Page images
PDF
EPUB

their metrical portions) he constantly gives an entirely new turn. In Boethius, Christian though he was, we find strangely little reference to the Christian sources of consolation. But to Alfred Christianity is everything, and he never fails to supply this lack in every poem that he renders.

3. Take, for example, the ode with which Boethius conIcludes his third book:

'Felix, qui potuit boni

Fontem visere lucidam ;
Felix qui potuit gravis

Terræ solvere vincula.'

[Blest is the man who hath the power
Good's lucid fount to gain,

Blest, who hath power of this sad earth

To loose the binding chain.]

These opening lines, which might have been written by a pagan philosopher, are thus expanded and Christianized by Alfred :

'Lo! of all upon earth

Is the happiest he

Who hath heart to behold

That clearest of waters

That welleth in heaven

With light from the Highest :
Who eke from himself ·

All swartness, all mist,
All the murk of his mood,
To scatter hath might.

'With God and His grace
By tales of old time
Thy thought will we teach,
Till thou readest aright
The highway to heaven,
That loved native land,

Own home of our souls.'

After this exordium, Alfred proceeds to give a free prose translation, inserting such expressions as 'Well a way,' of the beautiful poem of Boethius on Orpheus, and deduces (at greater length) the same moral as the author; viz., that he who would lead his soul from darkness to light must never cast a longing eye backwards.

$ 4. The tragic story of Boethius is now almost forgotten, but for many centuries he was held as the most noteworthy of all exemplars of patience under unmerited adversity. Chaucer, near the end of the Middle Ages, as Alfred near their beginning, thinks it worth while to translate his 'Consolations of Philosophy' into English ;-a task which, apart from its connection with their great names, no writer would nowadays care to enter upon. Boethius, long the trusted minister of Theodoric, the great King of the Ostro-Goths, whose reign gave Italy thirty years of peace amid the stress of the barbarian inroads, fell at last under the unjust suspicion of his master, and was cast into prison at Ravenna, the royal city which the King had just adorned with those marvellous churches and mosaics still abiding amid its decay. There he solaced himself by invoking Philosophy to help him in bearing his hard lot, and composed a dialogue between her and his soul, partly in prose and partly in verse, somewhat laboured and frigid, but containing here and there lines and sentences of real beauty. That the work appealed to the heart of Alfred is the best proof that it is not without genuine merit.

§ 5. In his dealing with Bede and with Orosius, Alfred uses the same freedom-the freedom of a master in literary work. He expands, abridges, paraphrases, as seems best to him, with the result of making his author far more spirited and readable than in the original. Orosius, in particular, he enriches by the insertion of a complete geographical survey of Europe, from original sources, such as the reports of the navigator Othere, the discoverer of the North Cape and the White Sea.

§ 6. Orosius, as has been said, was in Alfred's day the accepted authority on general history, so generally accepted that in his preface Alfred speaks of his history as 'the book that men call Orosius,' just as we talk of Herodotus' or 'Thucydides.'

[ocr errors]

§ 7. It was, in fact, an epoch-making work, being the first history written by a Christian and from a Christian standpoint. Orosius was a friend both of St. Jerome and of St. Augustine, and composed his work at the request of the

latter, who desired that the argument of his own ' De Civitate Dei' should be worked out historically.

§ 8. Orosius accordingly, like Augustine, addresses himself to the thesis that the world was, after all, the better and not the worse for the rise of Christ's spiritual kingdom, even though it rose upon the ruins of that mighty dominion which had for centuries been the all-pervading influence throughout the whole civilized world—the secular empire of Rome. At the time when he wrote, the entire consciousness of mankind was reeling under the shock of the capture of Rome by Alaric and his Goths, its first capture since the days of Brennus and his Gauls eight centuries before. Though the captors were this time fellow-Christians, and prosecuted their success in an incomparably milder and more Christian spirit than has ever been done before or since at the sack of any city, yet the tidings that Rome-the mighty Rome-had fallen, and by barbarian hands, were felt everywhere like a moral earthquake, reverberating with a stunning shock through all hearts and brains of men. This, then, was what had come of renouncing the ancient gods, the gods of the brave days of old,' when Rome was invincible, and the world lay in rest and quiet under the ægis of her mighty name. This was what had come of substituting for their immemorial worship a new-fangled Syrian superstition, which belittled local patriotism, and fixed men's minds on a shadowy world beyond the grave.

