ENGLISH LITERATURE. The literature produced by the English people, amid the varied course of their national development, and in the vernacular tongue. whether purely Teutonic, or the fusion of that clement with the Norman French, or the splendid and highly organized language, rich in its double inheritance, which modern times have raised to midi a pitch of power, flexibility. and grace. li must be treated as substantially one under all these various ashwets, though its beginnings are to its present maturity as the weakness of an infant to the rich endowment of a full-grown man. On the other hand. for convenience, if for no radical or logical dislinelm, the literature produeed in practirally the same language by daughter peo ples across the seas will 11 01 into into this sur vey. Nor will the method of treatment followed here allow anything like a enumeration of the authors who have adorned one period or another; it is for the present purpose, of far greater importancv to show tendencies and trace the outline of gradual development. Upon this principle, consequently. not upon any at tempt at appraisal of absolute values, will be based the proportion of space allotted to the writers for a discussion of whose work there is room. We need nut consider here the ;Rings of the British bards, whose race and language driven into the outlying hill countries by the Teutonic invasion, and who, save in the one notable instance of their contribution to the Arthurian legend, gave practically nothing to the literature now under discussion. By the terms of our definition we are also dispensed from dwelling on the work produced in Latin, the common language of scholars, before and after the Norman Conquest.
The development of early English poetry on its external side was not much unlike the same his tory elsewhere. It was the one intellectual amuse ment of a race of hardy fighters and hunters. They gathered inthe long winter evenings about the fire, to listen to tales of the adventures which had come to other men like themselves. As on the Conti
nent, there were two classes of singers—the scup, the real poet (maker, French trounere), who took the raw material of history or legend and shaped it into more or less artistic form; and the g/eoinan, who, like the Creek rhapsodist or the French jongleur, simply sang from place to place what he had learned from others. From these lays sprang the most important relic of the poetry of the pagan period, the epic of /?i'ouldf, which, although the only extant manuscript is of the tenth century, goes back for its inspira tion and its subject to the sixth, and is there fore Continental in its origin. It is impressive in its movement and imagery, and possesses the dignity, if not the fullness, of the epic. Three other fragments from this period are of consider able interest—Widsith, or the Wanderer, prob ably the oldest of all; Waldhere: and The Fight at Finnshnrg. The characteristic of this early verse is its sombre grimness, and its picture of a life of constant combat, either with savage hu man foes or with nature in its sterner aspects, overshadowed by the approach of inevitable destiny.
But this fierce and gloomy tone was modified by the introduction of the gentler spirit of Chris tianity from Rome and from Ireland. The poetry written under this new influence, whose remains cluster about the ill-defined personalities of Cled mon and Cynewulf, finds a reason for a more cheerful view of life in the replacing of Fate by an all-loving and almighty Father. For its sub jects it turns now to the Bible and to the legends of the saints; though even in these, as in Judith, for example. the old savage joy in 'goodly fight' still comes out. A few short poems of a lyrical or lyrieo-dramatic nature are of still wider in terest, as connecting the work of these early singers definitely with the far-away Tennyson and Shelley. The tenderness and grace of The Lorer's Message and The Wandrrer remind us to take account of an imponderable hut real admix ture of Celtic elements in the people from whom they proceeded.