Read Ebook: England's Antiphon by MacDonald George

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Ebook has 964 lines and 98533 words, and 20 pages

It must be confessed that there is in them even occasional coarseness; but that the devil for instance should always be represented as a baffled fool, and made to play the buffoon sometimes after a disgusting fashion, was to them only the treatment he deserved: it was their notion of "poetic justice;" while most of them were too childish to be shocked at the discord thus introduced, and many, we may well hope, too childlike to lose their reverence for the holy because of the proximity of the ridiculous.

And all that ever shall have being It is closed in my mind.

Here is part of Eve's lamentation, when she is conscious of the death that has laid hold upon her.

When the voice of God is heard, saying,

Adam, that with my hands I made, Where art thou now? what hast thou wrought?

Adam replies, in two lines, containing the whole truth of man's spiritual condition ever since:

Ah, Lord! for sin our flowers do fade: I hear thy voice, but I see thee nought.

The vision had vanished, but the voice remained; for they that hear shall live, and to the pure in heart one day the vision shall be restored, for "they shall see God." There is something wonderfully touching in the quaint simplicity of the following words of God to the woman:

Unwise woman, say me why That thou hast done this foul folly, And I made thee a great lady, In Paradise for to play?

As they leave the gates, the angel with the flaming sword ends his speech thus:

Eve laments bitterly, and at length offers her throat to her husband, praying him to strangle her:

Now stumble we on stalk and stone; My wit away from me is gone; Writhe on to my neck-bone With hardness of thine hand.

Adam replies--not over politely--

Wife, thy wit is not worth a rush;

and goes on to make what excuse for themselves he can in a very simple and touching manner:

The soul of Christ comes to the gates of hell, and says:

Against me it were but waste To holdyn or to standyn fast; Hell-lodge may not last Against the king of glory. Thy dark door down I throw; My fair friends now well I know; I shall them bring, reckoned by row, Out of their purgatory!

She was brighter of her blee than was the bright sun; Her rudd redder than the rose that on the rise hangeth; Meekly smiling with her mouth, and merry in her looks; Ever laughing for love, as she like would.

Everything bursts into life and blossom at her presence,

But the finest passage is part of Life's answer to Death, who has been triumphing over her:

When Life has ended her speech to Death, she turns to her own followers and says:--

It is not merely the antiquity of the language that causes its difficulty, but the accumulated weight of artistically fantastic and puzzling requirements which the writer had laid upon himself in its composition. The nature of these I shall be enabled to show by printing the first twelve lines almost as they stand in the manuscript.

Perle plesaunte to prynces paye, To clanly clos in golde so clere! Oute of oryent I hardyly saye, Ne proued I neuer her precios pere; So rounde, so reken in vche araye, So smal, so smothe her sydes were! Quere-so-euer I iugged gemmes gaye, I sette hyr sengeley in synglure: Allas! I leste hyr in on erbere, Thurh gresse to grounde hit fro me yot; I dewyne for-dolked of luf daungere, Of that pryuy perle with-outen spot.

He has gone on to exaggerate the peculiarities of Norman verse as well; but I think it better not to run the risk of wearying my reader by pointing out more of his oddities. I will now betake myself to what is far more interesting as well as valuable.

Pearl pleasant to prince's pleasure, Most cleanly closed in gold so clear! Out of the Orient, I boldly say, I never proved her precious equal; So round, so beautiful in every point! So small, so smooth, her sides were!

Wheresoever I judged gemmes gay I set her singly in singleness. Alas! I lost her in an arbour; Through the grass to the ground it from me went. I pine, sorely wounded by dangerous love Of that especial pearl without spot.

The father calls himself a jeweller; the pearl is his daughter. He has lost the pearl in the grass; it has gone to the ground, and he cannot find it; that is, his daughter is dead and buried. Perhaps the most touching line is one in which he says to the grave:

O moul, thou marrez a myry mele.

The father falls asleep on his child's grave, and has a dream, or rather a vision, of a country where everything--after the childish imagination which invents differences instead of discovering harmonies--is super-naturally beautiful: rich rocks with a gleaming glory, crystal cliffs, woods with blue trunks and leaves of burnished silver, gravel of precious Orient pearls, form the landscape, in which are delicious fruits, and birds of flaming colours and sweet songs: its loveliness no man with a tongue is worthy to describe. He comes to the bank of a river:

Swinging sweet the water did sweep With a whispering speech flowing adown;

and the stones at the bottom were shining like stars. It is a noteworthy specimen of the mode in which the imagination works when invention is dissociated from observation and faith. But the sort of way in which some would improve the world now, if they might, is not so very far in advance of this would-be glorification of Nature. The barest heath and sky have lovelinesses infinitely beyond the most gorgeous of such phantasmagoric idealization of her beauties; and the most wretched condition of humanity struggling for existence contains elements of worth and future development inappreciable by the philanthropy that would elevate them by cultivating their self-love.

