A Literary History of the English People Part 2

[10] He says, in reference to the pupils of the Druids, "De Bello Gallico," book vi.: "Magnum ibi numerum versuum ediscere dic.u.n.tur, itaque nonnulli annos vicenos in disciplina permanent; neque fas esse existimant ea litteris mandare." One of the reasons of this interdiction is to guard against the scholars ceasing to cultivate their memory, a faculty considered by the Celts as of the highest importance.

[11] Those, among others, of MM. Whitley Stokes, Rhys, d'Arbois de Jubainville, Lot, Windisch, Zimmer, Netlau, and Kuno-Meyer.

[12] "Est autem hoc Galliae consuetudinis; ut et viatores etiam invitos consistere cogant: et quod quisque eorum de quaque re audierit aut cognoverit quaerant, et mercatores in oppidis vulgus circ.u.msistat: quibus ex regionibus veniant, quasque res ibi cognoverint p.r.o.nunciare cogant."

Book iv.

[13] To wit, two hundred and fifty long and a hundred short ones.

D'Arbois de Jubainville, "Introduction a l'etude de la Litterature Celtique," Paris, 1883, 8vo, pp. 322-333.

[14] See, with reference to this, the "Navigation of Mael-Duin," a christianised narrative, probably composed in the tenth century, under the form in which we now possess it, but "the theme of which is fundamentally pagan." Here are the t.i.tles of some of the chapters: "The isle of enormous ants.--The island of large birds.--The monstrous horse.--The demon's race.--The house of the salmon.--The marvellous fruits.--Wonderful feats of the beast of the island.--The horse-fights.--The fire beasts and the golden apples.--The castle guarded by the cat.--The frightful mill.--The island of black weepers."

Translation by Lot in "L'epopee Celtique," of D'Arbois de Jubainville, Paris, 1892, 8vo, pp. 449 ff. See also Joyce, "Old Celtic Romances,"

1879; on the excellence of the memory of Irish narrators, even at the present day, see Joyce's Introduction.

[15] D'Arbois de Jubainville, "L'epopee Celtique," pp. xxviii and following. "Celtic marriage is a sale.... Physical paternity has not the same importance as with us"; people are not averse to having children from their pa.s.sing guest. "The question as to whether one is physically their father offers a certain sentimental interest; but for a practical man this question presents only a secondary interest, or even none at all." _Ibid._, pp. xxvii-xxix.

[16] The Murder of Cuchulann, "L'epopee Celtique en Irlande," p. 346.

[17] The same quality is found in the literature of Brittany; the major part of its monuments (of a more recent epoch) consists of religious dramas or mysteries. These dramas, mostly unpublished, are exceedingly numerous.

[18] "L'epopee Celtique," pp. 66 and following.

[19] "L'epopee Celtique en Irlande," pp. 217 and following.

[20] From "Mabinog" apprentice-bard. They are prose narratives, of divers origin, written in Welsh. They "appear to have been written at the end of the twelfth century"; the MS. of them we possess is of the fourteenth; several of the legends in it contain pagan elements, and carry us back "to the most distant past of the history of the Celts."

"Les Mabinogion," translated by Lot, with commentary, Paris, 1889, 2 vols. 8vo.

[21] In several places have been found the quarries from which the stone of Hadrian's wall was taken, and inscriptions bearing the name of the legion or of the officer charged with extracting it: "Petra Flavi[i]

Carantini," in the quarry of Fallowfield. "The Roman Wall, a description of the Mural Barrier of the North of England," by the Rev. J. C. Bruce, London, 1867, 4to (3rd ed.), pp. 141, 144, 185. _Cf. Athenaeum_, 15th and 19th of July, 1893.

[22] C. F. Routledge, "History of St. Martin's Church, Canterbury." The ruins of a tiny Christian basilica, of the time of the Romans, were discovered at Silchester, in May, 1892.

[23] Quant.i.ties of statuettes, pottery, gla.s.s cups and vases, arms, utensils of all kinds, sandals, styles for writing, fragments of colossal statues, mosaics, &c., have been found in England, and are preserved in the British Museum and in the Guildhall of London, in the museums of Oxford and of York, in the cloisters at Lincoln, &c. The great room at Bath was discovered in 1880; the piscina is in a perfect state of preservation; the excavations are still going on (1894).

[24] "Itinerarium Cambriae," b. i. chap. v.

