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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Celtic Literature, by Matthew Arnold
+(#2 in our series by Matthew Arnold)
+
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+Title: Celtic Literature
+
+Author: Matthew Arnold
+
+Release Date: February, 2004  [EBook #5159]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on May 20, 2002]
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+Edition: 10
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+Language: English
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+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, CELTIC LITERATURE ***
+
+
+
+
+Transcribed from the 1891 Smith, Elder and Co. edition by David
+Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
+
+
+
+
+CELTIC LITERATURE
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+
+
+The following remarks on the study of Celtic Literature formed the
+substance of four lectures given by me in the chair of poetry at
+Oxford.  They were first published in the Cornhill Magazine, and are
+now reprinted from thence.  Again and again, in the course of them, I
+have marked the very humble scope intended; which is, not to treat
+any special branch of scientific Celtic studies (a task for which I
+am quite incompetent), but to point out the many directions in which
+the results of those studies offer matter of general interest, and to
+insist on the benefit we may all derive from knowing the Celt and
+things Celtic more thoroughly.  It was impossible, however, to avoid
+touching on certain points of ethnology and philology, which can be
+securely handled only by those who have made these sciences the
+object of special study.  Here the mere literary critic must owe his
+whole safety to his tact in choosing authorities to follow, and
+whatever he advances must be understood as advanced with a sense of
+the insecurity which, after all, attaches to such a mode of
+proceeding, and as put forward provisionally, by way of hypothesis
+rather than of confident assertion.
+
+To mark clearly to the reader both this provisional character of much
+which I advance, and my own sense of it, I have inserted, as a check
+upon some of the positions adopted in the text, notes and comments
+with which Lord Strangford has kindly furnished me.  Lord Strangford
+is hardly less distinguished for knowing ethnology and languages so
+scientifically than for knowing so much of them; and his interest,
+even from the vantage-ground of his scientific knowledge, and after
+making all due reserves on points of scientific detail, in my
+treatment,--with merely the resources and point of view of a literary
+critic at my command,--of such a subject as the study of Celtic
+Literature, is the most encouraging assurance I could have received
+that my attempt is not altogether a vain one.
+
+Both Lord Strangford and others whose opinion I respect have said
+that I am unjust in calling Mr. Nash, the acute and learned author of
+Taliesin, or the Bards and Druids of Britain, a 'Celt-hater.'  'He is
+a denouncer,' says Lord Strangford in a note on this expression, 'of
+Celtic extravagance, that is all; he is an anti-Philocelt, a very
+different thing from an anti-Celt, and quite indispensable in
+scientific inquiry.  As Philoceltism has hitherto,--hitherto,
+remember,--meant nothing but uncritical acceptance and irrational
+admiration of the beloved object's sayings and doings, without
+reference to truth one way or the other, it is surely in the interest
+of science to support him in the main.  In tracing the workings of
+old Celtic leaven in poems which embody the Celtic soul of all time
+in a mediaeval form, I do not see that you come into any necessary
+opposition with him, for your concern is with the spirit, his with
+the substance only.'  I entirely agree with almost all which Lord
+Strangford here urges, and indeed, so sincere is my respect for Mr.
+Nash's critical discernment and learning, and so unhesitating my
+recognition of the usefulness, in many respects, of the work of
+demolition performed by him, that in originally designating him as a
+Celt-hater, I hastened to add, as the reader will see by referring to
+the passage, {0a} words of explanation and apology for so calling
+him.  But I thought then, and I think still, that Mr. Nash, in
+pursuing his work of demolition, too much puts out of sight the
+positive and constructive performance for which this work of
+demolition is to clear the ground.  I thought then, and I think
+still, that in this Celtic controversy, as in other controversies, it
+is most desirable both to believe and to profess that the work of
+construction is the fruitful and important work, and that we are
+demolishing only to prepare for it.  Mr. Nash's scepticism seems to
+me,--in the aspect in which his work, on the whole, shows it,--too
+absolute, too stationary, too much without a future; and this tends
+to make it, for the non-Celtic part of his readers, less fruitful
+than it otherwise would be, and for his Celtic readers, harsh and
+repellent.  I have therefore suffered my remarks on Mr. Nash still to
+stand, though with a little modification; but I hope he will read
+them by the light of these explanations, and that he will believe my
+sense of esteem for his work to be a thousand times stronger than my
+sense of difference from it.
+
+To lead towards solid ground, where the Celt may with legitimate
+satisfaction point to traces of the gifts and workings of his race,
+and where the Englishman may find himself induced to sympathise with
+that satisfaction and to feel an interest in it, is the design of all
+the considerations urged in the following essay.  Kindly taking the
+will for the deed, a Welshman and an old acquaintance of mine, Mr.
+Hugh Owen, received my remarks with so much cordiality, that he asked
+me to come to the Eisteddfod last summer at Chester, and there to
+read a paper on some topic of Celtic literature or antiquities.  In
+answer to this flattering proposal of Mr. Owen's, I wrote him a
+letter which appeared at the time in several newspapers, and of which
+the following extract preserves all that is of any importance
+
+'My knowledge of Welsh matters is so utterly insignificant that it
+would be impertinence in me, under any circumstances, to talk about
+those matters to an assemblage of persons, many of whom have passed
+their lives in studying them.
+
+'Your gathering acquires more interest every year.  Let me venture to
+say that you have to avoid two dangers in order to work all the good
+which your friends could desire.  You have to avoid the danger of
+giving offence to practical men by retarding the spread of the
+English language in the principality.  I believe that to preserve and
+honour the Welsh language and literature is quite compatible with not
+thwarting or delaying for a single hour the introduction, so
+undeniably useful, of a knowledge of English among all classes in
+Wales.  You have to avoid, again, the danger of alienating men of
+science by a blind partial, and uncritical treatment of your national
+antiquities.  Mr. Stephens's excellent book, The Literature of the
+Cymry, shows how perfectly Welshmen can avoid this danger if they
+will.
+
+'When I see the enthusiasm these Eisteddfods can awaken in your whole
+people, and then think of the tastes, the literature, the amusements,
+of our own lower and middle class, I am filled with admiration for
+you.  It is a consoling thought, and one which history allows us to
+entertain, that nations disinherited of political success may yet
+leave their mark on the world's progress, and contribute powerfully
+to the civilisation of mankind.  We in England have come to that
+point when the continued advance and greatness of our nation is
+threatened by one cause, and one cause above all.  Far more than by
+the helplessness of an aristocracy whose day is fast coming to an
+end, far more than by the rawness of a lower class whose day is only
+just beginning, we are emperilled by what I call the "Philistinism"
+of our middle class.  On the side of beauty and taste, vulgarity; on
+the side of morals and feeling, coarseness; on the side of mind and
+spirit, unintelligence,--this is Philistinism.  Now, then, is the
+moment for the greater delicacy and spirituality of the Celtic
+peoples who are blended with us, if it be but wisely directed, to
+make itself prized and honoured.  In a certain measure the children
+of Taliesin and Ossian have now an opportunity for renewing the
+famous feat of the Greeks, and conquering their conquerors.  No
+service England can render the Celts by giving you a share in her
+many good qualities, can surpass that which the Celts can at this
+moment render England, by communicating to us some of theirs.'
+
+Now certainly, in that letter, written to a Welshman and on the
+occasion of a Welsh festival, I enlarged on the merits of the Celtic
+spirit and of its works, rather than on their demerits.  It would
+have been offensive and inhuman to do otherwise.  When an
+acquaintance asks you to write his father's epitaph, you do not
+generally seize that opportunity for saying that his father was blind
+of one eye, and had an unfortunate habit of not paying his
+tradesmen's bills.  But the weak side of Celtism and of its Celtic
+glorifiers, the danger against which they have to guard, is clearly
+indicated in that letter; and in the remarks reprinted in this
+volume,--remarks which were the original cause of Mr. Owen's writing
+to me, and must have been fully present to his mind when he read my
+letter,--the shortcomings both of the Celtic race, and of the Celtic
+students of its literature and antiquities, are unreservedly marked,
+and, so far as is necessary, blamed. {0b}  It was, indeed, not my
+purpose to make blame the chief part of what I said; for the Celts,
+like other people, are to be meliorated rather by developing their
+gifts than by chastising their defects.  The wise man, says Spinoza
+admirably, 'de humana impotentia non nisi parce loqui curabit, at
+largiter de humana virtute seupotentia.'  But so far as condemnation
+of Celtic failure was needful towards preparing the way for the
+growth of Celtic virtue, I used condemnation.
