III

But the England of Bede is one in which the White Christ has triumphed. Over it rises that Sign which the author of the greatest Early English poem, The Dream of the Rood, beheld with trembling adoration uplifted in the heavens. When saintly King Oswald planted the Cross with his own hands upon his battle-field, as we may read in the second chapter of Bede’s third book, a new day had dawned for the British Isles. Nor can we wonder that the spot where the trophy was erected should “in the English tongue” have been called “Heavenfield,” nor that old moss scraped from the surface of that Wood should have been potent to heal disease.

In the time of Bede, Christian kings are on the throne. Learning exerts its new and fascinating spell—from his own Jarrow the best extant text of the Vulgate, the Codex Amiatinus, comes to us. Music, far different from the wild song of the Scop at feast or funeral, is cultivated with delight. The painful isolation of hostile or unlettered tribes is replaced by a wide-spread community of interests in arts and sciences, in government and faith; so that Bede in his seclusion can know fruitful intercourse with ripe scholars in various countries, with statesmen, with travellers from distant lands. Above all, monasticism has attained the zenith of its power. England is dotted all over with monasteries in which women are experiencing new peace and freedom, and the sons of the Edition: current; Page: [xiv] heroes are dedicating themselves, like the holy Abbot Easterwine, to a life not only of prayer and contemplation, but of hearty labour in the fields. Abuses enough—sufficiently painful, naïvely natural—existed in the monasteries, as we may learn from Bede’s candid letter to Bishop Egbert; yet in the main no one can doubt the surprising beauty of life in these centres of labour, learning and love. A few centuries later it is possible to claim that monasticism suppresses and belittles human nature; in the time of Bede no critic can deny that its effect was to release and enrich. These Houses of Faith were centres of healthful democracy. “The monks,” it has been said, “cultivated and extended with enthusiasm all the knowledge and literature possessed by the world in their day. The distant places toward which they had first been led by a love of solitude, changed rapidly and, as if by force of circumstances, into cathedrals, cities, towns or rural colonies, and served as centres, schools, libraries, workshops and citadels of the scarcely converted families, parties and tribes.” In the midst of sterile turmoil, Order and Kindness, those two forces signalled by Ruskin as central impulses in a just society, ruled in the monastery and there alone.

As we watch this England, in which Christianity is at once so vital and so pure, the inner strength of the new life grows clear. First to strike us is the curious tone of joy, refreshing and awakening as a spring wind, that pervades the book. This joy has two sources. It arises from the release, purification and expansion of the natural affections, and it finds ultimate origin in the opening to mortal vision of those Heavens whence Eternal Love for ever watches and guides.

To pass from Dear’s Complaint, The Seafarer, or the fragmentary poems of The Edda, to Bede’s stories of the early saints, is to escape from Natural Maligna to Natural Benigna. We flee from a world of sad grey seas and menacing landscape where an arrogant yet affrighted race moves tragically, boasting of its prowess, to a kindly fostering earth. The very prose of this new order is more lyrical than heathen verse; it is illumined by a Edition: current; Page: [xv] new and gracious light. Happiness, so rarely known in the old days apart from battle-rage, has gained subtlety and variety. Demons may fly on the wings of the wind, the far faint clang of their pinions recalling evil dragon-flights of old; but the former supernatural charged with terror is supplemented by another supernatural, full of sweet reassurance. Men may entertain angels unawares; celestial music echoes above those homes of prayer whence ascends in strange and piercing harmony the praise of a God who, by stooping to death, has won the world for love.