[25] "Ut qui modo linguam abnuebant, eloquentiam concupiscerent: inde etiam habitus nostri honor, et frequens toga; paullatimque discessum et dilinimenta vitiorum, porticus et balnea, et conviviorum elegantiam."

Tacitus, "Agricolae Vita," xxi.

CHAPTER II.

_THE GERMANIC INVASION._

"To say nothing of the perils of a stormy and unknown sea, who would leave Asia, Africa, or Italy for the dismal land of the Germans, their bitter sky, their soil the culture and aspect of which sadden the eye unless it be one's mother country?" Such is the picture Tacitus draws of Germany, and he concludes from the fact of her being so dismal, and yet inhabited, that she must always have been inhabited by the same people.

What others would have immigrated there of their own free will? For the inhabitants, however, this land of clouds and mora.s.ses is their home; they love it, and they remain there.

The great historian's book shows how little of impenetrable Germany was known to the Romans. All sorts of legends were current respecting this wild land, supposed to be bounded on the north-east by a slumbering sea, "the girdle and limit of the world," a place so near to the spot where Phoebus rises "that the sound he makes in emerging from the waters can be heard, and the forms of his steeds are visible." This is the popular belief, adds Tacitus; "the truth is that nature ends there."[26]

In this mysterious land, between the forests that sheltered them from the Romans and the grey sea was.h.i.+ng with long waves the flat sh.o.r.es, tribes had settled and multiplied which, contrary to the surmise of Tacitus, had perhaps left the mild climate of Asia for this barren country; and though they had at last made it their home, many of them whose names alone figure in the Roman's book had not adopted it for ever; their migrations were about to begin again.

This group of Teutonic peoples, with ramifications extending far towards the pole was divided into two princ.i.p.al branches: the Germanic branch, properly so called, which comprised the Goths, Angles, Saxons, the upper and lower Germans, the Dutch, the Frisians, the Lombards, the Franks, the Vandals, &c.; and the Scandinavian branch, settled farther north and composed of the Danes, Norwegians, and Swedes. The same region which Tacitus describes as bordering on the place "where nature ends," held thus in his day tribes that would later have for their capitals, towns founded long before by Celts: London, Vienna, Paris, and Milan.

Many hundred years before settling there, these men had already found themselves in contact with the Celts, and, at the time the latter were powerful in Europe, terrible wars had arisen between the two races. But all the north-east, from the Elbe to the Vistula, continued impenetrable; the Germanic tribes remained there intact, they united with no others, and alone might have told if the sun's chariot was really to be seen rising from the ocean, and splas.h.i.+ng the sky with salt sea foam. From this region were about to start the wild host destined to conquer the isle of Britain, to change its name and rebaptize it in blood.

Twice, during the first ten centuries of our era, the Teutonic race hurled upon the civilised world its savage hordes of warriors, streams of molten lava. The first invasion was vehement, especially in the fifth century, and was princ.i.p.ally composed of Germanic tribes, Angles, Franks, Saxons, Burgundians, Vandals; the second exercised its greatest ravages in the ninth century, at the time of Charlemagne's successors, and proceeded mostly from the Scandinavian tribes, called Danish or Norman by contemporary chroniclers.

From the third century after Christ, fermentation begins among the former of these two groups. No longer are the Germanic tribes content with fighting for their land, retreating step by step before the Latin invader; alarming symptoms of retaliation manifest themselves, like the rumblings that herald the great cataclysms of nature.

The Roman, in the meanwhile, wrapped in his glory, continued to rule the world and mould it to his image; he skilfully enervated the conquered nations, instructed them in the arts, inoculated them with his vices, and weakened in them the spring of their formerly strong will. They called civilisation, _humanitas_, Tacitus said of the Britons, what was actually "servitude."[27] The frontiers of the empire were now so far distant that the roar of the advancing tide scarcely reached Rome. What was overheard of it acted as a stimulus to pleasure, added point to the rhetorician's speeches, excitement to the circus games, and a halo to the beauty of red-haired courtesans. The Romans had reached that point in tottering empires, at which the threat of calamities no longer arouses dormant energy, but only whets and renews the appet.i.te for enjoyment.