[ocr errors]

§ 9. Such thoughts were surging in many a breast, and it was to meet them that Augustine and Orosius wrote. They saw, what at that crisis it took no small intuition to see, how, in it all, God's great purposes were being worked out; how, by His appointment, there was still to be a world-wide organization, whose aim should be the peace and well-being of mankind; how the Catholic Church was to take up the mantle of the universal empire, as a kingdom 'not of this world,' relying on spiritual, not on earthly forces, transforming Rome from the temporal into the spiritual metropolis of all the earth. And their message struck home; and thus it was that four centuries later Alfred found the name of Orosius still a household word throughout Latin Christendom, and

edited his work along with that of Venerable Bede, the first historian to compile the annals of the Anglican Church.

§ 10. The extent to which the continuation of Bede's history in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is due to Alfred is a matter on which critics are still divided; but, upon the whole, the evidence goes largely to prove that to him indeed we owe the inception of this great idea. From his day onwards we do find that in many parts of England such a chronicle of current events was kept by more than one of the greater abbeys, and that all are from a common exemplar dating from his reign. This chronicle forms the foundation on which every one of our early historians has built, and it only ceased to be compiled when the wonderful galaxy of such historians which shone out in the twelfth century seemed to render its continuance superfluous. The latest entry in any surviving copy is that of 1154, just about the time when Gaimar was writing of Alfred to tell how he had begun the work:

'Il fist escrivere un livre Engleis,

Des aventures, e des leis,

E de batailles de la terre,

E des reis ki firent la guere."1

[Made he write an English book,
Of adventures and of law,

And of battles in the land,

And of kings who wagèd war.]

6

§ 11. Alfred's edition of the Pastoral Care of St. Gregory' and his 'Flowrets from St. Augustine' are chiefly noteworthy for the prefaces which he has prefixed to them. The latter consists of a series of extracts, mostly from the saint's Soliloquies,' a work compared by Alfred to a wood full of goodly trees, from amid which he cut beams and joists and planks—‘yea, and helves to haft my tools withal,' for the building of a palace for his soul. In every tree saw I something needful for my home. Therefore rede I every man that can . . . that he fare to that same wood to fetch more for himself ... and build therewith many a comely house, and thereby may dwell merrily and softly, so as I yet

1 Line 3451.

have not done. But He Who taught me, He to Whom this wood was dear, He may make me to dwell softer in this shifting cot while that I am in this world, and eke in the everlasting home which He hath promised us by St. Augustine and St. Gregory and St. Jerome and many another holy Father. Yea, and I trow that, through the merits of all these, He will both make this my path here smoother than heretofore, and chiefly that He will enlighten the eyes of my mind, that I may seek out the rightwise road to the everlasting home and the everlasting glory which, through these holy Fathers, is promised unto us. So be it.'

§ 12. No wonder is it, though men swink in their timberworking and in their building. Yet would every man, when he has built him a cot on his lord's lease, fain sometimes rest him therein, and hunt, and fowl, and fish, and use it all ways according to the lease, until the day that he may earn bookland1 and perpetual holding, through his lord's grace. Even so may the great Giver, Whose are both these shifting cots and the everlasting homes, Who shaped both and wieldeth both, may He grant me that I be meet for each, both here to be useful and thither to come.'

§ 13. The preface to Gregory's 'Pastoral Care' is better known. Alfred begins by lamenting the decline of education in England through the Danish wars.

'What wise men of old were there in Angle-kin . . . and how happy were then the times. . . How earnest were the religious . . . and how did outland men then seek wisdom and learning in this land! And now we must get these from without if we would have them. So clean was learning fallen off among English folk, that few there were on this side Humber that could understand the Service in English, or even turn an errand-writing from Latin into English. And not many were there, I ween, beyond Humber. So few they were that I cannot bethink me of so much as one south of Thames, when first I took the kingdom.

[ocr errors]

'Then I minded me how I saw, ere all was wasted and burnt, how the churches throughout all Angle-kin stood filled with hoard and books, and eke a great press of God's

1I.e., copyhold.

« PreviousContinue »