v ili. Bede's Style xxxvi
XX XV l
H IS T O R IC A L IN T R O D U C T I O N
that God could and did work miracles through and on behalf of those who were very near and devoted to Him. Those who heard these stories were both delighted and edified. They learned from them that God was still ruling in spite of the many troubles that harassed the lives of ordinary men, and that from time to time He could still intervene on their behalf. Nowadays we may not regard the miracle stories in precisely the same light as did Bede and his contemporaries; but we ought to treat them with reverent sym pathy, for it was in such ways that they projected their own faith and hope upon the external world. Furthermore, even when the stories seem fantastic and incredible to the modern reader, there is often to be found in them a certain background of historical information which has its value; besides, many of these stories are delightful for their own sake as every reader of Bede's History knows.
In the Lives of the Abbots, which is mainly a portrait of Benedict Biscop, Bede is pure historian. He deals with the life of Benedict
Biscop just as a modern biographer would, bringing in much material about the lives of other abbots of the monastery at Wearmouth and Jarrow. However much he was tempted to add stories of miracles, and there was already a saga growing up about Ceolfrith, who was dearest of all the abbots to him, yet Bede does nothing else but recite sober history as any modern biographer would do. In the History, however, Bede is both historian and relater of saints' Lives. We must remember that the History was appealing to a much wider audience and so Bede did not refrain from telling the sagas of the saints wherever they seemed appro priate ; but in spite of all this his story is firmly based on historical materials, and when we read it in the light of contemporary literature we are not surprised that this miraculous element is present, for it is a true reflection of the mind of the people of his day; we are only surprised that there is not more of it. He was living in an age very different from our own in its attitude to the laws of nature. Yet compared with Gregory of Tours's History of the Franks, Bede seems to keep the miraculous element in check, possibly because he was modelling himself on Rufinus who also keeps the wonder element in the background. v ili. Bede's style Many scholars have praised Bede's Latin style for its straight forwardness and simplicity but it has more than that. Few writers,
H I S T O R I C A L I N T R O D U C T I O N
xxxvii before or since, have produced so many vivid incidents so dramati cally told, in one single work. Many of these, as we have seen, are now part and parcel of our literature; but there are a few which have not received the praise they deserve. One such is the healing of the dumb youth by St. John of Beverley, which is not without its touch of humour: others are the pair of stories of the two men who, each in his own way, discovered the virtues of the soil where
Oswald fell.1 The experiences of Dryhthelm in the other world must surely be one of the most striking examples of a literary genre which was very popular in the Middle Ages.2 Bede is in fact a master of dramatic effect and his incidents are built up with the skill of a practised writer. He was also familiar with the arts of the rhetoricians and had written a book on the subject himself.
He frequently makes use of figures of speech, epigrammatic con trasts, plays upon the meanings of words with implied secondary allusions, all of which are extremely difficult to reproduce in translation. To make Bede's History read in translation like any modern history book is not impossible, but it is only done at the cost of losing most of his overtones and producing a result which may be highly readable but is emphatically not Bede.
Bede's respect for Irish scholarship was high,3 but fortunately he never gave way to the popular Hisperica Fatnina type of Latin with its alliteration, periphrasis, and exotic vocabulary, consisting of a strange combination of new formations based on other Latin or Greek or Hebrew words and rare expressions borrowed from the glosses of grammarians. His contemporary Aldhelm used this form of writing largely and Bede refers to him politely as being
'sermone nitidus' ;4 if Bede had followed in his footsteps he could certainly have been more 'nitidus' than Aldhelm, but the result would have been fatal and the History would have been something very different from what we know today. It is true that there are obscurities in the course of the work, but these are found mostly either in the documents which he inserts verbatim into his text or in passages where he borrows phrases from other sources. The occasional difficulties which arise elsewhere are generally due to a faulty text or to his habit of bringing in remote scriptural references which were familiar enough in his day but are less
1 iii. 9, io; V. 2.
2 V. i2 and note; also B LT W , pp. 214-15.
4 V. 18.
3 iii. 27.
xxxviii
H I S T O R I C A L I N T R O D U C T I O N
familiar nowadays; such for instance is his description of Caedmon ruminating over the scripture stories 'like a clean beast' ;1 but taken as a whole Bede's Latin was worthy of the story he had to tell and worthy of the simple, pious, learned scholar who wrote it; and that is perhaps the highest praise we can give it.
B. C.
1 iv. 24.