Meanwhile, far away towards the north, the Germanic tribes, continually at strife with their neighbours, and warring against each other, without riches or culture, ignorant and savage, preserved their strength and kept their ferocity. They hated peace, despised the arts, and had no literature but drinking and war-songs. They take an interest only in hunting and war, said Caesar; from their earliest infancy they endeavour to harden themselves physically.[28] They were not inventive; they learned with more difficulty than the Celts; they were violent and irrepressible. The little that is known of their customs and character points to fiery souls that may rise to great rapturous joys but have an underlayer of gloom, a gloom sombre as the impenetrable forest, sad as the grey sea. For them the woods are haunted, the shades of night are peopled with evil spirits, in their mora.s.ses half-divine monsters lie coiled. "They wors.h.i.+p demons," wrote the Christian chroniclers of them with a sort of terror.[29] These men will enjoy lyric songs, but not charming tales; they are capable of mirth but not of gaiety; powerful but incomplete natures that will need to develop fully without having to wait for the slow procedure of centuries, an admixture of new blood and new ideas. They were to find in Britain this double graft, and an admirable literary development was to be the consequence. They set out then to accomplish their work and follow their destiny, having doubtless much to learn, but having also something to teach the enervated nations, the meaning of a word unknown till their coming, the word "war"

(_guerre, guerra_). After the time of the invasions "bellicose,"

"belliqueux," and such words lost their strength and dignity, and were left for songsters to play with if they liked; a tiny phenomenon, the sign of terrible transformations.

The invaders bore various names. The boundaries of their tribes, as regards population and territory, were vague, and in nowise resembled those of the kingdoms traced on our maps. Their groups united and dissolved continually. The most powerful among them absorb their neighbours and cause them to be forgotten for a time, their names frequently recur in histories; then other tribes grow up; other names appear, others die out. Several of them, however, have survived: Angles, Franks, Saxons, Burgundians, Lombards, Suevi, and Alemanni, which became the names of great provinces or mighty nations. The more important of these groups were rather an agglomeration of tribes than nations properly so called; thus under the name of Franks were comprised, in the third century, the Sicambers, the Chatti, the Chamavi; while the Suevi united, in the time of Tacitus, the Lombards, Semnones, Angles, and others. But all were bound by the tie of a common origin; their pa.s.sions, customs, and tastes, their arms and costumes were similar.[30]

This human mult.i.tude once put in motion, nothing was able to stop it, neither the military tactics of the legions nor the defeats which it suffered; neither rivers nor mountains, nor the dangers of unknown seas.

The Franks, before settling in Gaul, traversed it once from end to end, crossed the Pyrenees, ravaged Spain, and disappeared in Mauritania.

Transported once in great numbers to the sh.o.r.es of the Euxine Sea, and imprudently entrusted by the Romans with the defence of their frontiers, they embark, pillage the towns of Asia and Northern Africa, and return to the mouth of the Rhine. Their expeditions intercross each other; we find them everywhere at once; Franks are seen at London, and Saxons at Angers. In 406, Gaul is overrun with barbarians, Vandals, Saxons, Burgundians, Alemanni; every point of the territory is in flames; the noise of a falling empire reaches St. Jerome, in his cell at Bethlehem, and in an eloquent letter he deplores the disaster of Christendom: "Who could ever have believed the day would come when Rome should see war at her very gates, and fight, not for glory but for safety? Fight, say I?

Nay, redeem her life with treasure."[31]

Treasure did not suffice; the town was taken and retaken. Alaric sacked the capital in 410, and Genseric in 455. During several centuries all who emerge from this human tide, and are able to rule the tempest, are either barbarians or crowned peasants. In the fifth and sixth centuries a Frank reigns at Paris, Clovis to wit; an Ostrogoth at Ravenna, Theodoric; a peasant at Byzantium, Justinian; Attila's conqueror, Aetius, is a barbarian; Stilicho is a Vandal in the service of the Empire. A Frank kingdom has grown up in the heart of Gaul; a Visigoth kingdom has Toulouse for its capital; Genseric and his Vandals are settled in Carthage; the Lombards, in the sixth century, cross the mountains, establish themselves in ancient Cisalpine Gaul, and drive away the inhabitants towards the lagoons where Venice is to rise. The isle of Britain has likewise ceased to be Roman, and Germanic kingdoms have been founded there.

Mounted on their s.h.i.+ps, sixty to eighty feet long, by ten or fifteen broad, of which a specimen can be seen at the museum of Kiel,[32] the dwellers on the sh.o.r.es of the Baltic and North Sea had at first organised plundering expeditions against the great island. They came periodically and laid waste the coasts; and on account of them the inhabitants gave to this part of the land the name _Littus Saxonic.u.m_.

