sions of humanity. To the statement that the sun was obscured, Cynewulf adds, "darkened with misery." When he speaks of the earthquake, he says not only that the "earth shook," but also that it was "marred by fear." Nay, the whole Universe was, like a living Being, conscious of the death of Christ. 1143. And the broad-set sea Made its might of power known, from its clasping marges broke Yea, their shining stead within all the stars forsook Each his own aspect! So upsoaring and so sheen, On that very tide who it was had made it Hell, also, the guilt-avenging, knew that the Maker had come, and gave up her hosts from her hot bosom. And the sea declared who had spread it forth, the trees told who had shaped them with their blossoming, when mighty God stepped up on one of them. Many a one was all o'er-run beneath its rind with bloody tears. Red and thick, their sap was turned to blood. Earth's dwellers cannot tell how many things inanimate yet felt within themselves the travail of the Lord. The poem now turns to the division between the just and the unjust, and the three signs which mark the blessed, and the three others which indicate the cursed. Of these the only one worth dwelling on is the third sign of the blessed which might be due to the pen of Jonathan Edwards. "The happy band shall see the lost suffer sore pain amid the bale of dark ness 1250. Flame that welters up and of worms the fierce aspect, With their bitter-biting jaws - school of burning creatures! waxes for the righteous. There is not much of interest in the next portion of the poem, which is an enlargement of the reasons for the judgment of the good and evil given in chapter xxv. of St. Matthew's Gospel. The speech of Jesus to the good is short, but the speech to the evil is long and homiletic, and repeats, with the common aim of instruction, the whole story of the Fall, the Incarna 1 Scole. The Dutch speak of a school of fish. It is also a Lincolnshire word for a shoal of fish. It was, if I remember right, set apart by the Nantucket whalers to describe the herded households of the sperm-whale. I do not think that they employed it for any of the dwellers of the sea except the whale; and this usage of it for the great monsters when banded together may be as old as Cynewulf's time. tion, the Crucifixion, and Resurrection. It is not devoid of nobleness, constantly changing too in metrical movement in accordance with the meaning, full of quick appeals, excessively personal (Jesus speaks as if he were speaking to one only among the vast host), well fitted then for use in a homily, a use to which I have no doubt it was put. Some passages in it must have been effective when sung in a kind of recitative. "I was born alone," one of these begins, and the lines run to a great length and must be thought of as sung with a rushing and impassioned speed 1421. All alone I was begotten with their hands they folded me, For the comfort of the folk; and within the darkness wound me, All bedight with dusky swathing. Lo, for all the world, I endured this. Of a little worth, I seemed, to the sons of men. On the flinty stone I Young, a child within his crib. lay Nor, indeed, is the passage less effective when Christ, apparently turning to the gigantic rood, as a Catholic preacher to the crucifix, points to himself hanging there, and cries to all the vast host of the lost, "See now the deadly wounds which men erst made upon my palms, and also on my feet, by which I hung, fastened most bitterly! Here, too, mayst thou look on the wound, blood-streaming, on my side. Ó how uneven there between us two the reckoning! Why didst thou forsake the glorious life I bought for thee through love? Give me back thy life which I gave thee. I claim the life thou hast slain with sins. . . . Why hast thou crucified me worse upon the rood of thine hands than when of old I hung upon the tree?" The reasons of the sentence are now given which are written in the twenty-fifth chapter of St. Matthew, and this passage ends - "Go now, accursed, cut off by your own will from angels' joy, into eternal fire, made ready, hot and grim, for Satan and his comrades, for all that dusky shoal. And the Ward of Empire is mighty and enraged, ireful and terrorful; no foe upon this path of earth may then abide his presence. For he sweeps down with his right hand the sword of victory, and the devils fall headlong into the den profound, into the swarthy fire." The rest is homiletic exhortation and the final locking of hell; and, at the last, the opening of heaven to the hosts of the just. Cynewulf's description of the perfect land closes the poem 1649. There is angels' song, there enjoyment of the blest, than the beaming of the Sun ! There beloved Presence life without the end of death; rest withouten strife, bliss that's sorrowless; Peace all friends between, ever without enmity; Hunger is not there nor