Halleck's New English Literature Part 9

[Footnote 18: _Ibid_., I., 222-224.]

[Footnotes 19-22: Brooke's translation.]

[Footnote 23: Morley's translation.]

[Footnote 24: Brooke's translation.]

[Footnote 25: Morley's translation.]

[Footnotes 26-27: Brooke's translation.]

[Footnote 28: _Llywarch's Lament for his Son Gwenn_.]

[Footnote 29: Guest's _Mabinogion_.]

[Footnote 30: William Motherwell's _Wearie's Well_.]

[Footnote 31: Earle's translation.]

[Footnote 32: Cook and Tinker's _Select Translations from Old English Prose.]

[Footnote 33: In his _Education of the Central Nervous System_, Chaps.

VII.-X., the author has endeavored to give some special directions for securing definite ideas in the study of poetry.]

[Footnote 34: For full t.i.tles, see page 50.]

CHAPTER II: FROM THE NORMAN CONQUEST, 1066, TO CHAUCER'S DEATH, 1400

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE DEATH OF HAROLD AT HASTINGS. _From the Bayeaux tapestry_.]

The Norman Conquest.--The overthrow of the Saxon rule in England by William the Conqueror in 1066 was an event of vast importance to English literature. The Normans (Nors.e.m.e.n or Northmen), as they were called, a term which shows their northern extraction, were originally of the same blood as the English race. They settled in France in the ninth century, married French wives, and adopted the French language.

In 1066 their leader, Duke William, and his army crossed the English Channel and won the battle of Hastings, in which Harold, the last Anglo-Saxon king, was killed. William thus became king of England.

Characteristics of the Normans.--The intermixture of Teutonic and French blood had given to the Normans the best qualities of both races. The Norman was nimble-witted, highly imaginative, and full of northern energy. The Saxon possessed dogged perseverance, good common sense, if he had long enough to think, and but little imagination.

Some one has well said that the union of Norman with Saxon was like joining the swift spirit of the eagle to the strong body of the ox, or, again, that the Saxon furnished the dough, and the Norman the yeast. Had it not been for the blending of these necessary qualities in one race, English literature could not have become the first in the world. We see the characteristics of both the Teuton and the Norman in Shakespeare's greatest plays. A pure Saxon could not have turned from Hamlet's soliloquy to write:--

"Where the bee sucks, there suck I."[1]

Progress of the Nation, 1066-1400.--The Normans were specially successful in giving a strong central government to England. The feudal system, that custom of parceling out land in return for service, was so extended by William the Conqueror, that from king through n.o.ble to serf there was not a break in the interdependence of one human being on another. At first the Normans were the ruling cla.s.ses and they looked down on the Saxons; but intermarriage and community of interests united both races into one strong nation before the close of the period.

There was great improvement in methods of administering justice.

Accused persons no longer had to submit to the ordeal of the red-hot iron or to trial by combat, relying on heaven to decide their innocence. Ecclesiastical courts lost their jurisdiction over civil cases. In the reign of Henry II. (1154-1189), great grandson of William the Conqueror, judges went on circuits, and the germ of the jury system was developed.

Parliament grew more influential, and the first half of the fourteenth century saw it organized into two bodies,--the Lords and the Commons.

Three kings who governed tyrannically or unwisely were curbed or deposed. King John (1199-1216) was compelled to sign the _Magna Charta_, which reduced to writing certain foundation rights of his subjects. Edward II. (1307-1327) and Richard II. (1377-1399) were both deposed by Parliament. One of the reasons a.s.signed far the deposition of Richard II. was his claim that "he alone could change and frame the laws of the kingdom."

The ideals of chivalry and the Crusades left their impress on the age.

One English Monarch, Richard the Lion-Hearted (1189-1199) was the popular hero of the Third Crusade. In _Ivanhoe_ and _The Talisman_ Sir Walter Scott presents vivid pictures of knights and crusaders.

We may form some idea of the religious spirit of the Middle Ages from the Gothic cathedrals, which had the same relative position in the world's architecture as Shakespeare's work does in literature.

Travelers often declare that there is to-day nothing in England better worth seeing than these cathedrals, which were erected in the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries.[2]

The religious, social, and intellectual life of the time was profoundly affected by the coming of the friars (1220), who included the earnest followers of St. Francis (1182-1226), that Good Samaritan of the Middle Ages. The great philosopher and scientist, Roger Bacon (1214-1294), who was centuries in advance of his time, was a Franciscan friar. He studied at Oxford University, which had in his time become one of the great inst.i.tutions of Europe.

The church fostered schools and learning, while the barons were fighting. Although William Langland, a fourteenth-century cleric, pointed out the abuses which had crept into the church, he gave this testimony in its favor:--

"For if heaven be on this earth or any ease for the soul, it is in cloister or school. For in cloister no man cometh to chide or fight, and in school there is lowliness and love and liking to learn."

The rise of the common people was slow. During all this period the tillers of the soil were legally serfs, forbidden to change their location. The Black Death (1349) and the Peasants' Revolt (1381), although seemingly barren of results, helped them in their struggle toward emanc.i.p.ation. Some bought their freedom with part of their wages. Others escaped to the towns where new commercial activities needed more labor. Finally, the common toiler acquired more commanding influence by overthrowing even the French knights with his long bow.

This period laid the foundation for the almost complete disappearance of serfdom in the fifteenth century. France waited for the terrible Revolution of 1789 to free her serfs. England antic.i.p.ated other great modern nations in producing a literature of universal appeal because her common people began to throw off their shackles earlier.

This period opens with a victorious French army in England, followed by the rule of the conquerors, who made French the language of high life. It closes with the ascendancy of English government and speech at home and with the mid-fourteenth century victories of English armies on French soil, resulting in the rapture of Calais, which remained for more than two hundred years in the possession of England.

At the close of this period we find Wycliffe, "the morning star of the Reformation," and Chaucer, the first great singer of the welded Anglo-Norman race. His wide interest in human beings and his knowledge of the new Italian literature prefigure the coming to England of the Revival of Learning in the next age.

It will now be necessary to study the changes in the language, which were so p.r.o.nounced between 1066 and Chaucer's death.

THE EMERGENCE OF MODERN ENGLISH

Three Languages used in England--For three hundred years after the Norman Conquest, three languages were widely used in England. The Normans introduced French, which was the language of the court and the aristocracy. William the Conqueror brought over many Norman priests, who used Latin almost exclusively in their service. The influence of this book Latin is generally underestimated by those who do not appreciate the power of the church. The Domesday survey shows that in 1085 the church and her dependents held more than one third of some counties.

In addition to the Latin and the French (which was itself princ.i.p.ally of Latin origin), there was, thirdly, the Anglo-Saxon, to which the middle and the lower cla.s.ses of the English stubbornly adhered. The Loss of Inflections.--Anglo-Saxon was a language with changing endings, like modern German. If a Saxon wished to say, "good gifts,"

he had to have the proper case endings for both the adjective and the noun, and his expression was _g=ode giefa_. For "the good gifts," he said _=a g=odan giefa_, inflecting "the" and at the same time changing the case ending of "good."

The Norman Conquest helped to lop off these endings, which German has never entirely lost. We, however, no longer decline articles or ordinary adjectives. Instead of having our attention taken up with thinking of the proper endings, we are left free to attend to the thought rather than to the vehicle of its expression. Although our p.r.o.nouns are still declined, the sole inflection of our nouns, with the exception of a few like _ox, oxen_, or _mouse, mice_, is the addition of _'s, s,_ or _es_ for the possessive and the plural. Modern German, on the other hand, still retains these troublesome case endings. How did English have the good fortune to lose them?

