VI THE BOY WHO WON A PRIZE

You know what sort of stories Bede was fond of telling—of course in Latin. If you should be asked with whom English prose began, I think it would be safe to say, "With Bede, who wrote the life of St. Cuthbert and the Ecclesiastical History." But that is not why you should say that Bede began English prose, but because at his death he was busy finishing a book written in English and called Translation of the Gospel of St. John.

When his last day came the good old man called all his scholars about him.

"There is still a chapter wanting," said the youth who always took down all of Bede's dictation, "and it is hard for thee to question thyself longer."

"It is easily done," answered Bede; "take thy pen and write quickly."

And all day long they wrote.

When twilight came the boy cried out, "There is still one sentence unwritten, dear master."

[Pg 49]

"Write it quickly," answered the master.

"It is finished now," said the boy.

"Thou sayest truth," came the answer, "all is finished now."

Singing the praise of God, his scholars and the boy scribe about him, he died. Alas that this English book that he bravely finished has been lost!

Bede was born about 673 and lived most of his life in the monastery at Jarrow in Northumbria in the north of England. With Bede's death the home of English prose literature was changed from the north to the south, from Northumbria to Wessex, where there lived a noble boy called Alfred. Asser, the man who was his secretary after the boy grew up, has written a life of Alfred.

From the very first this little boy was full of promise and very attractive. This fact is rather hard on some of us, is it not, who find it difficult to be good and to win the confidence of grown-up people. But the confidence of others is precisely what the boy Alfred did win, and it was not because he was a molly-coddle, for no young prince ever swung a battle-ax more lustily than did Alfred.

When he was a little bit of a chap only five years old, he was taken to Rome to see the Pope. Alfred was born in 849 at the town of Wantage, so you know what year it was when he went to[Pg 50] Rome. The Pope took a great fancy to him and hallowed him as his "bishop's son." Just how old this charming boy was when he began to read we do not know. At that time, of course, all boys read Latin, for there were no English books to read. But there is an old English couplet—a couplet is two lines of verse with a rhyme at the end of each line—which may tell the story of Alfred's reading:
At writing he was good enough, and yet as he telleth me, He was more than ten years old ere he knew his A B C.

Alfred may have been younger or older than this. We don't know, and the probability is that we never shall know. This little boy was much loved by his father, King Ethelwulf, and his mother, Queen Osburh. He had many brothers and sisters, and was himself the fifth child. But he was a finer-looking boy than the others, and more graceful in his way of speaking and in his manners.

From the time that he was a tiny child he loved to know things. And yet his parents and nurses allowed him to remain untaught in reading and writing until he was quite a big boy. But at night, when the gleemen sang songs to the harp in the royal villa, Alfred listened attentively. He had memorized very early some splendid old English songs, such as "Beowulf." He knew all [Pg 51]about Grendel, and all about the death of the warrior Beowulf after his battle with the dragon. And he had listened to gentler songs, like the one of the cowherd, C?dmon. He listened to the singing of poems which were full of the sea and full of war. Saints, warriors, and pirates were the chief heroes. A Roman poet, thinking of the warriors and pirates, called the English people "sea wolves." All their poetry was full of the sea, and it is still true that the English love the sea.

But you must not think of these people, in the midst of whom Alfred was born, as just warriors. They loved their homes, and their poetry is full of love for their families and for the dear old home-place, wherever it happened to be. Besides home-loving poetry, the gleemen sang many religious poems to which the little Alfred listened. Among them was the story of C?dmon, as I have said. We hear, too, of warrior saints, good men who did not go out to slay a fire-spewing dragon lying on a heap of gold, as did Beowulf, but who taught them how to fight the dragon of evil which lurks somewhere near or within us all the time.

It is this sort of golden and every-day victory that not only C?dmon, the cowherd, sings, but also Cynewulf, who lived during the last half of the eighth century. Cynewulf was a minstrel at the court of one of the Northumbrian kings—just such a minstrel or gleeman as Alfred sometimes listened to on many a night when he[Pg 52] was committing to memory some stirring or beautiful Anglo-Saxon poem. This poet-singer loved the sea with all his heart, and his poetry is full of this love. And in our own day, eleven centuries later, Tennyson wrote poems in their spirit not unlike Old English poems. There is one called "The Sailor Boy" which resembles an Anglo-Saxon poem called "The Seafarer." It is a spirited little poem and begins:
He rose at dawn and, fired with hope, Shot o'er the sultry harbour-bar, And reached the ship and caught the rope, And whistled to the morning star.
God help me! save I take my part Of danger on the roaring sea, A devil rises in my heart, Far worse than any death to me.

