TO A.D. 1160]

MIRACLE PLAYS AND MYSTERIES

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It was probably with such plays that the practice of acting in churches was begun by the clergy in France, where the delight in dramatic entertainment had remained strong since the Roman time. Against the theatres of failing Rome the early Fathers of the Church had battled as against idolatry These things, they said, have their rise from idols, and are baits of a false religion. The Roman stage fell into ruin; but the dramatic instinct is part of man's nature. At the close of the second century Ezekiel, a tragic poet of the Jews, put the story of the Exodus into the form of a Greek drama. In the fourth century Gregory Nazianzen, as Patriarch of Constanti nople, attacked the Greek theatre there flourishing by substituting for the heathen plays plays of his own on stories of the Old and New Testament. They were written to the pattern of those of Sophocles and Euripides, Christian hymns taking the place of the old choruses. In humbler fashion, prompted perhaps by the success of their miracle plays, well-meaning priests endeavoured, on those great days of the Church which commemorate the birth or death of our Lord, or any other of the sublimer mysteries of Christian faith, to bring forcibly before the very eyes of the congregation the events told in the Bible lesson of the day. When, in the course of the service, the time came for the reading of the Lesson, it was not read but realised within the church. Such a play was called, not a MIRACLE PLAY but a MYSTERY; because it dealt not with the miracles of saints, but with the great mysteries of Christianity drawn from the life of Christ. In what way they were at first represented is shown clearly by that one of the three plays of Hilarius which happens to be not a miracle-play but a mystery. Its subject is the Raising of Lazarus-mystery of the resurrection of the dead. Its incidents having been realised to the utmost, and its dialogues set to popular tunes of the day, the officiating priest who, as Lazarus, has risen from the tomb, turns in that character to admonish the assembled people. He turns then to the representation of Jesus, whom he adores as master, king, and lord, who wipes out the sins of the people, whose ordinance is sure, and of whose kingdom there shall be no end; and the closing direction of the author is, that "This being finished, if it was played at matins, Lazarus shall begin 'Te Deum Lauda. mus;' but if at vespers, ' Magnificat anima mea Dominum;" and so the Church service proceeds. The last of the three plays by Hilarius was designed for a pompous Christmas

representation of the story of Daniel, and at its close the Church service was to be continued by the priest who played Darius. Such were the miracle and mystery plays written in France by Hilarius, an Englishman, in or a few years after the reign of King Stephen.

10. One other book written in Stephen's reign points also to the future course of thought. This was a little treatise by Henry of Huntingdon, entitled "De Contemptu Mundi" (On Contempt of the World). Its author was the son of a married clerk, and was trained in the household of a Bishop of Lincoln, who remained his patron. He wrote verse and prose ɔn divers subjects, compiled a Chronicle in seven books, which ended with the death of Henry I., and then added an eighth book on the reign of Stephen. It was at the end of Stephen's reign, when he was Prior of Huntingdon, that this busy writer closed his career with a treatise On Contempt of the World, addressed to the same friend Walter to whom his youthful poems had been dedicated: "A youth to a youth I dedicated juvenilities; an old man to an old man I destine now the thoughts of age." He recalled in this little book the friends they had both lost. Men rich in luxury were gone, so were the wise, so was the strong man who was cruel in his strength. Of the great kings also who are as gods the lives are vanity. Men of great name were recalled and passed before the imagination in a spirit kindred to that of books of later time which yielded Tragedies to dramatists when they arose.

II. We pass now from the reign of Stephen to the reign of Henry II. (1154–1189), a time of great interest in the early story of our literature. Throughout Europe there was a new activity of thought among the foremost nations, and that which was partly represented by the contest between Henry and Becket was in the general life of the time. Contest upon the limit of authority, which in its successive forms is the most vital part of our own history, and has been essential everywhere to the advance of modern Europe, became active in many places in the days of Henry II. As we shall find the course of English Literature illustrating throughout a steady maintenance of the principle out of which this contest arises, let us at once settle the point of view from which it will be here regarded.

No two men think alike upon all points, and some part of the difference is as distinctly natural as that which distinguishes one man from another by his outward form and face. It is

TO A.D. 1180]

GREAT CURRENTS OF THOUGHT

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part of the Divine plan of the world that we should not all have the same opinions. If we observe in one man the group of ideas forming his principles of thought, we find that they have well-marked characters, which are common to him and to many others. One might even imagine an arrangement of men by their way of thought, as of plants by their way of growth, into primary classes, sections, alliances, families, genera, and species. And as the two primary classes of the flowering plants are exogens and endogens, so the two primary classes of civilised men are (1) those in whom it is the natural tendency of the mind to treasure knowledge of the past, and shun departure from that which has been affirmed by wise and good men throughout many generations, those, in short, who find rest and hope of unity in the upholding of authority; and (2) those in whom it is the natural tendency of the mind to claim free right of examining and testing past opinions, who seek the utmost liberty of thought and action, holding that the best interests of the future are advanced when every man labours for truth in his own way, and holds sincerely by his individual convictions. Look where we may, to parties in the Church, to parties in the State, or any chance knot of a dozen men collected at a dinnerparty, the form of debate invariably shows this natural division of men's minds, serving its purpose for the thorough trial of new truth. No bold assertion is allowed to pass unquestioned. Whoever states a fact must also be prepared to prove it against ready opponents, who produce all possible grounds of doubt and forms of evidence against it. Thus men are trained in the right use of reason; their intellectual limbs gather strength by healthy exercise; and wholesome truths come out of the ordeal, as the pure grain winnowed from the chaff. Instead of wishing that all men were of our minds, we should account it one of the first blessings of life that there are men who don't agree with us. The currents of the air and sea are not more necessary and more surely a part of the wise ordinance of the Creator than those great currents of thought which, with all the storms bred of their conflict, maintain health in man's intellectual universe.