+
+The Times, however, prefers a shorter and sharper method of dealing
+with the Celts, and in a couple of leading articles, having the
+Chester Eisteddfod and my letter to Mr. Hugh Owen for their text, it
+developed with great frankness, and in its usual forcible style, its
+own views for the amelioration of Wales and its people.  Cease to do
+evil, learn to do good, was the upshot of its exhortations to the
+Welsh; by evil, the Times understanding all things Celtic, and by
+good, all things English.  'The Welsh language is the curse of Wales.
+Its prevalence, and the ignorance of English have excluded, and even
+now exclude the Welsh people from the civilisation of their English
+neighbours.  An Eisteddfod is one of the most mischievous and selfish
+pieces of sentimentalism which could possibly be perpetrated.  It is
+simply a foolish interference with the natural progress of
+civilisation and prosperity.  If it is desirable that the Welsh
+should talk English, it is monstrous folly to encourage them in a
+loving fondness for their old language.  Not only the energy and
+power, but the intelligence and music of Europe have come mainly from
+Teutonic sources, and this glorification of everything Celtic, if it
+were not pedantry, would be sheer ignorance.  The sooner all Welsh
+specialities disappear from the face of the earth the better.'
+
+And I need hardly say, that I myself, as so often happens to me at
+the hands of my own countrymen, was cruelly judged by the Times, and
+most severely treated.  What I said to Mr. Owen about the spread of
+the English language in Wales being quite compatible with preserving
+and honouring the Welsh language and literature, was tersely set down
+as 'arrant nonsense,' and I was characterised as 'a sentimentalist
+who talks nonsense about the children of Taliesin and Ossian, and
+whose dainty taste requires something more flimsy than the strong
+sense and sturdy morality of his fellow Englishmen.'
+
+As I said before, I am unhappily inured to having these harsh
+interpretations put by my fellow Englishmen upon what I write, and I
+no longer cry out about it.  And then, too, I have made a study of
+the Corinthian or leading article style, and know its exigencies, and
+that they are no more to be quarrelled with than the law of
+gravitation.  So, for my part, when I read these asperities of the
+Times, my mind did not dwell very much on my own concern in them; but
+what I said to myself, as I put the newspaper down, was this:
+'Behold England's difficulty in governing Ireland!'
+
+I pass by the dauntless assumption that the agricultural peasant whom
+we in England, without Eisteddfods, succeed in developing, is so much
+finer a product of civilisation than the Welsh peasant, retarded by
+these 'pieces of sentimentalism.'  I will be content to suppose that
+our 'strong sense and sturdy morality' are as admirable and as
+universal as the Times pleases.  But even supposing this, I will ask
+did any one ever hear of strong sense and sturdy morality being
+thrust down other people's throats in this fashion?  Might not these
+divine English gifts, and the English language in which they are
+preached, have a better chance of making their way among the poor
+Celtic heathen, if the English apostle delivered his message a little
+more agreeably?  There is nothing like love and admiration for
+bringing people to a likeness with what they love and admire; but the
+Englishman seems never to dream of employing these influences upon a
+race he wants to fuse with himself.  He employs simply material
+interests for his work of fusion; and, beyond these, nothing except
+scorn and rebuke.  Accordingly there is no vital union between him
+and the races he has annexed; and while France can truly boast of her
+'magnificent unity,' a unity of spirit no less than of name between
+all the people who compose her, in England the Englishman proper is
+in union of spirit with no one except other Englishmen proper like
+himself.  His Welsh and Irish fellow-citizens are hardly more
+amalgamated with him now than they were when Wales and Ireland were
+first conquered, and the true unity of even these small islands has
+yet to he achieved.  When these papers of mine on the Celtic genius
+and literature first appeared in the Cornhill Magazine, they brought
+me, as was natural, many communications from Welshmen and Irishmen
+having an interest in the subject; and one could not but be painfully
+struck, in reading these communications, to see how profound a
+feeling of aversion and severance from the English they in general
+manifested.  Who can be surprised at it, when he observes the strain
+of the Times in the articles just quoted, and remembers that this is
+the characteristic strain of the Englishman in commenting on
+whatsoever is not himself?  And then, with our boundless faith in
+machinery, we English expect the Welshman as a matter of course to
+grow attached to us, because we invite him to do business with us,
+and let him hold any number of public meetings and publish all the
+newspapers he likes!  When shall we learn, that what attaches people
+to us is the spirit we are of, and not the machinery we employ?
+
+Last year there was a project of holding a Breton Eisteddfod at
+Quimper in Brittany, and the French Home Secretary, whether wishing
+to protect the magnificent unity of France from inroads of Bretonism,
+or fearing lest the design should be used in furtherance of
+Legitimist intrigues, or from whatever motive, issued an order which
+prohibited the meeting.  If Mr. Walpole had issued an order
+prohibiting the Chester Eisteddfod, all the Englishmen from Cornwall
+to John o' Groat's House would have rushed to the rescue; and our
+strong sense and sturdy morality would never have stopped gnashing
+their teeth and rending their garments till the prohibition was
+rescinded.  What a pity our strong sense and sturdy morality fail to
+perceive that words like those of the Times create a far keener sense
+of estrangement and dislike than acts like those of the French
+Minister!  Acts like those of the French Minister are attributed to
+reasons of State, and the Government is held blameable for them, not
+the French people.  Articles like those of the Times are attributed
+to the want of sympathy and of sweetness of disposition in the
+English nature, and the whole English people gets the blame of them.
+And deservedly; for from some such ground of want of sympathy and
+sweetness in the English nature, do articles like those of the Times
+come, and to some such ground do they make appeal.  The sympathetic
+and social virtues of the French nature, on the other hand, actually
+repair the breaches made by oppressive deeds of the Government, and
+create, among populations joined with France as the Welsh and Irish
+are joined with England, a sense of liking and attachment towards the
+French people.  The French Government may discourage the German
+language in Alsace and prohibit Eisteddfods in Brittany; but the
+Journal des Debats never treats German music and poetry as
+mischievous lumber, nor tells the Bretons that the sooner all Breton
+specialities disappear from the face of the earth the better.
+Accordingly, the Bretons and Alsatians have come to feel themselves a
+part of France, and to feel pride in bearing the French name; while
+the Welsh and Irish obstinately refuse to amalgamate with us, and
+will not admire the Englishman as he admires himself, however much
+the Times may scold them and rate them, and assure them there is
+nobody on earth so admirable.
+
+And at what a moment does it assure them of this, good heavens!  At a
+moment when the ice is breaking up in England, and we are all
+beginning at last to see how much real confusion and insufficiency it
+covered; when, whatever may be the merits,--and they are great,--of
+the Englishman and of his strong sense and sturdy morality, it is
+growing more and more evident that, if he is to endure and advance,
+he must transform himself, must add something to his strong sense and
+sturdy morality, or at least must give to these excellent gifts of
+his a new development.  My friend Mr. Goldwin Smith says, in his
+eloquent way, that England is the favourite of Heaven.  Far be it
+from me to say that England is not the favourite of Heaven; but at
+this moment she reminds me more of what the prophet Isaiah calls, 'a
+bull in a net.'  She has satisfied herself in all departments with
+clap-trap and routine so long, and she is now so astounded at finding
+they will not serve her turn any longer!  And this is the moment,
+when Englishism pure and simple, which with all its fine qualities
+managed always to make itself singularly unattractive, is losing that
+imperturbable faith in its untransformed self which at any rate made
+it imposing,--this is the moment when our great organ tells the Celts
+that everything of theirs not English is 'simply a foolish
+interference with the natural progress of civilisation and
+prosperity;' and poor Talhaiarn, venturing to remonstrate, is
+commanded 'to drop his outlandish title, and to refuse even to talk
+Welsh in Wales!'