Each time the pirates met with less resistance, and found the country more disorganised. In the course of the fifth century they saw they had no need to return annually to their mora.s.ses, and that they could without trouble remain within reach of plunder. They settled first in the islands, then on the coasts, and by degrees in the interior. Among them were Goths or Jutes of Denmark (Jutland), Frisians, Franks, Angles from Schleswig, and Saxons from the vast lands between the Elbe and Rhine.

These last two, especially, came in great numbers, occupied wide territories, and founded lasting kingdoms. The Angles, whose name was to remain affixed to the whole nation, occupied Northumberland, a part of the centre, and the north-east coast, from Scotland to the present county of Ess.e.x; the Saxons settled further south, in the regions which were called from them Ess.e.x, Suss.e.x, Middles.e.x, and Wess.e.x: Saxons of the east, south, centre, and west. It was in these two groups of tribes, or kingdoms, that literature reached the greatest development, and it was princ.i.p.ally between them also that the struggle for supremacy set in, after the conquest. Hence the name of Anglo-Saxons generally given to the inhabitants of the soil, in respect of the period during which purely Germanic dialects were spoken in England. This composite word, recently the cause of many quarrels, has the advantage of being clear; long habit is in its favour; and its very form suits an epoch when the country was not unified, but belonged to two princ.i.p.al agglomerations of tribes, that of the Angles and that of the Saxons.[33]

In the same way as in Gaul, the invaders found themselves in the presence of a people infinitely more civilised than themselves, skilled in the arts, excellent agriculturists, rich traders, on whose soil arose those large towns that the Romans had fortified, and connected by roads.

Never had they beheld anything like it, nor had they names for such things. They had in consequence to make additions to their vocabulary.

Not knowing how to designate these unfamiliar objects, they left them the names they bore in the language of the inhabitants: _castrum_, _strata_, _colonia_; which became in their language _chester_, _street_, or _strat_, as in Stratford, and _coln_ as in Lincoln.

The Britons who had taken to the toga--"frequens toga," says Tacitus--and who were no longer protected by the legions, made a vain resistance; the advancing tide of barbarians swept over them, they ceased to exist as a nation. Contributions were levied on the cities, the country was laid waste, villas were razed to the ground, and on all the points where the natives endeavoured to face the enemy, fearful hecatombs were slaughtered by the wors.h.i.+ppers of Woden.

They could not, however, destroy all; and here comes in the important question of Celtic survival. Some admirers of the conquerors credit them with superhuman ma.s.sacres. According to them no Celt survived; and the race, we are told, was either driven back into Wales or destroyed, so that the whole land had to be repopulated, and that a new and wholly Germanic nation, as pure in blood as the tribes on the banks of the Elbe, grew up on British soil. But if facts are examined it will be found that this t.i.tle to glory cannot be claimed for the invaders. The deed was an impossible one; let that be their excuse. To destroy a whole nation by the sword exceeds human power, and there is no example of it.

We know, besides, that in this case the task would have been an especially hard one, for the population of Britain, even at the time of Caesar, was dense: _hominum infinita mult.i.tudo_, he says in his Commentaries. The invaders, on the other hand, found themselves in presence of an intelligent, laborious, a.s.similable race, trained by the Romans to usefulness. The first of these facts precludes the hypothesis of a general ma.s.sacre; and the second the hypothesis of a total expulsion, or of such extinction as threatens the ina.s.similable native of Australia.

In reality, all the doc.u.ments which have come down to us, and all the verifications made on the ground, contradict the theory of an annihilation of the Celtic race. To begin with, we can imagine no systematic destruction after the introduction of Christianity among the Anglo-Saxons, which took place at the end of the sixth century. Then, the chroniclers speak of a general ma.s.sacre of the inhabitants, in connection with two places only: Chester and Anderida.[34] We can ascertain even to-day that in one of these cases the destruction certainly was complete, since this last town was never rebuilt, and only its site is known. That the chroniclers should make a special mention of the two ma.s.sacres proves these cases were exceptional. To argue from the destruction of Anderida to the slaughter of the entire race would be as little reasonable as to imagine that the whole of the Gallo-Romans were annihilated because the ruins of a Gallo-Roman city, with a theatre seating seven thousand people have been discovered in a spot uninhabited to-day, near Sanxay in Poictou. Excavations recently made in England have shown, in a great number of cemeteries, even in the region termed _Littus Saxonic.u.m_, where the Germanic population was densest, Britons and Saxons sleeping side by side, and nothing could better point to their having lived also side by side. Had a wholesale ma.s.sacre taken place, the victims would have had no sepulchres, or at all events they would not have had them amongst those of the slayers.