thirst, glory with their Lord. The last of the signed poems of Cynewulf is the Elene. It is in the Vercelli Book, and contains 1321 lines. Its source, as Kemble and Grimm first laid down, appears to be the Latin life of Quiriacus or Cyriacus, Bishop of Jerusalem, written in the Acta Sanctorum of the 4th of May; but reasons have been alleged for thinking that some other life was used by Cynewulf. Some have thought - and the view is based on the Greek title of the poem that the Greek life of Cyriacus, which is of the 3rd of May, may have been brought to England and followed by Cynewulf, but the mere form of the name cannot prove this, and Greek had decayed in England when Cynewulf was writing. Cyriacus is the Judas of the poem. own. If Cynewulf used the life in the Acta Sanctorum, he used it with the freedom of a poet. He expands and contracts when he pleases, and he has interpolated two long inventions of his Professor Kent, in an excellent edition of the Elene,1 has given the Latin text along with the Anglo-Saxon. Any one can now see without trouble where Cynewulf has followed, or not followed, his source; and the original matter in the poem seems worthy of the pains which Cynewulf says he bestowed on its composition. The subject is the Finding of the True Cross, and the action passes steadily on to this end. The Huns gather against Constantine as he lies asleep in camp, who dreams his famous dream of the Rood, and is bid to conquer by that sign. The battle follows, the victory, Constantine's study of the Scriptures, Helena's journey to Jerusalem, the council held by Helena with the Jews, the i Elene, edited with introduction, Latin original, notes and glossary, by Charles Kent, Univ. of Tennessee. Ginn & Co., Boston and London. separate council of the Jews when Judas advises them not to reveal the place of the Cross, his imprisonment, his release, his prayer to Christ, his declaration of the death of Jesus for the redemption of the world, the finding of the Crosses, the discovery of the true Cross by a miracle, the devil's indignation and speech, the reply of Judas, the message of Helena to Constantine, the baptism of Judas as Cyriacus and his appointment to the Bishopric of Jerusalem, the finding of the nails and the return of Helena. The last canto is Cynewulf's personal account of how he wrote the poem and of his state of mind. Many have said that this is the finest of his poems, but I cannot agree with them. Cynewulf was at his best when he had to invent, not to follow. When he works as he does here, on a given story, his imagination seems fettered. It is very different when, as in the Christ, he is building his lofty song out of his own heart. It is different, even in the Elene, when he wholly abandons his original, and invents the battle, the sea-voyage, and the personal epilogue. These are excellent, and it is their goodness, I think, which has made the critics place the whole poem on so high a level. I have already translated them all and need dwell on them no more. The rest of the poem is, I think, extremely dull. In the battle and sea descriptions many heathen terms are used which enliven and strengthen the verse. Moreover, those swift, surprising, vivid phrases which mark a poet; that wordinvention of which every poet is fond at one time or another of his life, and which, in the shape more of double-shotted substantives than of adjectives, the Anglo-Saxon poets of Northumbria were only too eager to use appear frequently in the Elene. The metrical movement and swing of the lines are much more fixed and steady than in his other poems. There are very few verses which even tend towards the long line that belongs to the Caedmonian poems. On the contrary, that short epic line is used into which, after Alfred, all English poetry seems to have drifted, as we see for example in the songs of the Chronicle. Rhyme and assonance are also not uncommon. All these characteristics point to a time when the art of poetry had consciously adopted rules, and when the metrical freedom of the poet began to be more rigidly limited. It does not, however, follow that because a poet like Cynewulf adopted the short epic line in its strictness that he was precluded from using the long line of the Caedmonian poetry; and whether he did use it in any later poem than the Elene is a question that will meet us when we describe the Dream of the Holy Rood, which, though I believe it to be at least partly Cynewulf's, I leave to the following chapter because it is unsigned by him.1 1 I have said no more, in this chapter on the signed poems of Cynewulf, of the Fates of the Apostles. It did not seem worth while to treat of it apart. But when these pages had gone to press Mr. Gollancz's book on the Christ appeared, and I have placed in a note at the end of this volume his new theory concerning the Fates of the Apostles and the Andreas. |