+
+But let us leave the dead to bury their dead, and let us who are
+alive go on unto perfection.  Let the Celtic members of this empire
+consider that they too have to transform themselves; and though the
+summons to transform themselves he often conveyed harshly and
+brutally, and with the cry to root up their wheat as well as their
+tares, yet that is no reason why the summons should not be followed
+so far as their tares are concerned.  Let them consider that they are
+inextricably bound up with us, and that, if the suggestions in the
+following pages have any truth, we English, alien and uncongenial to
+our Celtic partners as we may have hitherto shown ourselves, have
+notwithstanding, beyond perhaps any other nation, a thousand latent
+springs of possible sympathy with them.  Let them consider that new
+ideas and forces are stirring in England, that day by day these new
+ideas and forces gain in power, and that almost every one of them is
+the friend of the Celt and not his enemy.  And, whether our Celtic
+partners will consider this or no, at any rate let us ourselves, all
+of us who are proud of being the ministers of these new ideas, work
+incessantly to procure for them a wider and more fruitful
+application; and to remove the main ground of the Celt's alienation
+from the Englishman, by substituting, in place of that type of
+Englishman with whom alone the Celt has too long been familiar, a new
+type, more intelligent, more gracious, and more humane.
+
+
+
+THE STUDY OF CELTIC LITERATURE
+
+
+
+'They went forth to the war, but they always fell.'
+OSSIAN
+
+Some time ago I spent some weeks at Llandudno, on the Welsh coast.
+The best lodging-houses at Llandudno look eastward, towards
+Liverpool; and from that Saxon hive swarms are incessantly issuing,
+crossing the bay, and taking possession of the beach and the lodging-
+houses.  Guarded by the Great and Little Orme's Head, and alive with
+the Saxon invaders from Liverpool, the eastern bay is an attractive
+point of interest, and many visitors to Llandudno never contemplate
+anything else.  But, putting aside the charm of the Liverpool
+steamboats, perhaps the view, on this side, a little dissatisfies one
+after a while; the horizon wants mystery, the sea wants beauty, the
+coast wants verdure, and has a too bare austereness and aridity.  At
+last one turns round and looks westward.  Everything is changed.
+Over the mouth of the Conway and its sands is the eternal softness
+and mild light of the west; the low line of the mystic Anglesey, and
+the precipitous Penmaenmawr, and the great group of Carnedd Llewelyn
+and Carnedd David and their brethren fading away, hill behind hill,
+in an aerial haze, make the horizon; between the foot of Penmaenmawr
+and the bending coast of Anglesey, the sea, a silver stream,
+disappears one knows not whither.  On this side, Wales,--Wales, where
+the past still lives, where every place has its tradition, every name
+its poetry, and where the people, the genuine people, still knows
+this past, this tradition, this poetry, and lives with it, and clings
+to it; while, alas, the prosperous Saxon on the other side, the
+invader from Liverpool and Birkenhead, has long ago forgotten his.
+And the promontory where Llandudno stands is the very centre of this
+tradition; it is Creuddyn, THE BLOODY CITY, where every stone has its
+story; there, opposite its decaying rival, Conway Castle, is Diganwy,
+not decaying but long since utterly decayed, some crumbling
+foundations on a crag top and nothing more; Diganwy, where Mael-gwyn
+shut up Elphin, and where Taliesin came to free him.  Below, in a
+fold of the hill, is Llan-rhos, the church of the marsh, where the
+same Mael-gwyn, a British prince of real history, a bold and
+licentious chief, the original, it is said, of Arthur's Lancelot,
+shut himself up in the church to avoid the Yellow Plague, and peeped
+out through a hole in the door, and saw the monster and died.  Behind
+among the woods, is Gloddaeth, THE PLACE OF FEASTING, where the bards
+were entertained; and farther away, up the valley of the Conway
+towards Llanrwst, is the Lake of Ceirio-nydd and Taliesin's grave.
+Or, again, looking seawards and Anglesey-wards you have Pen-mon,
+Seiriol's isle and priory, where Mael-gwyn lies buried; you have the
+SANDS OF LAMENTATION and Llys Helig, HEILIG'S MANSION, a mansion
+under the waves, a sea-buried palace and realm.  Hac ibat Simois; hic
+est Sigeia tellus.
+
+As I walked up and down, looking at the waves as they washed this
+Sigeian land which has never had its Homer, and listening with
+curiosity to the strange, unfamiliar speech of its old possessors'
+obscure descendants,--bathing people, vegetable-sellers, and donkey-
+boys, who were all about me, suddenly I heard, through the stream of
+unknown Welsh, words, not English, indeed, but still familiar.  They
+came from a French nursery-maid, with some children.  Profoundly
+ignorant of her relationship, this Gaulish Celt moved among her
+British cousins, speaking her polite neo-Latin tongue, and full of
+compassionate contempt, probably, for the Welsh barbarians and their
+jargon.  What a revolution was here!  How had the star of this
+daughter of Gomer waxed, while the star of these Cymry, his sons, had
+waned!  What a difference of fortune in the two, since the days when,
+speaking the same language, they left their common dwelling-place in
+the heart of Asia; since the Cimmerians of the Euxine came in upon
+their western kinsmen, the sons of the giant Galates; since the
+sisters, Gaul and Britain, cut the mistletoe in their forests, and
+saw the coming of Caesar!  Blanc, rouge, rocher champ, eglise,
+seigneur,--these words, by which the Gallo-Roman Celt now names
+white, and red, and rock, and field, and church, and lord, are no
+part of the speech of his true ancestors, they are words he has
+learnt; but since he learned them they have had a worldwide success,
+and we all teach them to our children, and armies speaking them have
+domineered in every city of that Germany by which the British Celt
+was broken, and in the train of these armies, Saxon auxiliaries, a
+humbled contingent, have been fain to follow; the poor Welshman still
+says, in the genuine tongue of his ancestors, {4} gwyn, goch, craig,
+maes, llan, arglwydd; but his land is a province, and his history
+petty, and his Saxon subduers scout his speech as an obstacle to
+civilisation; and the echo of all its kindred in other lands is
+growing every day fainter and more feeble; gone in Cornwall, going in
+Brittany and the Scotch Highlands, going, too, in Ireland; and there,
+above all, the badge of the beaten race, the property of the
+vanquished.
+
+But the Celtic genius was just then preparing, in Llandudno, to have
+its hour of revival.  Workmen were busy in putting up a large tent-
+like wooden building, which attracted the eye of every newcomer, and
+which my little boys believed (their wish, no doubt, being father to
+their belief,) to be a circus.  It turned out, however, to be no
+circus for Castor and Pollux, but a temple for Apollo and the Muses.
+It was the place where the Eisteddfod, or Bardic Congress of Wales,
+was about to be held; a meeting which has for its object (I quote the
+words of its promoters) 'the diffusion of useful knowledge, the
+eliciting of native talent, and the cherishing of love of home and
+honourable fame by the cultivation of poetry, music, and art.'  My
+little boys were disappointed; but I, whose circus days are over, I,
+who have a professional interest in poetry, and who, also, hating all
+one-sidedness and oppression, wish nothing better than that the
+Celtic genius should be able to show itself to the world and to make
+its voice heard, was delighted.  I took my ticket, and waited
+impatiently for the day of opening.  The day came, an unfortunate
+one; storms of wind, clouds of dust, an angry, dirty sea.  The Saxons
+who arrived by the Liverpool steamers looked miserable; even the
+Welsh who arrived by land,--whether they were discomposed by the bad
+morning, or by the monstrous and crushing tax which the London and
+North-Western Railway Company levies on all whom it transports across
+those four miles of marshy peninsula between Conway and Llandudno,--
+did not look happy.  First we went to the Gorsedd, or preliminary
+congress for conferring the degree of bard.  The Gorsedd was held in
+the open air, at the windy corner of a street, and the morning was
+not favourable to open-air solemnities.  The Welsh, too, share, it
+seems to me, with their Saxon invaders, an inaptitude for show and
+spectacle.  Show and spectacle are better managed by the Latin race
+and those whom it has moulded; the Welsh, like us, are a little
+awkward and resourceless in the organisation of a festival.  The
+presiding genius of the mystic circle, in our hideous nineteenth-
+century costume, relieved only by a green scarf, the wind drowning
+his voice and the dust powdering his whiskers, looked thoroughly
+wretched; so did the aspirants for bardic honours; and I believe,
+after about an hour of it, we all of us, as we stood shivering round
+the sacred stones, began half to wish for the Druid's sacrificial
+knife to end our sufferings.  But the Druid's knife is gone from his
+hands; so we sought the shelter of the Eisteddfod building.