In addition to this, it is only by the preservation of the pre-established race that the change in manners and customs, and the rapid development of the Anglo-Saxons can be explained. These roving pirates lose their taste for maritime adventure; they build no more s.h.i.+ps; their intestine quarrels are food sufficient for what is left of their warlike appet.i.tes. Whence comes it that the instincts of this impetuous race are to some degree moderated? Doubtless from the quant.i.ty and fertility of the land they had conquered, and from the facility they found on the spot for turning that land to account. These facilities consisted in the labour of others. The taste for agriculture did not belong to the race. Tacitus represents the Germans as cultivating only what was strictly necessary.[35] The Anglo-Saxons found in Britain wide tracts of country tilled by romanised husbandmen; after the time of the first ravages they recalled them to their toil, but a.s.signed its fruits to themselves. Well, therefore, might the same word be used by the conquerors to designate the native Celt and the slave. They established themselves in the fields, and superintended their cultivation after their fas.h.i.+on; their encampments became boroughs: Nottingham, Buckingham, Glas...o...b..ry, which have to the present day retained the names of Germanic families or tribes. The towns of more ancient importance, on the contrary, have retained Celtic or Latin names: London, York, Lincoln, Winchester, Dover, Cirencester, Manchester, &c.[36] The Anglo-Saxons did not destroy them, since they are still extant, and only mingled in a feeble proportion with their population, having, like all Germans, a horror of sojourning in cities. "They avoided them, regarding them as tombs," they thought that to live in towns was like burying oneself alive.[37] The preservation in England of several branches of Roman industry is one proof more of the continuance of city life in the island; had the British artisans not survived the invasion, there would never have been found in the tombs of the conquerors those gla.s.s cups of elaborate ornamentation, hardly distinguishable from the products of the Roman gla.s.s-works, and which the clumsy hands of the Saxon were certainly incapable of fusing and adorning.[38]

The Britons, then, subsist in large numbers, even in the eastern and southern counties, where the Germanic settlement was most dense, but they subsist as a conquered race; they till the ground in the country, and in the cities occupy themselves with manual labour. Wales and Cornwall alone, in the isle of Britain, were still places of refuge for independent Celts. The idiom and traditions of the ancient inhabitants were there preserved. In these distant retreats, at the foot of Snowdon, in the valley of St. David's, beneath the trees of Caerleon, popular singers accompany on their harps the old national poems; perhaps they even begin to chaunt those tales telling of the exploits of a hero destined to the highest renown in literature, King Arthur.

But in the heart of the country the national tongue had been for a long time constantly losing ground; the Britons had learnt Latin, many of them; they now forget it by degrees, as they had previously forgotten Celtic, and learn instead the language of their new masters. It was one of their national gifts, a precious and fatal one; they were swift to learn.

In France the result of the Germanic conquest was totally different; the Celtic language reappeared there no more than in England. It has only survived in the extreme west.[39] But in France the Germanic idiom did not overpower the Latin; the latter persisted, so much so that the French tongue has remained a Romance language. This is owing to two great causes. Firstly, the Germans came to France in much smaller numbers than to England, and those that remained had been long in contact with the Romans; secondly, the romanising of Gaul had been more complete. Of all the provinces of the Empire, Gaul, the birthplace of Cornelius Gallus, Trogus Pompeius, Domitius Afer, Petronius, Ausonius, Sidonius Apollinaris, prided itself on speaking the purest Latin, and on producing the best poets. Whether we take material monuments or literary ones, the difference is the same in the two countries. In England theatres, towers, temples, all marks of Latin civilisation, had been erected, but not so numerous, ma.s.sive, or strong that the invaders were unable to destroy them. At the present time only shapeless remnants exist above ground. In France, the barbarians came, plundered, burnt, razed to the ground all they possibly could; but the work of destruction was too great, the mult.i.tude of temples and palaces was more than their strength was equal to, and the torch fell from their tired hands.