That devil is, of course, the devil of idleness, of uselessness. These stanzas are worth memorizing. You can see the spirit of a poet sometimes has a very long life. Here is one of the Old English riddles:
On the sand I stayed, by the sea-wall near, All beside the surge-inflowing! Firm I sojourned there, Where I first was fastened. Only few of men Watched among the waste where I wonned on the earth. But the brown-backed billow, at each break of day, With its water-arms enwrapt me! Little weened I then, That I e'er should speak, in the after-days, Mouthless o'er the mead-bench....

[Pg 53]

What do you think that meant? A reed flute—a little flute on which one played a song.

When Christianity came to England, as it did in 597 with St. Augustine, almost three hundred years before little Alfred was born, it made men care less for warfare and more for Christ. It is difficult to do what Christ told us to do—love one another, and at the same time fight one another. And that we should love one another was the great new message of Christianity. Christ was in men's minds, however, in those olden days, not only our gentle Saviour, but also a hero who went forth to war.

Alfred knew all about warfare, but it was not for warfare that this gentle boy and brave man cared most. One day his noble mother, Osburh, showed him and his brothers a book of poetry written in English.

"Whichever of you," she said, "shall the soonest learn this volume shall have it for his own."

This book was a very beautiful book with an illuminated letter at the beginning of the volume. An illuminated letter is usually bright with gold as well as with other colors. Of course the boy Alfred wanted this wonderful book.

He said before all his brothers, who were older than he, "Will you really give that book to one of us, that is to say to him who can first understand and repeat it to you?"

[Pg 54]

"Yes," answered his mother, smiling, and assuring him that it was so.

Alfred thereupon took the book from her hand and went to his master to read it. And it was not so very long before he had it all by heart. Then one day he brought the book to his mother and recited it. And so well did he do that he received the gift as his mother had promised him he should.

We have taken a look through the golden door over which is written Old English Poetry. We know something of what the boy Alfred learned from the book his mother gave him.

By that time he had grown to be a large boy. When he was still a little boy he had been taken from his nurses and taught the use of arms and how to ride. All his training was teaching him how to be a soldier. Yet there was something for which Alfred cared even more. All about them in those days were the Danes, the fiercest of fighting-men. Government, the gentle religion of Christ, peace, had been almost dislodged by these fierce, heathen Danes. Yet in the midst of the war-filled years of his boyhood and young manhood Alfred was dreaming of what English books, of what education in their own tongue, might do for his people.

And even in war times they were very busy just getting things together in order to live. They had to have food, they had to be warm, they had to have houses and clothes. In the woods they[Pg 55] had pigs—wild-looking swine with tusks. In the fields they had cattle and sheep and chickens. From the sea they took fish. They made butter and cheese, ale and mead, candles, leather from skins, and they wove cloth and silk. They kept bees, too, as you know from what happened to little Finan in the story of C?dmon. Besides all these things they had their carpenter's work, their blacksmith's, their baker's, hunting, woodcutting, the making of weapons, and a hundred and one other employments.

Still, despite all the warfare and the work, Alfred, when he became king in 871, had time to do a great deal for the education of the boys and girls of those stirring days. The young king wrote in English and translated from Latin into English so that the people might have books in their own tongue. And since Bede's translation of the Gospel of St. John was lost, Alfred must be called the true "father of English prose." Just as Whitby and the stall in which C?dmon saw the vision and learned how to sing was the cradle of English poetry, so was Winchester the cradle of English prose. To accomplish this work the good king brought scholars from all over the world. Asser, his secretary and biographer, has compared Alfred to a most productive bee which flew here and there asking questions as he went. He made it possible for every free-born youth to learn to read and write English perfectly. Indeed, this[Pg 56] wonderful king made himself into a schoolmaster and took on the direction of a school in his own court. He translated from well-known books into English, among others Bede's History and Pope Gregory's Pastoral Care. Although he freed his people from the fierce Danes, through his love for a book he did more for his own times and for all times—more, almost, than any other English boy has ever grown up to do.