Amenities of Literature. Disraeli Isaac

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СКАЧАТЬ more than they themselves had taught. We can only draw out of a cistern the waters which we have poured into it. Every succeeding day, however, swelled the Cædmonian Poem; assuredly they wanted neither zeal nor hands—for the glory of the monastery of Whitby!

      Such is a literary anecdote of the seventh century conveyed to us by ancient Bede. The dream of the apparition’s inspiration of this unlettered monk was one more miracle among many in honour of the monastery; and it was to be told in the customary way, for never yet in a holy brotherhood was found a recusant.

      Even to this day we ourselves dream grotesque adventures; but in the days of monachism visions were not merely a mere vivid and lengthened dream, a slight delirium, for they usually announced something important. A dream was a prognostic or a prelude. The garrulous chroniclers, and saintly Bede himself, that primeval gossiper, afford abundant evidence of such secret revelations. Whenever some great act was designed, or some awful secret was to be divulged, a dream announced it to the world. Was a king to be converted to Christianity, the people were enlightened by the vision which the sovereign revealed to them; was a maiden to take the vow of virginity, or a monastery to be built, an angelical vision hovered, and sometimes specified the very spot. Was a crime of blood to be divulged by some penitent accessory, somebody had a dream, and the criminal has stood convicted by the grave-side, which gave up the fatal witness in his victim. In those ages of simplicity and pious frauds, a dream was an admirable expedient by which important events were carried on, and mystification satisfactorily explained the incomprehensible.

The marvellous incident on which the history of Cædmon revolves may only veil a fact which has nothing extraordinary in itself when freed from the invention which disguises it. Legends like the present one were often borrowed by one monastery from another, and an exact counterpart of the dream and history of our Saxon bard, in a similar personage and a like result, has been pointed out as occurring in Gaul. A vernacular or popular version of the Scriptures being required, it was supplied by a peasant wholly ignorant of the poetic art till he had been instructed in a DREAM.1

Scriptural themes were common with the poets of the monastery.2 The present enterprise, judging from the variety of its fragments from both Testaments and from the Apocrypha, in its complete state would have formed a chronological poem of the main incidents of the Scriptures in the vernacular Saxon. This was a burden of magnitude which no single shoulder could have steadily carried, and probably was supported by several besides “the Dreamer.” Critical Saxonists, indeed, have detected a variation in the style, and great inequalities in the work; such discordances indicate that the paraphrase was occasionally resumed by some successor, as idling monks at a later period were often the continuators of voluminous romances. I would class the Cædmonian poem among the many attempts of the monachal genius to familiarize the people with the miraculous and the religious narratives in the Scriptures, by a paraphrase in the vernacular idiom. The poem may be deemed as equivocal as the poet; the text has been impeached; interpolations and omissions are acknowledged by the learned in Saxon lore. The poem is said to have been written in the seventh century, and the earliest manuscript we possess is of the tenth, suffering in that course of time all the corruptions or variations of the scribes, while the ruder northern dialect has been changed into the more polished southern. If we may confide in a learned conjecture, it may happen that Cædmon is no name at all, but merely a word or a phrase; and thus the entity of the Dreamer of the Monastery of Whitby may vanish in the wind of two Chaldaic syllables!3 Be this as it may, for us the poem is an entity, whatever becomes of the pretended Dreamer.

It has become an arduous inquiry whether Milton has not drawn largely from the obscurity of this monkish Ennius? “In reading Cædmon,” says Sharon Turner, “we are reminded of Milton—of a ‘Paradise Lost’ in rude miniature.” Conybeare advances, “the pride, rebellion, and punishments of Satan and his princes have a resemblance to Milton so remarkable that much of this portion might be almost literally translated by a cento of lines from the great poet.”4 A recent Saxonist, in noticing “the creation of Cædmon as beautiful,” adds, “it is still more interesting from its singular correspondence even in expression with ‘Paradise Lost.’ ”

      The ancient, as well as the modern, of these scriptural poets has adopted a narrative which is not found in the Scriptures. The rebellion of Satan before the creation of man, and his precipitation with the apostate angels into a dungeon-gulf of flame, and ice, and darkness, though an incident familiar to us as a gospel text, remains nothing more than a legend unhallowed by sacred writ.

Where are we, then, to seek for the origin of a notion universal throughout Christendom? I long imagined that this revolt in heaven had been one of the traditions hammered in the old rabbinical forge; and in the Talmudical lore there are tales of the fallen angels; but I am assured by a learned professor in these studies, that the Talmud contains no narrative of “the Rebellion of Satan.” The Hebrews, in their sojourn in Babylon, had imbibed many Chaldean fables, and some fanciful inventions. At this obscure period did this singular episode in sacred history steal into their popular creed? Did it issue from that awful cradle of monstrous imaginings, of demons, of spirits, and of terrifying deities, Persia and India? In the Brahminical Shasters we find a rebellion of the angels before the creation, and their precipitation from light into darkness; their restoration by the clemency of the Creator, however, occurs after their probationary state, during millions of years in their metamorphoses on earth. But this seems only the veil of an allegory designed to explain their dark doctrine of the metempsychosis. The rebellion of the angels, as we have been taught it, is associated with their everlasting chains and eternal fire; how the legend became universally received may baffle inquiry.5

      But the coincidence of the Cædmonian with the Miltonian poem in having adopted the same peculiar subject of the revolt of Satan and the expulsion of the angels, is not the most remarkable one in the two works. The same awful narrative is pursued, and we are startled at the opening of the Pandemonium by discovering the same scene and the same actors. When we scrutinise into minuter parts, we are occasionally struck by some extraordinary similarities.

      Cædmon, to convey a notion of the ejection from heaven to hell, tells that “the Fiend, with all his comrades, fell from heaven above, through as long as three nights and days.” Milton awfully describes Satan “confounded, though immortal,” rolling in the fiery gulf—

Nine times the space that measures day and night To mortal men.

      Cædmon describes the Deity having cast the evil angel into that “House of perdition, down on that new bed; after, gave him a name that the highest (of the devils which they had now become) should be called Satan thenceforwards.” Milton has preserved the same notice of the origin of the name, thus—

To whom the Arch-Enemy, And thence in heaven called Satan—

      Satan in Hebrew signifying “the Enemy,” or “the Adversary.”

      The harangue of Satan to his legions by the Saxon monk cannot fail to remind us of the first grand scene in the “Paradise Lost,” however these creations of the two poets be distinct. “The swart hell—a land void of light, and full of flame,” is like Milton’s—

——yet from these flames No light, but rather darkness visible.

      The locality is not unlike, “There they have at even, immeasurably long, each of all the fiends a renewal of fire, with sulphur charged; but cometh ere dawn the eastern wind frost, bitter-cold, ever fire or dart.” This torment we find in the hell of Milton—

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