The range of feeling in Bede is indeed surprising. Here, says Aubrey de Vere, we see for the first time “the affections of Christianized humanity, affections founded on divine truths and heavenly hopes, and yet in entire harmony with affections of a merely human order which lie beneath them in an equal plane.” Tenderness has been called, as it were, out of the void; it heralds that literature of sentiment, growing even to our own day, so natural a product of Christianity, so unknown to Paganism except in faint foreshadowings. True, the ties which Bede describes are spiritual rather than natural; they relate rather to the cloister than to the family. Regretting this, we may yet realize that the time had not come for the full transfiguration by spiritual light of that bond between man and woman which had in the old days been passionate but rarely tender. All through the middle ages the romance of emotion obedient to law must be sought less in the world than under the control of religious rule. Spenser is perhaps the first English author in whom we catch the pure gleam of idealized domestic affections. If in Bede we see an ideal of fellowship more ascetic than our own, and rejoice that in the fulness of time the race has been trusted with a more generous conception, we may at least consider the cloister-life he shows, a training school for those softer and more disciplined emotions which were later to be transferred to the home. These new ties, unrelated to family, tribe or natural passion, carrying the fierce devotions and loyalties of the old Saga world into higher and purer regions, mark a strange enrichment of consciousness. We are Edition: current; Page: [xvi] present at an emancipation of hearts, which find in their own wondering depths, impulses and delights, directly born from above, unguessed before. How touching the story of the little cloister-bred boy who clung so lovingly to the young sister, Eadgyth, and, calling three times in death on her beloved name, summoned her to follow him to the land where love knows no parting! How everfresh the picture of the two dying brothers, placed in the same bed and helped to kiss each other; or the other tale of Cuthbert and Herebert, those long-severed friends content in the faith that the prayers ascending from Farne and Derwentwater met before the Heavenly Altar, yet asking and receiving the boon that their souls might depart together! In the pages of Bede we watch the birth of no less a gift and blessing than Christian friendship. Its light shines through the book: fair as moonlight, holy, temperate, released from the sad bonds of time or passion, of exacting greed or jealous fear. How gently do these people deal with one another! With what wise tenderness do the abbesses care for the welfare of their spiritual daughters, how fine the relations between the kings and their directors, as between Oswin and Aidan! Compassion, that virtue so rare in heathen times, is pervasive and compelling. Such sympathetic insight as prompted the remarkable instructions of Gregory to Augustine regarding the forbearance to be shown in methods of proselytizing, is everywhere visible. It implies a respect for others and a delicacy of feeling which leads, on the one hand, to such wise statesmanship as that of Paulinus, on the other to such friendly feeling for all animate life as we see in Cuthbert and Aidan. In these inward reactions of the Faith, in this extension, softening and elevation of the sympathies, we shall do well to see a fulfilment of the ancient promise: He shall take away the stony heart out of your breast, and shall give you a heart of flesh.

If Bede reveals a new comfort in human relations, he shows us also abundant gladness born of a deeper source. For fogs have lifted, and grateful eyes gaze outward to horizons before unseen, and upward to the open heavens. Edition: current; Page: [xvii] Into that fatalistic brooding of the North, which could only say at best and bravest that Wyrd sometimes saved an undoomed man when his courage was good, has come a vision of an eternity of joy. The soul might still be seen, as in Coifi’s famous apologue, in guise of a sparrow flying swiftly through the fire-lit Hall of Life: only outside that Hall no wintry storms of rain or snow now awaited it, but a homing flight under starry heavens to the Heart of Love. We are present in Bede’s story at many death-beds. This is not only because mortality was more in evidence then than now, but also, and chiefly, because at this point, so dark, so sad to the heathen world, the marvel of the new faith was clearest. These lights that hover softly over the homes of prayer, these angel songs heard especially at the shrouded moment of the soul’s passing, these sights of ascending spirits clothed in glory, betoken a conception of death and being that had been strange indeed to the old Germanic world. One notes the intimate relation of these phenomena to the new tenderness. They spring from no ascetic egotism, but from intensity of love; for they habitually concern, not the person to whom they are vouchsafed, but some one dear to him. Even while Bede wrote, or a little earlier, rainbow mosaics in the apse of churches at Ravenna and elsewhere were enshrining for all time symbols of the Christian hope. Those solemn fields of Paradise, where fair emblems of eternal life drawn from the world of beast and blossom surround the triumphant Cross, rise to memory as one reads of the mystic visions of the night revealed so often to devout men and women in the Northern Isles.

