The eighth century produced no English poet, whose name has reached us, unless we may refer Aldhelm to this period. Aldhelm, nephew of Ina, King of the West-Sexe, was taught Latin at Malmesbury by Maildulf the Scot, and Greek Dialectics and Rhetoric at Canterbury, by Archbishop Theodore, and the celebrated Adrian, abbot of St. Austin’s. He was shorn in Maildulf’s monastery, of which he became the second abbot; and when the diocese of Winchester was divided A.D. 705, he was made first bishop of Shireburn. His abbot’s robe, his psalter, and his silver altar, were long kept as relics at Malmesbury, and were shown to Leland, when he visited that monastery. He is said to have written many English songs, interspersed with notices of Scripture. One of these was still sung by the people, in the days of Malmesbury; and many of them are probably extant in the vast mass of devotional poetry, which lies unowned, and we may add unread, in our Anglo-Saxon MSS.
He was a great imitator of the ancients; he was a celebrated Greek scholar, and he filled his writings with foreign words and clumsy compounds; he was also a lover and composer of Anglo-Saxon verse, and he shows a deeply rooted taste for alliteration and pompous diction; and in addition to these defects we see in his writings generally a bad choice of words, with harsh sentences, and a great deficiency in true delicacy and harmony. In a word, Aldhelm’s writings, popular as they once were, exhibit a very general want of good taste.
The style of his Latin poems, as might be expected from his other compositions, is more characteristic of the Saxon gleeman than of the classic scholar: alternately pompous and homely; occasionally delighting the reader with the beauty of its imagery, often offending him by the utter absence of grace or dignity. His countrymen, however, looked up to him with admiration; nor was his fame confined to the Anglo-Saxons; it quickly spread itself over the neighbouring nations; and foreigners were eager to submit their works to Aldhelm for revision and approbation.
Aldhelm long enjoyed the highest reputation for learning; but his writings are chiefly remarkable for their elaborately unnatural and fantastic rhetoric. His Latin style bears some resemblance to the pedantic English, full of alliteration and all sorts of barbarous quaintness, that was fashionable among our theological writers in the reigns of Elizabeth and James the First.
We can understand how he came to imitate, in his Latin poems, certain peculiarities of the national versification, which, however, are oftentimes superfluous and disturbing elements. It is likewise conceivable that such a nature often bore itself with poor grace in the majestic garb of Latin prose.
In Aldhelm they had a Latin poet of much feeling and refinement.
Aldhelm is the first of the Anglo-Latin poets, and he was a classical scholar at a time when to be so was a great distinction. Both in prose and verse, his style has the faults which belong to an age of revived study. His love of learning, his keen appreciation of its beauty and its value, have tended to inflate his sentences with an appearance of display. His poetic diction is simpler than that of his prose; but here, too, he is habitually over-elevated, whence he becomes sometimes stilted, and oftentimes he drops below pitch with an inadequate and disappointing close. But we must honour him in the position which he holds. He is the leader of that noble series of English scholars who represent the first endeavoring stage of recovery after the great eclipse of European culture.
Aldhelm, of whom the great King Alfred speaks admiringly; who not only knew his languages but could sing a song; a sort of early Saxon Sankey who beguiled wanderers into better ways by his homely rhythmic utterance. I think we may safely count this old Aldhelm, who had a strain of royal blood in him, as the first of English ballad-mongers.