+
+The sight inside was not lively.  The president and his supporters
+mustered strong on the platform.  On the floor the one or two front
+benches were pretty well filled, but their occupants were for the
+most part Saxons, who came there from curiosity, not from enthusiasm;
+and all the middle and back benches, where should have been the true
+enthusiasts,--the Welsh people, were nearly empty.  The president, I
+am sure, showed a national spirit which was admirable.  He addressed
+us Saxons in our own language, and called us 'the English branch of
+the descendants of the ancient Britons.'  We received the compliment
+with the impassive dulness which is the characteristic of our nature;
+and the lively Celtic nature, which should have made up for the
+dulness of ours, was absent.  A lady who sat by me, and who was the
+wife, I found, of a distinguished bard on the platform, told me, with
+emotion in her look and voice, how dear were these solemnities to the
+heart of her people, how deep was the interest which is aroused by
+them.  I believe her, but still the whole performance, on that
+particular morning, was incurably lifeless.  The recitation of the
+prize compositions began:  pieces of verse and prose in the Welsh
+language, an essay on punctuality being, if I remember right, one of
+them; a poem on the march of Havelock, another.  This went on for
+some time.  Then Dr. Vaughan,--the well-known Nonconformist minister,
+a Welshman, and a good patriot,--addressed us in English.  His speech
+was a powerful one, and he succeeded, I confess, in sending a faint
+thrill through our front benches; but it was the old familiar thrill
+which we have all of us felt a thousand times in Saxon chapels and
+meeting-halls, and had nothing bardic about it.  I stepped out, and
+in the street I came across an acquaintance fresh from London and the
+parliamentary session.  In a moment the spell of the Celtic genius
+was forgotten, the Philistinism of our Saxon nature made itself felt;
+and my friend and I walked up and down by the roaring waves, talking
+not of ovates and bards, and triads and englyns, but of the sewage
+question, and the glories of our local self-government, and the
+mysterious perfections of the Metropolitan Board of Works.
+
+I believe it is admitted, even by the admirers of Eisteddfods in
+general, that this particular Eisteddfod was not a success.
+Llandudno, it is said, was not the right place for it.  Held in
+Conway Castle, as a few years ago it was, and its spectators,--an
+enthusiastic multitude,--filling the grand old ruin, I can imagine it
+a most impressive and interesting sight, even to a stranger labouring
+under the terrible disadvantage of being ignorant of the Welsh
+language.  But even seen as I saw it at Llandudno, it had the power
+to set one thinking.  An Eisteddfod is, no doubt, a kind of Olympic
+meeting; and that the common people of Wales should care for such a
+thing, shows something Greek in them, something spiritual, something
+humane, something (I am afraid one must add) which in the English
+common people is not to be found.  This line of reflection has been
+followed by the accomplished Bishop of St. David's, and by the
+Saturday Review, it is just, it is fruitful, and those who pursued it
+merit our best thanks.  But, from peculiar circumstances, the
+Llandudno meeting was, as I have said, such as not at all to suggest
+ideas of Olympia, and of a multitude touched by the divine flame, and
+hanging on the lips of Pindar.  It rather suggested the triumph of
+the prosaic, practical Saxon, and the approaching extinction of an
+enthusiasm which he derides as factitious, a literature which he
+disdains as trash, a language which he detests as a nuisance.
+
+I must say I quite share the opinion of my brother Saxons as to the
+practical inconvenience of perpetuating the speaking of Welsh.  It
+may cause a moment's distress to one's imagination when one hears
+that the last Cornish peasant who spoke the old tongue of Cornwall is
+dead; but, no doubt, Cornwall is the better for adopting English, for
+becoming more thoroughly one with the rest of the country.  The
+fusion of all the inhabitants of these islands into one homogeneous,
+English-speaking whole, the breaking down of barriers between us, the
+swallowing up of separate provincial nationalities, is a consummation
+to which the natural course of things irresistibly tends; it is a
+necessity of what is called modern civilisation, and modern
+civilisation is a real, legitimate force; the change must come, and
+its accomplishment is a mere affair of time.  The sooner the Welsh
+language disappears as an instrument of the practical, political,
+social life of Wales, the better; the better for England, the better
+for Wales itself.  Traders and tourists do excellent service by
+pushing the English wedge farther and farther into the heart of the
+principality; Ministers of Education, by hammering it harder and
+harder into the elementary schools.  Nor, perhaps, can one have much
+sympathy with the literary cultivation of Welsh as an instrument of
+living literature; and in this respect Eisteddfods encourage, I
+think, a fantastic and mischief-working delusion.
+
+For all serious purposes in modern literature (and trifling purposes
+in it who would care to encourage?) the language of a Welshman is and
+must be English; if an Eisteddfod author has anything to say about
+punctuality or about the march of Havelock, he had much better say it
+in English; or rather, perhaps, what he has to say on these subjects
+may as well be said in Welsh, but the moment he has anything of real
+importance to say, anything the world will the least care to hear, he
+must speak English.  Dilettanteism might possibly do much harm here,
+might mislead and waste and bring to nought a genuine talent.  For
+all modern purposes, I repeat, let us all as soon as possible be one
+people; let the Welshman speak English, and, if he is an author, let
+him write English.
+
+So far, I go along with the stream of my brother Saxons; but here, I
+imagine, I part company with them.  They will have nothing to do with
+the Welsh language and literature on any terms; they would gladly
+make a clean sweep of it from the face of the earth.  I, on certain
+terms, wish to make a great deal more of it than is made now; and I
+regard the Welsh literature,--or rather, dropping the distinction
+between Welsh and Irish, Gaels and Cymris, let me say Celtic
+literature,--as an object of very great interest.  My brother Saxons
+have, as is well known, a terrible way with them of wanting to
+improve everything but themselves off the face of the earth; I have
+no such passion for finding nothing but myself everywhere; I like
+variety to exist and to show itself to me, and I would not for the
+world have the lineaments of the Celtic genius lost.  But I know my
+brother Saxons, I know their strength, and I know that the Celtic
+genius will make nothing of trying to set up barriers against them in
+the world of fact and brute force, of trying to hold its own against
+them as a political and social counter-power, as the soul of a
+hostile nationality.  To me there is something mournful (and at this
+moment, when one sees what is going on in Ireland, how well may one
+say so!) in hearing a Welshman or an Irishman make pretensions,--
+natural pretensions, I admit, but how hopelessly vain!--to such a
+rival self-establishment; there is something mournful in hearing an
+Englishman scout them.  Strength! alas, it is not strength, strength
+in the material world, which is wanting to us Saxons; we have plenty
+of strength for swallowing up and absorbing as much as we choose;
+there is nothing to hinder us from effacing the last poor material
+remains of that Celtic power which once was everywhere, but has long
+since, in the race of civilisation, fallen out of sight.  We may
+threaten them with extinction if we will, and may almost say in so
+threatening them, like Caesar in threatening with death the tribune
+Metellus who closed the treasury doors against him:  'And when I
+threaten this, young man, to threaten it is more trouble to me than
+to do it.'  It is not in the outward and visible world of material
+life, that the Celtic genius of Wales or Ireland can at this day hope
+to count for much; it is in the inward world of thought and science.
+What it HAS been, what it HAS done, let it ask us to attend to that,
+as a matter of science and history; not to what it will be or will
+do, as a matter of modern politics.  It cannot count appreciably now
+as a material power; but, perhaps, if it can get itself thoroughly
+known as an object of science, it may count for a good deal,--far
+more than we Saxons, most of us, imagine,--as a spiritual power.