The widening of the Universe brought awe as well as joy. The Cædmonian poems and those of Cynewulf show the majestic sequences of a drama which sweeps beyond the range of mortal sight—beginning with Creation, enduring till Judgment; abysses of spiritual being into which the men of the eighth century gazed overwhelmed. Bede’s book is a rich repository of those imaginative concepts of the Other-World which were to dominate the middle ages. These concepts are here Edition: current; Page: [xviii] charged with the first free emotion and excitement that they inspired. The Visions of Fursey and of Drithelm, so naïvely and earnestly related, are original adventures of the pilgrim soul. They are among our earliest reports from those strange regions, beyond and within our mortal life, from which Dante, six centuries later, was to bring back perhaps the last authentic message. There is an interesting reticence in these stories. The four fires seen of Fursey in the air above the dark and obscure valley are not the fires of Hell, but the fires of falsehood, covetousness, discord and iniquity, which “would kindle and consume the world.” Nor does Drithelm, in all the picturesque and solemn variety in his experience, behold more than the mouth of the Pit and the far light of Heaven. This reserve is finer by far than the bold irreverence with which the later middle ages descanted on the ultimate secrets of the prison house. Nor is the Christian ethical feeling with which the tales are charged any the less impressive because they are full of haunting reminiscence of Celtic Other-World myths; for the power of Christianity is seen always less in its invention of new things than in its transformation of old. And again we note the light and grace of a new supernatural hope. If the folklorist be right, the Other-World of the Celt was the exclusive abode of the gods, opened only to an occasional hero favoured by the love of an Immortal. In this new legend, the idea has enlarged its bounds, and Paradise awaits, late or soon, all faithful souls.

Allied to the visions recorded by Bede are the frequent miracles, of which he tells with a grave simplicity full of innocent poetry. And here the reader will surely err if he indulge in any instinct of patronage toward monkish credulity, or any attempt to rationalize. For these Signs are of the very warp and woof of Bede’s narrative, a natural product of the new psychology. They belong to that Christian consciousness which was so lovingly and gratefully aware of the influx of deep mystical currents of love and healing through the channels of daily life. If we find that birds and beasts, the air and the sea obey the children of God, it behoves us less to marvel than to Edition: current; Page: [xix] rejoice: “For it is no wonder,” says Bede of S. Cuthbert, “that the very creature should obey his wishes who so faithfully obeyed the great Author of all creatures. But we for the most part have lost our dominion over the creation that has been subjected to us, because we neglect to obey the Lord and Creator of all things.” The creation that has been subjected to us! How strangely had this quiet incidental phrase fallen on Pagan ears!

These miracles have for the most part a homely sweetness, quite dissimilar to the artificial marvels of later ecclesiasticism; their fragrance is natural as that of the blossoms to spring later around the footsteps of S. Francis and his companions in the Umbrian plain. Cuthbert takes refuge for the night in a deserted hut; his horse pulls at the straw of the roof, and there falls down a cloth wrapped round a portion of meat and half a hot loaf, which the saint shares with his faithful beast. He stands all night doing penance in the wintry sea, and when he emerges two friendly otters, crawling from the waves, warm his poor cold feet with their breath. A sick horse, rolling in the green grass that naturally grows from the dust of King Oswald, is restored to health. The post on which hangs a cloth containing dust from the grave of Aidan remains unburned when the cottage of wattles is consumed around it. Almost always the stories bear unconscious witness to the new fellowship. Crows, fishes, eagles gladly serve the saints. The careful accounts of the cure of a little maid’s headache, of healing wrought on children, poor people, servants, gain fresh cogency when we realize that we are dealing with a generation when the zest for wholesale slaughter must have been keen in memory of nerve and brain, and when, as Bede frankly tells us, it still got the better of men from time to time.

It is an interesting evidence of Bede’s honesty that he is chary of miracles in the periods where he had only tradition to guide him, and multiplies them as he approaches the time when he could sift his testimony himself. One also notes that they occur more often in connection with the Celtic than with the Roman side of the Edition: current; Page: [xx] story. They flower in the pathway of Cuthbert and Aidan and over the dust of Oswald; of Wilfrid, that energetic prince of the Church—to whose party Bede none the less loyally adhered—we have only one dubious instance. The nearer we come to simple people, the more do the miracles abound. They are not, as a rule, political in nature, though we must make an exception of the impressive sign given to Edwin: they rise rather with perfect naturalness from the daily life of the times. They show us Christianity, even in its most mysterious reaches, practically and simply serviceable, and they afford a new evidence of the intimacy with which the faith had penetrated the popular heart.