"Yet during the silent centuries before the book was printed his was the only voice that was to be heard in England. Save for Anon singing his song at the back door the English might be a dumb race, a race of merchants, soldiers, priests; who left behind them stone houses, cultivated fields and great churches, but no words. It was Anon who gave voice to the old stories, who incited the peasants when he came to the back door to put off their working clothes and deck themselves in green. He it was who found words for them to sing" (page 583).
Virginia Woolf is on a roll.
"It was the printing press that finally was to kill Anon. But it was the press also that preserved him. When in 1477 Caxton printed the twenty one books of the Morte DArthur he fixed the voice of Anon for ever. There we tap the reservoir of common belief that lay deep sunk in the minds of peasants and nobles. There in Malory's pages we hear the voice of Anon murmuring still" (page 583).
In another passage Virginia Woolf says that we can still return to the anonymous world beneath our consciousness (page 584). But this anonymous world beneath our ego-consciousness does not sound like our personal unconscious, but like the collective unconscious that C. G. Jung claims is part of the human psyche.
"Caxton's printing press foretold the end of that anonymous world; It is now written down; fixed; nothing will be added, even if the legend still murmurs on" (page 584).
"The printing press brought the past into existence. It brought into existence the man who is conscious of the past the man who sees his time, against a back ground; the man who first sees himself and shows himself to us. The first blow has been aimed at Anon when the author's name is attached to the book. The individual emerges" (pages 584-585).
"For the English past as Harrison saw it, served only to show up the material change -- the change that had come over houses, furniture clothing. There is not English literature to show up the change in the mind" (page 585).
"In order to have ancestors by way of the mind he must cross the channel his ancestors by way of the mind are the Greeks and Romans" (page 585).
Of course the Greeks and Romans were taught and studied at Cambridge University and Oxford University.
"He turns away from the present. He does not hear Anon singing at the back door; he ignores the actors who were acting their crude dramas in the market place" (page 585).
"Yet in spite of the printed book, the common people were still at their lewd practices" (page 585).
"The Elizabethans are silent. There is no little language nothing brief, intimate, colloquial. When they write the rhythm of the bible is in their ears. It makes their speech unfamiliar. It is only expressive of certain emotions" (page 588).
"Then again we cannot hear the rough English voice that they heard at the back door, the voice of the mummer and the minstrel" (page 588).
"The writer, who is distinct from the minstrel, whose words are printed in a book with his name to it, must be a poet. For when familiar letters are written in Biblical prose, there is a limit to what can be put into words" (pages 588-589).
"But though at the beginning of the sixteenth century the printing press has given the poet a name, he is still unspecialized. He is not wholly writer, wholly musician or wholly painter. It seems possible that the great English art may be the art of words" (page 589).
The then-emerging sixteenth-century English poet's "ear is stimulated by the sound of words spoken aloud. He must make words sonorous, rhythm obvious. Since they are to be read out in company" (page 589).
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