Amenities of Literature. Disraeli Isaac

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СКАЧАТЬ of style; and a critical Saxonist has detected the corruptions of its idiom, its inflections, and its orthography—in a word, that through successive periods it had suffered a material alteration in its character.2

Somewhat more than a century after the Norman invasion, about 1180, Layamon made an English version of Wace’s “Brut”—that French metrical chronicle which the Anglo-Norman had drawn from the Latin history of “Geoffry of Monmouth.” Here we detect an entire changeableness of style, or rather a transformation; but what to call it the most skilful have not agreed. George Ellis drew a copious specimen of a writer unnoticed by Warton; but, confounded by “its strange orthography,” and mournfully doubtful of his own meritorious glossary, he considered the style, “though simple and unmixed, yet a very barbarous Saxon.” A recent critic opines that Layamon “seems to have halted between two languages, the written and the spoken.” Mr. Campbell imagines it “the dawn” of our language; while some Saxonists have branded it as semi-Saxon. It seems a language thrown into confusion, struggling to adapt itself to a new state of things; it has no Norman-French, it is saturated with Saxon, but the sentences are freed from inversions.3

      About the same period as Layamon’s version of Wace, we have a very original attempt of a writer, in those days of capricious pronunciation, to convey to the reader the orthoepy by regulating the orthography. As it is only recently that we have obtained any correct notion of a writing which has suffered many misconceptions from our earlier English scholars, the history of this work becomes a bibliographical curiosity.

An ecclesiastic paraphrased the Gospel-histories. He was a critical writer, projecting a system to which he strictly adhered, warning his transcribers as punctually to observe, otherwise “they would not write the word right;” they were therefore “to write those letters twice which he had written so.” The system consisted in doubling the consonant after a short vowel to regulate the pronunciation. He wrote brotherr and affterr; is iss, and it itt.4

It is evident that this critical was also a refined writer; for it indicated some delicacy, when we find him apologising for certain additions in his version, which was metrical, not found in the original, and merely used by him for the convenience of filling up his metre. The first literary historians to whose lot it fell to record this anomalous work, among whom were Hickes and Wanley, judging by appearances, in the superabundance of the rugged consonants, deemed this refined Anglo-Saxon’s writing as the work of an ignorant scribe, or as a rude provincial dialect, or harsh enough to be the work of an English Dane; its metrical form eluded all detection, as the verses were a peculiar metre of fifteen syllables, all jumbled together as prose: as such they gave some extracts, but it is evident that this was done with little intelligence of their author. Tyrwhit, occupied on his “Chaucer,” had a more percipient ear for these Anglo-Saxon metres, and discovered that this prose was strictly metrical; but he surely advanced no farther—he did not discover the writer’s design that “the Ennglisshe writ” was for “Ennglisshe menn to lare”—to learn. Indeed, Tyrwhit, who complains that Hickes in noticing this peculiarity of spelling “has not explained the author’s reason for it,” himself so little comprehended the system of the double consonants, that in his extract, humorously “begging pardon” of this old and odd reformer whom the critic was not only offending, but massacring, “for not following his injunctions,” he discards “all the superfluous letters!” not aware that it was the intention of the writer to preserve the orthoepy. Even our Anglo-Saxon historian missed the secret; for he has remarked on the words, that they were “needlessly loaded with double consonants.” Yet he was not wholly insensible to the substantial qualities of the writer, for he discovered in the diction that “the order of words is uniformly more natural, the inflections are more unfrequent, and the phrases of our English begin to emerge.” And, finally, our latest authority decides that this work, so long misinterpreted, is “the oldest, the purest, and by far the most valuable specimen of our old English dialect that time has left us.”5

      What is “old English” is the question. The title of this work may have perplexed the first discoverers as much as the double consonants. The writer was an ecclesiastic of the name of Orm, and he was so fascinated with his own work for the purity of its diction, and the precision of its modulated sounds, that in a literary rapture he baptized it with reference to himself; and Orm fondly called his work the Ormulum! One hardly expected to meet with such a Narcissus of literature in an old Anglo-Saxon, philologist of the year so far gone by, yet we now find that Orm might fairly exult in his Ormulum!

Nearly a century after Layamon, in the same part of England, the monk, Robert of Gloucester, wrote his “Chronicle,” about 1280. This honest monk painfully indited for his brother-Saxons the whole history of England, in the shape of Alexandrine verse in rhyme; the diction of the verse approaches so nearly to prose, that it must have been the colloquial idiom of the west. The “Ingliss,” as it was called in the course of the century between Layamon and Robert of Gloucester, betrays a striking change; and modern philologists have given the progressive term of “middle English” to the language from this period to the Reformation.6 Our chronicler has fared ill with posterity, of whom probably he never dreamt. Robert of Gloucester, who is entirely divested of a poetical character, as are all rhyming chroniclers, has had the hard hap of being criticised by two merciless poets; and, to render his uncouthness still more repulsive, the black-letter fanaticism of his editor has vauntingly arrayed the monk whom he venerated in the sable Gothic, bristling with the Saxon characters.7 It has therefore required something like a physical courage to sit down to Robert of Gloucester. Yet in the rhymer whom Warton has degraded, Ellis has discovered a metrical annalist whose orations are almost eloquent, whose characters of monarchs are energetic, and what he records of his own age matter worthy of minute history.

Another monk, Robert Mannyng, of Brunne, or Bourne, in Lincolnshire, who had versified Piers Langtoft’s “Chronicle,” has left a translation of the “Manuel des Péchés,” ascribed to Bishop Grosteste, who composed it in politer French. In this “Manual of Sins,” or, as he terms it, “A Handlyng of Sinne,” according to monkish morality and the monkish devices to terrify sinners, our recreative monk has introduced short tales, some grave, and some he deemed facetious, which convey an idea of domestic life and domestic language. It is not without curiosity that we examine these, the earliest attempts at that difficult trifle—the art of telling a short tale, Robert de Brunne is neither a Mat Prior nor a La Fontaine, but he is a block which might have been carved into one or the other, and he shows that without much art a tale may be tolerably told.8 His octosyllabic verse is more fluent than the protracted Alexandrine of his “Chronicle.” The words fall together in natural order, and we seem to have advanced in this rude and artless “Ingliss.” But the most certain evidence that “the English” was engaging the attention of those writers who professedly were devoting their pens to those whom they called “the Commonalty,” is, that they now began to criticise; and we find Robert de Brunne continually protesting against “strange Ingliss.” This phrase has rather perplexed our inquirers. “Strange Ingliss” would seem to apply to certain novelties in diction used by the tale-reciters and harpers, for so our monk tells us,

“I wrote In symple speeche as I couthe, That is lightest in manne’s mouthe. I mad (made) nought for no disoúrs (tale-tellers), Ne for no seggers nor harpoúrs, Bot for the luf (love) of symple menu That strange Inglis cann not ken.”

      It was about this time that the metrical romances, translated from the French, spread in great number, and introduced many exotic phrases. In the celebrated romance of “Alisaundre” we find French СКАЧАТЬ