FOREWORDS

This little book makes no claim to be a history of pre-Conquest Literature.  It is an attempt to increase the interest which Catholics may well feel in this part of the great ‘inheritance of their fathers.’  It is not meant to be a formal course of reading, but a sort of talk, as it were, about beautiful things said and sung in old days:  things which to have learned to love is to have incurred a great and living debt.  I have tried to clothe some of these in the nearest approach I could find to the native garb in which their makers had sent them forth, with the humblest acknowledgement that nothing comes up to that native garb itself.  In writing the book I have naturally incurred debt in various directions; debt of which the source would be difficult always to trace.  I may mention my obligations to the work of Professor Morley, Professor Earle, Professor Ten Brink, and Professor Albert S. Cook:  also to the writers of Chapters I-vii of “The Cambridge History of English Literature,” vol. i.

If this little book in any way fulfils the wishes of those Catholic teachers who have asked me to print some thoughts of mine about English Literature, I shall be glad indeed.

Emily Hickey.

CHAPTER I

The beginnings of Literature in England.  Two poets of the best period of our old poetry, Caedmon and Cynewulf.  The language they wrote in.  The monastery at Whitby.  The story of Caedmon’s gift of song.

How many of us I wonder, realise in anything like its full extent the beauty and the glory of our Catholic heritage.  Do we think how the Great Mother, the keeper of truth, the guardian of beauty, the muse of learning, the fosterer of progress, has given us gifts in munificent generosity, gifts that sprang from her holy bosom, to enlighten, to cheer, to guide and to help; gifts that she, large, liberal, glorious, could not but give, for she, like her Lord, is giver and bestower; and to be of her children is to be of the givers and bestowers.  The Catholic Church is the source of fine literature, of true art, as of noble speech and noble deed.

We are going to look at a small portion of that part of our Catholic heritage which consists of our early literature; we are going to think about the beginning of Christian work of this kind in the form of poetry and prose in England.  When I say Christian poetry and prose, I am using the word Christian as opposed to pagan, and inclusive of secular as well as religious verse, though the amount of secular verse is, in the earliest time, comparatively very small.  Some of the pagan work was retouched by Christians who cared for the truth and strength and beauty of it.  The ideal of the English heathen poet was, in many respects, a fine one.  He loved valour and generosity and loyalty, and all these things are found, for instance,