+
+The bent of our time is towards science, towards knowing things as
+they are; so the Celt's claims towards having his genius and its
+works fairly treated, as objects of scientific investigation, the
+Saxon can hardly reject, when these claims are urged simply on their
+own merits, and are not mixed up with extraneous pretensions which
+jeopardise them.  What the French call the science des origines, the
+science of origins,--a science which is at the bottom of all real
+knowledge of the actual world, and which is every day growing in
+interest and importance--is very incomplete without a thorough
+critical account of the Celts, and their genius, language, and
+literature.  This science has still great progress to make, but its
+progress, made even within the recollection of those of us who are in
+middle life, has already affected our common notions about the Celtic
+race; and this change, too, shows how science, the knowing things as
+they are, may even have salutary practical consequences.  I remember,
+when I was young, I was taught to think of Celt as separated by an
+impassable gulf from Teuton; {14} my father, in particular, was never
+weary of contrasting them; he insisted much oftener on the separation
+between us and them than on the separation between us and any other
+race in the world; in the same way Lord Lyndhurst, in words long
+famous, called the Irish 'aliens in speech, in religion, in blood.'
+This naturally created a profound sense of estrangement; it doubled
+the estrangement which political and religious differences already
+made between us and the Irish:  it seemed to make this estrangement
+immense, incurable, fatal.  It begot a strange reluctance, as any one
+may see by reading the preface to the great text-book for Welsh
+poetry, the Myvyrian Archaeology, published at the beginning of this
+century, to further,--nay, allow,--even among quiet, peaceable people
+like the Welsh, the publication of the documents of their ancient
+literature, the monuments of the Cymric genius; such was the sense of
+repulsion, the sense of incompatibilty, of radical antagonism, making
+it seem dangerous to us to let such opposites to ourselves have
+speech and utterance.  Certainly the Jew,--the Jew of ancient times,
+at least,--then seemed a thousand degrees nearer than the Celt to us.
+Puritanism had so assimilated Bible ideas and phraseology; names like
+Ebenezer, and notions like that of hewing Agag in pieces, came so
+natural to us, that the sense of affinity between the Teutonic and
+the Hebrew nature was quite strong; a steady, middleclass Anglo-Saxon
+much more imagined himself Ehud's cousin than Ossian's.  But
+meanwhile, the pregnant and striking ideas of the ethnologists about
+the true natural grouping of the human race, the doctrine of a great
+Indo-European unity, comprising Hindoos, Persians, Greeks, Latins,
+Celts, Teutons, Slavonians, on the one hand, and, on the other hand,
+of a Semitic unity and of a Mongolian unity, separated by profound
+distinguishing marks from the Indo-European unity and from one
+another, was slowly acquiring consistency and popularising itself.
+So strong and real could the sense of sympathy or antipathy, grounded
+upon real identity or diversity in race, grow in men of culture, that
+we read of a genuine Teuton,--Wilhelm von Humboldt--finding, even in
+the sphere of religion, that sphere where the might of Semitism has
+been so overpowering, the food which most truly suited his spirit in
+the productions not of the alien Semitic genius, but of the genius of
+Greece or India, the Teutons born kinsfolk of the common Indo-
+European family.  'Towards Semitism he felt himself,' we read, 'far
+less drawn;' he had the consciousness of a certain antipathy in the
+depths of his nature to this, and to its 'absorbing, tyrannous,
+terrorist religion,' as to the opener, more flexible Indo-European
+genius, this religion appeared.  'The mere workings of the old man in
+him!' Semitism will readily reply; and though one can hardly admit
+this short and easy method of settling the matter, it must be owned
+that Humboldt's is an extreme case of Indo-Europeanism, useful as
+letting us see what may be the power of race and primitive
+constitution, but not likely, in the spiritual sphere, to have many
+companion cases equalling it.  Still, even in this sphere, the
+tendency is in Humboldt's direction; the modern spirit tends more and
+more to establish a sense of native diversity between our European
+bent and the Semitic and to eliminate, even in our religion, certain
+elements as purely and excessively Semitic, and therefore, in right,
+not combinable with our European nature, not assimilable by it.  This
+tendency is now quite visible even among ourselves, and even, as I
+have said, within the great sphere of the Semitic genius, the sphere
+of religion; and for its justification this tendency appeals to
+science, the science of origins; it appeals to this science as
+teaching us which way our natural affinities and repulsions lie.  It
+appeals to this science, and in part it comes from it; it is, in
+considerable part, an indirect practical result from it.
+
+In the sphere of politics, too, there has, in the same way, appeared
+an indirect practical result from this science; the sense of
+antipathy to the Irish people, of radical estrangement from them, has
+visibly abated amongst all the better part of us; the remorse for
+past ill-treatment of them, the wish to make amends, to do them
+justice, to fairly unite, if possible, in one people with them, has
+visibly increased; hardly a book on Ireland is now published, hardly
+a debate on Ireland now passes in Parliament, without this appearing.
+Fanciful as the notion may at first seem, I am inclined to think that
+the march of science,--science insisting that there is no such
+original chasm between the Celt and the Saxon as we once popularly
+imagined, that they are not truly, what Lord Lyndhurst called them,
+ALIENS IN BLOOD from us, that they are our brothers in the great
+Indo-European family,--has had a share, an appreciable share, in
+producing this changed state of feeling.  No doubt, the release from
+alarm and struggle, the sense of firm possession, solid security, and
+overwhelming power; no doubt these, allowing and encouraging humane
+feelings to spring up in us, have done much; no doubt a state of fear
+and danger, Ireland in hostile conflict with us, our union violently
+disturbed, might, while it drove back all humane feelings, make also
+the old sense of utter estrangement revive.  Nevertheless, so long as
+such a malignant revolution of events does not actually come about,
+so long the new sense of kinship and kindliness lives, works, and
+gathers strength; and the longer it so lives and works, the more it
+makes any such malignant revolution improbable.  And this new,
+reconciling sense has, I say, its roots in science.
+
+However, on these indirect benefits of science we must not lay too
+much stress.  Only this must be allowed; it is clear that there are
+now in operation two influences, both favourable to a more attentive
+and impartial study of Celtism than it has yet ever received from us.
+One is, the strengthening in us of the feeling of Indo-Europeanism;
+the other, the strengthening in us of the scientific sense generally.
+The first breaks down barriers between us and the Celt, relaxes the
+estrangement between us; the second begets the desire to know his
+case thoroughly, and to be just to it.  This is a very different
+matter from the political and social Celtisation of which certain
+enthusiasts dream; but it is not to be despised by any one to whom
+the Celtic genius is dear; and it is possible, while the other is
+not.
+
+
+I.
