout his life the leader of a forlorn hope. Again and again he is successful in spite of odds, foot by foot he grapples with destiny unafraid, but he knows that there is but one way, and that he must tread at last the pathway to the shades. The clear-sighted philosophy of the old English epic, undimmed by any dream of hope, disturbed by no metaphysical consolations, has in it the more than Roman fortitude that looks unflinchingly into the burning eyes of Truth.

Of the arts of peace Beowulf says little. The skilful craftsman twists collars of gold or bracelets or other personal adornments, but the warrior's weapons are the subject of his peculiar and affectionate regard. The sword, to which perpetual reference is made, is jewelled, carved with runes, often personified and given an individual name, handed down as a precious heirloom, its record preserved in history. The helmet and coat of mail too, the spear and shield, are wrought with a care and skill lavished upon no other possessions. So much are they a part of himself that a warrior is known by his arms. This is true epic feeling. In the true epic manner, too, Beowulf does not

1 Maldon, 312-313.

resources.

await the tide of war, he goes out to meet it, and against an enemy of unknown strength, unknown haunts, and unknown In his labours-the fight with Grendel and his dam and the Fire Dragon-human valour and power as idealised by the poet are matched with supernatural adversaries, vaguely imagined, dwellers in a mysterious country. The landscape assists to create an atmosphere of the dim and marvellous. A hidden and perilous place is it, the haunt of the mighty stalkers of the mere, and there is none of the sons of men so wise as to know its depths. "Thou knowest not yet the spot, the savage place," says Hrothgar, "seek it if thou darest." The Athelings follow to the misty mere, "over steep slopes of stone, a narrow and single path, by many an abrupt cliff, the homes of sea monsters, an unknown road." The dragon of the last combat watches its hoard in a high burial mound, " beneath it a path unknown to men."

In the foreground of the Beowulf landscape are the shore, the bold headlands, the wind-swept sea rising clearly before the eyes as in a picture; beyond is a vague region of enchantmentnot mountain country, it is significant that mountains are never mentioned in this east coast epic-gloomy fells and shaggy woods, a land of high and dead romance, but romance in which there is neither sunshine nor warmth, in which terror overpowers beauty. In Celtic story one meets with delightful experiences, exquisite sylvan retreats, meadows rich in flower and fruit, islands of repose and fair winning figures that invite the seaworn mariner. There are no such pleasaunces in Beowulf. In Homer the divine shapes of gods and goddesses, the holy splendours of Nature and of a world fairer than man's, are discerned through the dust and smoke of mortal battle, or beyond the weary leagues of sundering sea; no veil lifts in Beowulf to disclose immortal beauty. What a life, behind all its courtliness, the grace and chivalry the poet imparts, what a life in the ages before his own this epic pictures-days and nights tossing upon the sea, the bitter North Sea, in open vessels, days and nights of unintermitting battle with foes human and inhuman; the fierce quarrels, the ferocity of war, the bodily strain, the sleep

less mental vigilance, rage and storm and slaughter, uncouth terrors, and nowhere a harbour of refuge, nowhere lasting peace or beauty-surely a school for heroes. Nor, as in Homer, is the spectacle of life enriched and graced by scenes of domestic happiness, like that of Andromache and Astyanax; Beowulf is the story of men and men's work, the pioneer work of the world.

Never shall I leave this wintry land, these stony ways, the fields of war. where men meet many a form of death.1

Wonder and admiration are the emotions proper to heroic poetry, to wonder and admiration this epic calls us. The hero, unlike the hero of tragedy, Edipus or Hamlet or Othello, asks for the tribute of our worship rather than of our pity and of our tears. Yet as he goes down the lonely way to death for his people something of affectionate and human compassion mingles with worship and astonishment-here before the dawn of history is written that marvellous tale of the travailing soul, driven by who knows what divine gale, that would not if she could purchase her deliverance from the strange, unprofitable ideals of allegiance to truth and duty.

Two strains are blended in the Beowulf narrative, the strain of fact and the strain of fable, the strain of history and the strain of imagination. We know when we read of the hero's voyage, of the handling of the ship, of the arms and armour, of the hall of Heorot, that in describing these things the poet had his eye upon the object, so firm and clear is the drawing. We know when he relates the struggle with Grendel or the Fire Drake that he is telling a story he has heard or has invented. And this is as it should be. It is the mark of the true epic that it weaves together legend and history, things familiar with things told or dreamt or believed. In the poem, as we possess it, the stories of marriages and reconciliations, even some of the genealogies and characters, are no doubt historical; the 1 Argonautica (Valerius Flaccus), vi. 335.