When the millions lie in darkness and are thought for by the few, they need the guidance of an absolute authority. As the light grows on them, each becomes more able to help himself. External aids and restrictions become gradually less and less necessary; exercise of authority falls within narrower limits, and exercise of individual discretion takes a wider range

This constant readjustment of the boundary-line between individual right and the restraint of law must needs advance with civilisation, as keen intellectual debate prepares the way for every change. In England such a process has gone on so actively and freely that our political institutions, which have grown and are growing with our growth, are strong also with all our strength.

In the time of Henry II. the contest between the king and Becket represented what was then the chief point to be settled in the argument as to the limit of authority. It was a question of supremacy between the two great forms of authority to which men were subjected. Was the Church, representing God on earth, to be, through its chief, the pope, a supreme arbiter in the affairs of men—a lord of lords and king of kings? Or was the king alone supreme in every temporal relation with his subjects? Becket devoutly battled for supreme rule of the Church. Henry maintained the independence of his crown. That battle won, the next part of our controversy on the limit of authority would concern the relations between king and people. When Henry's cause was stained with the crime of Becket's murder, the Church had an advantage of which it understood the value. All that was done to make the shrine of the martyred Becket a place of pilgrimage and to exalt the saint was exaltation of the name inseparable from the cause of an unlimited Church supremacy.

After his murder, in 1170, The Life of Thomas à Becket was written by William Fitzstephen, a Londoner, who had been a trusted clerk in the Archbishop's household, and was witness to his death. Fitzstephen's life of Becket includes an interesting account of London as it was in Henry II.'s time, with incidental evidence of the growing interest in miracle-plays. London, he says, instead of the shows of the ancient theatre, "has entertainments of a more devout kind, either representations of those miracles which were wrought by holy confessors, or those passions and sufferings in which the martyrs so rigidly displayed their fortitude." It may be observed that Fitzstephen's definition of these entertainments limits them to the miracleplay; there is no reference to any acting of a mystery. When, afterwards, both forms were common, no distinction of name was made between them in this country. All were called miracleplays; doubtless, because that name alone had become familiar during a long period, in which the only plays acted were

TO A.D. 1189]

NATIONAL LIFE. NIGEL WIREKER

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miracles. Perhaps a sense of reverence delayed the introduction of the mystery.

12. Outside England the literature of Europe was now taking forms more and more representative of the advance of thought. There was what may be called a Court literature, concerned only with the pleasures of the rich; and there was a National literature, through which men, thinking with or for the people, showed their sense of life and its duties. The famous beast epic of "Reynard the Fox" and Isegrim the Wolf, still vigorous and fresh, first came into literature as a Flemish poem of "Reinaert" in the year 1150, or towards the close of the reign of Stephen. During the reign of Henry II. it was popular abroad as a keen satire from the side of the people on the current misuse of authority. The essence of the work in its first form, and in all early adaptations of it to other countries, was a homely spirit of freedom. The reign of Henry II. was also the time when the Germans gathered fragments of romance into their great national epic of the Nibelungen. It was at the close of the same period that the Spaniards poured out their national spirit in the poem of the Cid. Crusades had brought men into contact with the bright imagination of the East. Romances, brisk with action, were recited or sung to the Norman lords; and southern poets were taught by the Arabs to rhyme tunefully on love. The oldest extant troubadour verse dates from a year after the accession of King Henry II.; and his were the times in which were born the Suabian Minnesänger Hartmann von Aue and Walther von der Vogelweide. Their master, Barbarossa, was then bringing Germans into Italy, and forced the states of the Lombard League into that patriotic contest which, in 1182, left them free republics, with a nominal allegiance to the empire. In Italy the conflict was begun that should stir presently a mighty soul to song.

13. At home, in good harmony with the spirit of Reinaert, or Reineke Fuchs, we have, among the books written in Henry II.'s reign, the "Brunellus" of Nigel Wireker. Nigel Wireker was precentor in the Benedictine monastery at Canterbury, friend to William de Longchamp, afterwards Bishop of Ely, to whom he dedicated a treatise On the Corruptions of the Church. Wireker's minor writings were attacks upon selfseeking and hypocrisy among those who made religion their profession; for the movement towards reformation in the Church was now begun. Wireker's chief work, Brunellus, or