+
+
+To know the Celtic case thoroughly, one must know the Celtic people;
+and to know them, one must know that by which a people best express
+themselves,--their literature.  Few of us have any notion what a mass
+of Celtic literature is really yet extant and accessible.  One
+constantly finds even very accomplished people, who fancy that the
+remains of Welsh and Irish literature are as inconsiderable by their
+volume, as, in their opinion, they are by their intrinsic merit; that
+these remains consist of a few prose stories, in great part borrowed
+from the literature of nations more civilised than the Welsh or Irish
+nation, and of some unintelligible poetry.  As to Welsh literature,
+they have heard, perhaps, of the Black Book of Caermarthen, or of the
+Red Book of Hergest, and they imagine that one or two famous
+manuscript books like these contain the whole matter.  They have no
+notion that, in real truth, to quote the words of one who is no
+friend to the high pretensions of Welsh literature, but their most
+formidable impugner, Mr. Nash:- 'The Myvyrian manuscripts alone, now
+deposited in the British Museum, amount to 47 volumes of poetry, of
+various sizes, containing about 4,700 pieces of poetry, in 16,000
+pages, besides about 2,000 englynion or epigrammatic stanzas.  There
+are also, in the same collection, 53 volumes of prose, in about
+15,300 pages, containing great many curious documents on various
+subjects.  Besides these, which were purchased of the widow of the
+celebrated Owen Jones, the editor of the Myvyrian Archaeology, there
+are a vast number of collections of Welsh manuscripts in London, and
+in the libraries of the gentry of the principality.'  The Myvyrian
+Archaeology, here spoken of by Mr. Nash, I have already mentioned; he
+calls its editor, Owen Jones, celebrated; he is not so celebrated but
+that he claims a word, in passing, from a professor of poetry.  He
+was a Denbighshire STATESMAN, as we say in the north, born before the
+middle of last century, in that vale of Myvyr, which has given its
+name to his archaeology.  From his childhood he had that passion for
+the old treasures of his Country's literature, which to this day, as
+I have said, in the common people of Wales is so remarkable; these
+treasures were unprinted, scattered, difficult of access, jealously
+guarded.  'More than once,' says Edward Lhuyd, who in his
+Archaeologia Britannica, brought out by him in 1707, would gladly
+have given them to the world, 'more than once I had a promise from
+the owner, and the promise was afterwards retracted at the
+instigation of certain persons, pseudo-politicians, as I think,
+rather than men of letters.'  So Owen Jones went up, a young man of
+nineteen, to London, and got employment in a furrier's shop in Thames
+Street; for forty years, with a single object in view, he worked at
+his business; and at the end of that time his object was won.  He had
+risen in his employment till the business had become his own, and he
+was now a man of considerable means; but those means had been sought
+by him for one purpose only, the purpose of his life, the dream of
+his youth,--the giving permanence and publicity to the treasures of
+his national literature.  Gradually he got manuscript after
+manuscript transcribed, and at last, in 1801, he jointly with two
+friends brought out in three large volumes, printed in double
+columns, his Myvyrian Archaeology of Wales.  The book is full of
+imperfections, it presented itself to a public which could not judge
+of its importance, and it brought upon its author, in his lifetime,
+more attack than honour.  He died not long afterwards, and now he
+lies buried in Allhallows Church, in London, with his tomb turned
+towards the east, away from the green vale of Clwyd and the mountains
+of his native Wales; but his book is the great repertory of the
+literature of his nation, the comparative study of languages and
+literatures gains every day more followers, and no one of these
+followers, at home or abroad, touches Welsh literature without paying
+homage to the Denbighshire peasant's name; if the bard's glory and
+his own are still matter of moment to him,--si quid mentem mortalia
+tangunt,--he may be satisfied.
+
+Even the printed stock of early Welsh literature is, therefore,
+considerable, and the manuscript stock of it is very great indeed.
+Of Irish literature, the stock, printed and manuscript, is truly
+vast; the work of cataloguing and describing this has been admirably
+performed by another remarkable man, who died only the other day, Mr.
+Eugene O'Curry.  Obscure Scaliger of a despised literature, he
+deserves some weightier voice to praise him than the voice of an
+unlearned bellettristic trifler like me; he belongs to the race of
+the giants in literary research and industry,--a race now almost
+extinct.  Without a literary education, and impeded too, it appears,
+by much trouble of mind and infirmity of body, he has accomplished
+such a thorough work of classification and description for the
+chaotic mass of Irish literature, that the student has now half his
+labour saved, and needs only to use his materials as Eugene O'Curry
+hands them to him.  It was as a professor in the Catholic University
+in Dublin that O'Curry gave the lectures in which he has done the
+student this service; it is touching to find that these lectures, a
+splendid tribute of devotion to the Celtic cause, had no hearer more
+attentive, more sympathising, than a man, himself, too, the champion
+of a cause more interesting than prosperous,--one of those causes
+which please noble spirits, but do not please destiny, which have
+Cato's adherence, but not Heaven's,--Dr. Newman.  Eugene O'Curry, in
+these lectures of his, taking as his standard the quarto page of Dr.
+O'Donovan's edition of the Annals of the Four Masters (and this
+printed monument of one branch of Irish literature occupies by
+itself, let me say in passing, seven large quarto volumes, containing
+4,215 pages of closely printed matter), Eugene O'Curry says, that the
+great vellum manuscript books belonging to Trinity College, Dublin,
+and to the Royal Irish Academy,--books with fascinating titles, the
+Book of the Dun Cow, the Book of Leinster, the Book of Ballymote, the
+Speckled Book, the Book of Lecain, the Yellow Book of Lecain,--have,
+between them, matter enough to fill 11,400 of these pages; the other
+vellum manuscripts in the library of Trinity College, Dublin, have
+matter enough to fill 8,200 pages more; and the paper manuscripts of
+Trinity College, and the Royal Irish Academy together, would fill, he
+says, 30,000 such pages more.  The ancient laws of Ireland, the so-
+called Brehon laws, which a commission is now publishing, were not as
+yet completely transcribed when O'Curry wrote; but what had even then
+been transcribed was sufficient, he says, to fill nearly 8,000 of Dr.
+O'Donovan's pages.  Here are, at any rate, materials enough with a
+vengeance.  These materials fall, of course, into several divisions.
+The most literary of these divisions, the Tales, consisting of
+Historic Tales and Imaginative Tales, distributes the contents of its
+Historic Tales as follows:- Battles, voyages, sieges, tragedies, cow-
+spoils, courtships, adventures, land-expeditions, sea-expeditions,
+banquets, elopements, loves, lake-irruptions, colonisations, visions.
+Of what a treasure-house of resources for the history of Celtic life
+and the Celtic genius does that bare list, even by itself, call up
+the image!  The Annals of the Four Masters give 'the years of
+foundations and destructions of churches and castles, the obituaries
+of remarkable persons, the inaugurations of kings, the battles of
+chiefs, the contests of clans, the ages of bards, abbots, bishops,
+&c.' {25}  Through other divisions of this mass of materials,--the
+books of pedigrees and genealogies, the martyrologies and
+festologies, such as the Felire of Angus the Culdee, the
+topographical tracts, such as the Dinnsenchas,--we touch 'the most
+ancient traditions of the Irish, traditions which were committed to
+writing at a period when the ancient customs of the people were
+unbroken.'  We touch 'the early history of Ireland, civil and
+ecclesiastical.'  We get 'the origin and history of the countless
+monuments of Ireland, of the ruined church and tower, the sculptured
+cross, the holy well, and the commemorative name of almost every
+townland and parish in the whole island.'  We get, in short, 'the
+most detailed information upon almost every part of ancient Gaelic
+life, a vast quantity of valuable details of life and manners.' {26}
+
+And then, besides, to our knowledge of the Celtic genius, Mr. Norris
+has brought us from Cornwall, M. de la Villemarque from Brittany,
+contributions, insignificant indeed in quantity, if one compares them
+with the mass of the Irish materials extant, but far from
+insignificant in value.
+
+We want to know what all this mass of documents really tells us about
+the Celt.  But the mode of dealing with these documents, and with the
+whole question of Celtic antiquity, has hitherto been most
+unsatisfactory.  Those who have dealt with them, have gone to work,
+in general, either as warm Celt-lovers or as warm Celt-haters, and
+not as disinterested students of an important matter of science.  One
+party seems to set out with the determination to find everything in
+Celtism and its remains; the other, with the determination to find
+nothing in them.  A simple seeker for truth has a hard time between
+the two.  An illustration or so will make clear what I mean.  First
+let us take the Celt-lovers, who, though they engage one's sympathies
+more than the Celt-haters, yet, inasmuch as assertion is more
+dangerous than denial, show their weaknesses in a more signal way.  A
+very learned man, the Rev. Edward Davies, published in the early part
+of this century two important books on Celtic antiquity.  The second
+of these books, The Mythology and Rites of the British Druids,
+contains, with much other interesting matter, the charming story of
+Taliesin.  Bryant's book on mythology was then in vogue, and Bryant,
+in the fantastical manner so common in those days, found in Greek
+mythology what he called an arkite idolatry, pointing to Noah's
+deluge and the ark.  Davies, wishing to give dignity to his Celtic
+mythology, determines to find the arkite idolatry there too, and the
+style in which he proceeds to do this affords a good specimen of the
+extravagance which has caused Celtic antiquity to be looked upon with
+so much suspicion.  The story of Taliesin begins thus:-
+
+'In former times there was a man of noble descent in Penllyn.  His
+name was Tegid Voel, and his paternal estate was in the middle of the
+Lake of Tegid, and his wife was called Ceridwen.'
+
+Nothing could well be simpler; but what Davies finds in this simple
+opening of Taliesin's story is prodigious:-
+
+'Let us take a brief view of the proprietor of this estate.  Tegid
+Voel--BALD SERENITY--presents itself at once to our fancy.  The
+painter would find no embarrassment in sketching the portrait of this
+sedate venerable personage, whose crown is partly stripped of its
+hoary honours.  But of all the gods of antiquity, none could with
+propriety sit for this picture excepting Saturn, the acknowledged
+representative of Noah, and the husband of Rhea, which was but
+another name for Ceres, the genius of the ark.'
+
+And Ceres, the genius of the ark, is of course found in Ceridwen,
+'the British Ceres, the arkite goddess who initiates us into the
+deepest mysteries of the arkite superstition.'
+
+Now the story of Taliesin, as it proceeds, exhibits Ceridwen as a
+sorceress; and a sorceress, like a goddess, belongs to the world of
+the supernatural; but, beyond this, the story itself does not suggest
+one particle of relationship between Ceridwen and Ceres.  All the
+rest comes out of Davies's fancy, and is established by reasoning of
+the force of that about 'bald serenity.'
+
+It is not difficult for the other side, the Celt-haters, to get a
+triumph over such adversaries as these.  Perhaps I ought to ask
+pardon of Mr. Nash, whose Taliesin it is impossible to read without
+profit and instruction, for classing him among the Celt-haters; his
+determined scepticism about Welsh antiquity seems to me, however, to
+betray a preconceived hostility, a bias taken beforehand, as
+unmistakable as Mr. Davies's prepossessions.  But Mr. Nash is often
+very happy in demolishing, for really the Celt-lovers seem often to
+try to lay themselves open, and to invite demolition.  Full of his
+notions about an arkite idolatry and a Helio-daemonic worship, Edward
+Davies gives this translation of an old Welsh poem, entitled The
+Panegyric of Lludd the Great:-
+
+'A song of dark import was composed by the distinguished Ogdoad, who
+assembled on the day of the moon, and went in open procession.  On
+the day of Mars they allotted wrath to their adversaries; and on the
+day of Mercury they enjoyed their full pomp; on the day of Jove they
+were delivered from the detested usurpers; on the day of Venus, the
+day of the great influx, they swam in the blood of men; {29} on the
+day of the Sun there truly assemble five ships and five hundred of
+those who make supplication:  O Brithi, O Brithoi!  O son of the
+compacted wood, the shock overtakes me; we all attend on Adonai, on
+the area of Pwmpai.'
+
+That looks Helio-daemonic enough, undoubtedly; especially when Davies
+prints O Brithi, O Brithoi! in Hebrew characters, as being 'vestiges
+of sacred hymns in the Phoenician language.'  But then comes Mr.
+Nash, and says that the poem is a middle-age composition, with
+nothing Helio-daemonic about it; that it is meant to ridicule the
+monks; and that O Brithi, O Brithoi! is a mere piece of
+unintelligible jargon in mockery of the chants used by the monks at
+prayers; and he gives this counter-translation of the poem:-
+
+'They make harsh songs; they note eight numbers.  On Monday they will
+be prying about.  On Tuesday they separate, angry with their
+adversaries.  On Wednesday they drink, enjoying themselves
+ostentatiously.  On Thursday they are in the choir; their poverty is
+disagreeable.  Friday is a day of abundance, the men are swimming in
+pleasures.  On Sunday, certainly, five legions and five hundreds of
+them, they pray, they make exclamations:  O Brithi, O Brithoi!  Like
+wood-cuckoos in noise they will be, every one of the idiots banging
+on the ground.'
+
+As one reads Mr. Nash's explanation and translation after Edward
+Davies's, one feels that a flood of the broad daylight of common-
+sense has been suddenly shed over the Panegyric on Lludd the Great,
+and one is very grateful to Mr. Nash.
+
+Or, again, when another Celt-lover, Mr. Herbert, has bewildered us
+with his fancies, as uncritical as Edward Davies's; with his neo-
+Druidism, his Mithriac heresy, his Crist-celi, or man-god of the
+mysteries; and above all, his ape of the sanctuary, 'signifying the
+mercurial principle, that strange and unexplained disgrace of
+paganism,' Mr. Nash comes to our assistance, and is most refreshingly
+rational.  To confine ourselves to the ape of the sanctuary only.
+Mr. Herbert constructs his monster,--to whom, he says, 'great
+sanctity, together with foul crime, deception, and treachery,' is
+ascribed,--out of four lines of old Welsh poetry, of which he adopts
+the following translation:-
+
+'Without the ape, without the stall of the cow, without the mundane
+rampart, the world will become desolate, not requiring the cuckoos to
+convene the appointed dance over the green.'
+
+One is not very clear what all this means, but it has, at any rate, a
+solemn air about it, which prepares one for the development of its
+first-named personage, the ape, into the mystical ape of the
+sanctuary.  The cow, too,--says another famous Celt-lover, Dr. Owen,
+the learned author of the Welsh Dictionary,--the cow (henfon) is the
+cow of transmigration; and this also sounds natural enough.  But Mr.
+Nash, who has a keen eye for the piecing which frequently happens in
+these old fragments, has observed that just here, where the ape of
+the sanctuary and the cow of transmigration make their appearance,
+there seems to come a cluster of adages, popular sayings; and he at
+once remembers an adage preserved with the word henfon in it, where,
+as he justly says, 'the cow of transmigration cannot very well have
+place.'  This adage, rendered literally in English, is:  'Whoso owns
+the old cow, let him go at her tail;' and the meaning of it, as a
+popular saying, is clear and simple enough.  With this clue, Mr. Nash
+examines the whole passage, suggests that heb eppa, 'without the
+ape,' with which Mr. Herbert begins, in truth belongs to something
+going before and is to be translated somewhat differently; and, in
+short, that what we really have here is simply these three adages one
+after another:  'The first share is the full one.  Politeness is
+natural, says the ape.  Without the cow-stall there would be no dung-
+heap.'  And one can hardly doubt that Mr. Nash is quite right.
+
+Even friends of the Celt, who are perfectly incapable of
+extravagances of this sort, fall too often into a loose mode of
+criticism concerning him and the documents of his history, which is
+unsatisfactory in itself, and also gives an advantage to his many
+enemies.  One of the best and most delightful friends he has ever
+had,--M. de la Villemarque,--has seen clearly enough that often the
+alleged antiquity of his documents cannot be proved, that it can be
+even disproved, and that he must rely on other supports than this to
+establish what he wants; yet one finds him saying:  'I open the
+collection of Welsh bards from the sixth to the tenth century.
+Taliesin, one of the oldest of them,' . . . and so on.  But his
+adversaries deny that we have really any such thing as a 'collection
+of Welsh bards from the sixth to the tenth century,' or that a
+'Taliesin, one of the oldest of them,' exists to be quoted in defence
+of any thesis.  Sharon Turner, again, whose Vindication of the
+Ancient British Poems was prompted, it seems to me, by a critical
+instinct at bottom sound, is weak and uncritical in details like
+this:  'The strange poem of Taliesin, called the Spoils of Annwn,
+implies the existence (in the sixth century, he means) of
+mythological tales about Arthur; and the frequent allusion of the old
+Welsh bards to the persons and incidents which we find in the
+Mabinogion, are further proofs that there must have been such stories
+in circulation amongst the Welsh.'  But the critic has to show,
+against his adversaries, that the Spoils of Annwn is a real poem of
+the sixth century, with a real sixth-century poet called Taliesin for
+its author, before he can use it to prove what Sharon Turner there
+wishes to prove; and, in like manner, the high antiquity of persons
+and incidents that are found in the manuscripts of the Mabinogion,--
+manuscripts written, like the famous Red Book of Hergest, in the
+library of Jesus College at Oxford, in the fourteenth and fifteenth
+centuries,--is not proved by allusions of the old Welsh bards, until
+(which is just the question at issue) the pieces containing these
+allusions are proved themselves to possess a very high antiquity.  In
+the present state of the question as to the early Welsh literature,
+this sort of reasoning is inconclusive and bewildering, and merely
+carries us round in a circle.  Again, it is worse than inconclusive
+reasoning, it shows so uncritical a spirit that it begets grave
+mistrust, when Mr. Williams ab Ithel, employed by the Master of the
+Rolls to edit the Brut y Tywysogion, the 'Chronicle of the Princes,'
+says in his introduction, in many respects so useful and interesting:
+'We may add, on the authority of a scrupulously faithful antiquary,
+and one that was deeply versed in the traditions of his order--the
+late Iolo Morganwg--that King Arthur in his Institutes of the Round
+Table introduced the age of the world for events which occurred
+before Christ, and the year of Christ's nativity for all subsequent
+events.'  Now, putting out of the question Iolo Morganwg's character
+as an antiquary, it is obvious that no one, not Grimm himself, can
+stand in that way as 'authority' for King Arthur's having thus
+regulated chronology by his Institutes of the Round Table, or even
+for there ever having been any such institutes at all.  And finally,
+greatly as I respect and admire Mr. Eugene O'Curry, unquestionable as
+is the sagacity, the moderation, which he in general unites with his
+immense learning, I must say that he, too, like his brother Celt-
+lovers, sometimes lays himself dangerously open.  For instance, the
+Royal Irish Academy possesses in its Museum a relic of the greatest
+value, the Domhnach Airgid, a Latin manuscript of the four gospels.