Whenever two peoples, speaking different languages, are closely a.s.sociated, there is a tendency to drop the terminations and to use the stem word in all grammatical relations. If an English-speaking person, who knows only a little German, travels in Germany, he finds that he can make himself understood by using only one form of the noun or adjective. If he calls for "two large gla.s.ses of hot milk,"

employing the incorrect expression, _zwei gross Gla.s.s heiss Milch_, he will probably get the milk as quickly as if he had said correctly, _zwei grosse Glaser heisse Milch_. Neglect of the proper case endings may provoke a smile, but the tourist prefers that to starvation.

Should the Germans and the English happen to be thrown together in nearly equal numbers on an island, the Germans would begin to drop the inflections that the English could not understand, and the German language would undergo a change.

If there were no books or newspapers to circulate a fixed form of speech, the alteration in the spoken tongue would be comparatively rapid.

Such dropping of terminations is precisely what did happen before the Norman Conquest in those parts of England most overrun by the Danes.

There, the adjectives lost their terminations to indicate gender and case, and the article "the" ceased to be declined.

Even if the Normans had not come to England, the dropping of the inflections would not have ceased. Many authorities think that the grammatical structure of English would, even in the absence of that event, have evolved into something like its present form. Of course the Norman Conquest hastened many grammatical changes that would ultimately have resulted from inherent causes, but it did not exercise as great an influence as was formerly ascribed to it. Philologists find it impossible to a.s.sign the exact amount of change due to the Conquest and to other causes. Let us next notice some changes other than the loss of inflections.

Change in Gender.--Before any one could speak Anglo-Saxon correctly, he had first to learn the fanciful genders that were attached to nouns: "trousers" was feminine; "childhood," masculine; "child,"

neuter. During this period the English gradually lost these fanciful genders which the German still retains. A critic thus ill.u.s.trates the use of genders in that language: "A German gentleman writes a masculine letter of feminine love to a neuter young lady with a feminine pen and feminine ink on masculine sheets of neuter paper, and incloses it in a masculine envelope with a feminine address to his darling, though neuter, Gretchen. He has a masculine head, a feminine hand, and a neuter heart."

Prefixes, Suffixes, and Self-explaining Compounds.--The English tongue lost much of its power of using prefixes. A prefix joined to a well-known word changes its meaning and renders the coining of a new term unnecessary. The Anglo-Saxons, by the use of prefixes, formed ten compounds from their verb _fl=owan_, "to flow." Of these, only one survives in our "overflow." From _sittan_, "to sit," thirteen compounds were thus formed, but every one has perished. A larger percentage of suffixes was retained, and we still have many words like "wholesome-ness," "child-hood," "sing-er."

The power of forming self-explaining compounds was largely lost. The Saxon compounded the words for "tree," and "worker," and said _tr=eow-wyrhta_, "tree-wright," but we now make use of the single word "carpenter." We have replaced the Saxon _b=oc-craeft_, "book-art," by "literature"; _=aefen-gl=om_, "evening-gloom," by "twilight"; mere-sw=in, "sea-swine," by "porpoise"; _=eag-wraec_, "eye-rack," by "pain in the eye"; _leornung-cild_, "learning-child," by "pupil." The t.i.tle of an old work, _Ayen-bite of In-wit_, "Again-bite of In-wit,"

was translated into "Remorse of Conscience." _Grund-weall_ and _word-hora_ were displaced by "foundation" and "vocabulary." The German language still retains this power and calls a glove a "hand-shoe," a thimble a "finger-hat," and rolls up such clumsy compound expressions as _Unabhangigkeits-erklarung_.

We might lament this loss more if we did not remember that Shakespeare found our language ample for his needs, and that a considerable number of the old compounds still survive, as _home-stead, man-hood, in-sight, break-fast, house-hold, horse-back, s.h.i.+p-man, sea-sh.o.r.e, hand-work_, and _day-light_.

Introduction of New Words and Loss of Old Ones.--Since the Normans were for some time the governing race, while many of the Saxons occupied comparatively menial positions, numerous French words indicative of rank, power, science, luxury, and fas.h.i.+on were introduced. Many t.i.tles were derived from a French source. English thus obtained words like "sovereign," "royalty," "duke," "marquis,"