At the foot of a crystal cliff, on the opposite side of the river, which he cannot cross, he sees a maiden sitting, clothed and crowned with pearls, and wearing one pearl of surpassing wonder and spotlessness upon her breast. I now make the spelling and forms of the words as modern as I may, altering the text no further.

When the father pours out his gladness at the sight of her, she rejoins in these words:

Much conversation follows, the glorified daughter rebuking and instructing her father. He prays for a sight of the heavenly city of which she has been speaking, and she tells him to walk along the bank until he comes to a hill. In recording what he saw from the hill, he follows the description of the New Jerusalem given in the Book of the Revelation. He sees the Lamb and all his company, and with them again his lost Pearl. But it was not his prince's pleasure that he should cross the stream; for when his eyes and ears were so filled with delight that he could no longer restrain the attempt, he awoke out of his dream.

After this, he holds him to that prince's will, and yearns after no more than he grants him.

"As in water face is to face, so the heart of man." Out of the far past comes the cry of bereavement mingled with the prayer for hope: we hear, and lo! it is the cry and the prayer of a man like ourselves.

From the words of the greatest man of his age, let me now gather two rich blossoms of utterance, presenting an embodiment of religious duty and aspiration, after a very practical fashion. I refer to two short lyrics, little noted, although full of wisdom and truth. They must be accepted as the conclusions of as large a knowledge of life in diversified mode as ever fell to the lot of man.

GOOD COUNSEL OF CHAUCER.

This needs no comment. Even the remark that every line is worth meditation may well appear superfluous. One little fact only with regard to the rhymes, common to this and the next poem, and usual enough in Norman verse, may be pointed out, namely, that every line in the stanza ends with the same rhyme-sound as the corresponding line in each of the other stanzas. A reference to either of the poems will at once show what I mean.

THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY.

After the birth of a Chaucer, a Shakspere, or a Milton, it is long before the genial force of a nation can again culminate in such a triumph: time is required for the growth of the conditions. Between the birth of Chaucer and the birth of Shakspere, his sole equal, a period of more than two centuries had to elapse. It is but small compensation for this, that the more original, that is simple, natural, and true to his own nature a man is, the more certain is he to have a crowd of imitators. I do not say that such are of no use in the world. They do not indeed advance art, but they widen the sphere of its operation; for many will talk with the man who know nothing of the master. Too often intending but their own glory, they point the way to the source of it, and are straightway themselves forgotten.

Very little of the poetry of the fifteenth century is worthy of a different fate from that which has befallen it. Possibly the Wars of the Roses may in some measure account for the barrenness of the time; but I do not think they will explain it. In the midst of the commotions of the seventeenth century we find Milton, the only English poet of whom we are yet sure as worthy of being named with Chaucer and Shakspere.

It is in quality, however, and not in quantity that the period is deficient. It had a good many writers of poetry, some of them prolific. John Lydgate, the monk of Bury, a great imitator of Chaucer, was the principal of these, and wrote an enormous quantity of verse. We shall find for our use enough as it were to keep us alive in passing through this desert to the Paradise of the sixteenth century--a land indeed flowing with milk and honey. For even in the desert of the fifteenth are spots luxuriant with the rich grass of language, although they greet the eye with few flowers of individual thought or graphic speech.

THANK GOD FOR ALL.

Till a letter all one me lad, That well was written on a wall, A blissful word that on I rad, That alway said, 'Thank God for all.'

I cannot say there is much poetry in this, but there is much truth and wisdom. There is the finest poetry, however, too, in the line--I give it now letter for letter:--

But think that God ys ther he was.

There is poetry too in the line, if I interpret it rightly as intending the gospel--

The sonde that God sent al abowte.

Jesus, soothfast God and man, Two kinds knit in one person, The wonder-work that thou began Thou hast fulfilled in flesh and bone.

Lest this poem should appear to any one hardly religious enough for the purpose of this book, I would remark that it reminds me of what our Lord says about the true source of defilement: it is what is bred in the man that denies him. Our Lord himself taught a divine morality, which is as it were the body of love, and is as different from mere morality as<

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