To demonstrate this, and to show that the songs of these converted Saxons are “but a concrete of exclamations,” have “no development,” and are nothing but paganism after all, M. Taine gives five prose lines of imperfect translation from a poem by Cædmon. Here is a correct rendering of the opening of the poem in the original metre. Let the reader judge of the amount of pagan inspiration it contains:
“Now must we glorify The guardian of heaven’s kingdom, The Maker’s might, And his mind’s thought, The work of the worshipped father, When of his wonders, each one, The ever-living Lord Ordered the origin, He erst created For earth’s children Heaven as a high roof, The holy Creator: Then on this mid-world Did man’s great guardian, The ever-living Lord, Afterward prepare For men a mansion, The Master Almighty.”[4]
“One of them” [those servants of Odin, take notice], “Adhelm, stood on a bridge leading to the town where he lived, and repeated warlike and profane odes alternately with religious poetry, in order to attract and instruct the men of his time. He could do it without changing his key. In one of them, a funeral song, Death speaks. It was one of the last Saxon compositions, containing a terrible Christianity, which seems at the same time to have sprung from the blackest depths of the _Edda_.”
M. Taine has here given rein to his imagination, and made terrible work with Saxon chronology and other matters. For Adhelm read Aldhelm, in Saxon _Ealdhelm_, so King Alfred spelt it. The name signifies _Old Helmet_; Aldhelm was of princely extraction. “Warlike and profane odes” does not correctly translate “_carmen triviale_.” Aldhelm was a learned priest, a Greek, Latin, and Hebrew scholar, with a profound knowledge of the Holy Scriptures. His present reputation rests on his Latin works. His contemporary reputation was founded on his Anglo-Saxon productions. He composed canticles and ballads in his native tongue, and, remarking the haste of many of the Anglo-Saxon peasants to leave church as soon as the Sunday Mass was over, in order to avoid the sermon, he would lie in wait for them at the bridge or wayside, and, singing to them as a bard, attract their attention, and in the fascination of a musical verse teach them the truths of religion they would not wait to hear from the pulpit. It was not for the pleasure of singing that Aldhelm thus labored: it was to save souls. Without the slightest authority, M. Taine puts in his mouth this beautiful Anglo-Saxon fragment: