II

So Bede tells his thrilling story of a critical time: how England—always to him a unit, no mere congeries of warring tribes—was civilized and brought into union with the rest of Europe through the agency of the Church. Yet the central value of his work is not in the outward history so carefully narrated; we find it rather in his revelation of the secret life that was transforming the heart of the English. Here, in a practically contemporary account, it is our privilege to catch in the very act the re-creation of a primitive people by the power of an ideal. We in these latter days, sons of a civilization nominally Christian, accustomed to platitudes which we Edition: current; Page: [x] imperfectly observe, may well learn a fresh appreciation of the startling nature of the faith we profess, as we watch it in the pages of Bede, transforming a haughty and at times blood-thirsty race into the likeness of Jesus of Nazareth.

When Christianity, new-born, made its swift way around the shores of the Mediterranean, it brought its message of hope to ancient peoples, weary with much thinking and striving, among whom arts, philosophies and the science of dominion had reached perfection and were ripening to decay. But no sooner had the gifts of Rome and Greece become intimately one with the gift of Judæa, than a new act in the drama opened. The advancing tide of the Faith, setting from the East, encountered the tide of the Germanic invasion, sweeping down from the North in successive waves over the Roman Empire. From the blending of these two tides at the term of classic civilization arose the mediæval world.

Christianity was now called on to penetrate and possess a rude life in which neither the graces nor the vices of civilization existed. The process of converting our Germanic ancestors lasted long: from the fourth century, when the West Goths were won, to the eleventh, when the sturdy Vikings of Scandinavia finally succumbed. In England the fifth and sixth centuries witnessed the inundation of the old British peoples, already partially Christianized, by the heathen Germanic tribes. The seventh century is the century of the Conversion. The eighth, Bede’s own century, is, broadly speaking, the Golden Age of early English Christianity. In the ninth century came the fresh invasion of the heathen Danes, and the work was largely to be repeated.

Indeed, in one sense we may say that it has not been thoroughly done yet. Christianity has no easy task. It must prove the paradox that defeat may be the truest victory, and that “forgiveness is force at the height.” It must displace the Fighter from the heart of the world, and must put the Sufferer there. Since, from the national or social point of view, we are still so imperfectly Christian, we cannot wonder if the Danes in the century after Edition: current; Page: [xi] Bede were to find plenty of Paganism surviving in England. Yet when all allowances are made it remains true that Bede shows us a land in which hundreds, nay thousands, of individuals have been literally “born again”: shaped, in a manner so marvellous that we hold our breath, by an ideal opposite at every point to that cherished by their fathers. Nowhere else are there records of this strange process richer in psychological interest. Through all their quietude and their matter-of-fact manner, the wonder of the change broods over them.

Fully to appreciate that change, we need a vivid impression of the temperaments and standards which Christianity encountered. Nor is this hard to gain. The dim days of the Folk-Wandering produced, to our profit, a luxuriant growth of Saga and Hero-Epic in which the hidden life of our forefathers is clearly seen. From England, Germany, Iceland, Scandinavia, Denmark, from the decorous pages of Latin chroniclers no less than from the precious survivals of authentic Lay and tale, scholars have gleaned an invaluable harvest. Having already seen how slow was the process of conversion, we need not be surprised to find that dark traditions of the Heroic Age lingered here and there even in the twelfth century. Saxo Grammaticus, for instance, a Danish historian of this century, tells us stories which may serve as well as any for a background to Bede. Here in stiff would-be Ciceronian Latin are traces of a life so primeval in practices and concepts that for analogues we have to turn to surviving savage tribes. As in Beowulf, we find a civilization suspicious, melancholy, peril-ridden, in which heroes find their sole pleasure in coarse brags at the flyting and grim slaughter at the fighting. In these pages, where we read the earliest story of Hamlet, are full details of the dreaded Bear-Sarks—unfortunate men endowed with the power of shape-shifting, a curse to the community into which they are born, helplessly subject to accesses in which they howled and bit themselves into frenzy. Here we may read of a hero who stands in the bitter winter sea till his wolf-skins freeze upon him and thus gain magic power to repel the venom of dragons. Edition: current; Page: [xii] In Saxo’s time—four centuries after Bede—the old gods can still be seen by looking through the elbow of a witch held akimbo, and their power is vital in the land. A shudder runs through all the treatment of the supernatural world. Nowhere is there a more gruesome tale than that of the man who, with sad Germanic loyalty, had himself buried alive in the barrow of his dead blood-brother. Passers-by, who, lured by hope of treasure, lowered one of their number into the barrow with a basket, listened terror-stricken to the sounds of horrid conflict within the mound. And when the basket rose again it held the ghastly form of the buried comrade, who had won desperate escape from that underworld, where the ghost of his brother, turned vampire, had viciously torn off his ear. If Bede has no such horrors as this to chronicle—though similar tales attend everywhere the progress of the old Northern peoples—we can see even from the stories he himself tells such as that of the sons of Penda, how violent and fierce was the temper of the heathen world. The light of conflagration, which shines down the ages in such old poems as The Fight at Finnsburgh, is not absent from his pages. The England he shows us is a bleak country, in which rare cultivated oases break the expanse of forest and morass. An eyewitness told him of the small altar to Odin erected by King Redwald in a Christian Church:

“He, the ruler of North-folk and South-folk, a man open-browed as the skies,

Held the eyes of the eager Italians with his blue, bold, Englishman’s eyes;

To the priests, to the eager Italians, thus fearless he poured his swift speech:

‘O my honey-tongued fathers, I turn not away from the faith that you preach:

Not the less, hath a man many moods, and may ask a religion for each.

Grant that all things are well with the realm on a delicate day of the spring,—

Easter-month, time of hopes and of swallows—. The praises, the psalms that ye sing,

As in pleasant accord they float heavenward, are good in the ears of the King.

But a churl comes adrip from the rivers, pants me out, fallen spent on the floor:

‘O King Raedwald, Northumbria marches, and to-morrow knocks hard at thy door,

Hot for melting thy crown on the hearth!’ Then commend me to Woden and Thor!

For my thought flashes out as a sword, cleaving counsel as clottage of cream

And your incense and chanting are but as the smoke of burnt towns and the scream:

And I quaff me the thick mead of triumph from enemies’ skulls in my dream!”