+The outer box containing this manuscript is of the fourteenth
+century, but the manuscript itself, says O'Curry (and no man is
+better able to judge) is certainly of the sixth.  This is all very
+well.  'But,' O'Curry then goes on, 'I believe no reasonable doubt
+can exist that the Domhnach Airgid was actually sanctified by the
+hand of our great Apostle.'  One has a thrill of excitement at
+receiving this assurance from such a man as Eugene O'Curry; one
+believes that he is really going to make it clear that St. Patrick
+did actually sanctify the Domhnach Airgid with his own hands; and one
+reads on:-
+
+'As St. Patrick, says an ancient life of St. Mac Carthainn preserved
+by Colgan in his Acta Sanctorum Hiberniae, was on his way from the
+north, and coming to the place now called Clogher, he was carried
+over a stream by his strong man, Bishop Mac Carthainn, who, while
+bearing the Saint, groaned aloud, exclaiming:  "Ugh!  Ugh!"
+
+'"Upon my good word," said the Saint, "it was not usual with you to
+make that noise."
+
+'"I am now old and infirm," said Bishop Mac Carthainn, "and all my
+early companions in mission-work you have settled down in their
+respective churches, while I am still on my travels."
+
+'"Found a church then," said the Saint, "that shall not be too near
+us" (that is to his own Church of Armagh) "for familiarity, nor too
+far from us for intercourse."
+
+'And the Saint then left Bishop Mac Carthainn there, at Clogher, and
+bestowed the Domhnach Airgid upon him, which had been given to
+Patrick from heaven, when he was on the sea, coming to Erin.'
+
+The legend is full of poetry, full of humour; and one can quite
+appreciate, after reading it, the tact which gave St. Patrick such a
+prodigious success in organising the primitive church in Ireland; the
+new bishop, 'not too near us for familiarity, nor too far from us for
+intercourse,' is a masterpiece.  But how can Eugene O'Curry have
+imagined that it takes no more than a legend like that, to prove that
+the particular manuscript now in the Museum of the Royal Irish
+Academy was once in St. Patrick's pocket?
+
+I insist upon extravagances like these, not in order to throw
+ridicule upon the Celt-lovers,--on the contrary, I feel a great deal
+of sympathy with them,--but rather, to make it clear what an immense
+advantage the Celt-haters, the negative side, have in the controversy
+about Celtic antiquity; how much a clear-headed sceptic, like Mr.
+Nash, may utterly demolish, and, in demolishing, give himself the
+appearance of having won an entire victory.  But an entire victory he
+has, as I will next proceed to show, by no means won.
+
+
+II.
+
+
+I said that a sceptic like Mr. Nash, by demolishing the rubbish of
+the Celtic antiquaries, might often give himself the appearance of
+having won a complete victory, but that a complete victory he had, in
+truth, by no means won.  He has cleared much rubbish away, but this
+is no such very difficult feat, and requires mainly common-sense; to
+be sure, Welsh archaeologists are apt to lose their common-sense, but
+at moments when they are in possession of it they can do the
+indispensable, negative part of criticism, not, indeed, so briskly or
+cleverly as Mr. Nash, but still well enough.  Edward Davies, for
+instance, has quite clearly seen that the alleged remains of old
+Welsh literature are not to be taken for genuine just as they stand:
+'Some petty and mendicant minstrel, who only chaunted it as an old
+song, has tacked on' (he says of a poem he is discussing) 'these
+lines, in a style and measure totally different from the preceding
+verses:  "May the Trinity grant us mercy in the day of judgment:  a
+liberal donation, good gentlemen!"'  There, fifty years before Mr.
+Nash, is a clearance like one of Mr. Nash's.  But the difficult feat
+in this matter is the feat of construction; to determine when one has
+cleared away all that is to be cleared away, what is the significance
+of that which is left; and here, I confess, I think Mr. Nash and his
+fellow-sceptics, who say that next to nothing is left, and that the
+significance of whatever is left is next to nothing, dissatisfy the
+genuine critic even more than Edward Davies and his brother
+enthusiasts, who have a sense that something primitive, august, and
+interesting is there, though they fail to extract it, dissatisfy him.
+There is a very edifying story told by O'Curry of the effect produced
+on Moore, the poet, who had undertaken to write the history of
+Ireland (a task for which he was quite unfit), by the contemplation
+of an old Irish manuscript.  Moore had, without knowing anything
+about them, spoken slightingly of the value to the historian of
+Ireland of the materials afforded by such manuscripts; but, says
+O'Curry:-
+
+'In the year 1839, during one of his last visits to the land of his
+birth, he, in company with his old and attached friend Dr. Petrie,
+favoured me with an unexpected visit at the Royal Irish Academy.  I
+was at that period employed on the Ordnance Survey of Ireland, and at
+the time of his visit happened to have before me on my desk the Books
+of Ballymote and Lecain, The Speckled Book, The Annals of the Four
+Masters, and many other ancient books, for historical research and
+reference.  I had never before seen Moore, and after a brief
+introduction and explanation of the nature of my occupation by Dr.
+Petrie, and seeing the formidable array of so many dark and time-worn
+volumes by which I was surrounded, he looked a little disconcerted,
+but after a while plucked up courage to open the Book of Ballymote
+and ask what it was.  Dr. Petrie and myself then entered into a short
+explanation of the history and character of the books then present as
+well as of ancient Gaedhelic documents in general.  Moore listened
+with great attention, alternately scanning the books and myself, and
+then asked me, in a serious tone, if I understood them, and how I had
+learned to do so.  Having satisfied him upon these points, he turned
+to Dr. Petrie and said:- "Petrie, these huge tomes could not have
+been written by fools or for any foolish purpose.  I never knew
+anything about them before, and I had no right to have undertaken the
+History of Ireland."'
+
+And from that day Moore, it is said, lost all heart for going on with
+his History of Ireland, and it was only the importunity of the
+publishers which induced him to bring out the remaining volume.
+
+COULD NOT HAVE BEEN WRITTEN BY FOOLS OR FOR ANY FOOLISH PURPOSE.
+That is, I am convinced, a true presentiment to have in one's mind
+when one looks at Irish documents like the Book of Ballymote, or
+Welsh documents like the Red Book of Hergest.  In some respects, at
+any rate, these documents are what they claim to be, they hold what
+they pretend to hold, they touch that primitive world of which they
+profess to be the voice.  The true critic is he who can detect this
+precious and genuine part in them, and employ it for the elucidation
+of the Celt's genius and history, and for any other fruitful purposes
+to which it can be applied.  Merely to point out the mixture of what
+is late and spurious in them, is to touch but the fringes of the
+matter.  In reliance upon the discovery of this mixture of what is
+late and spurious in them, to pooh-pooh them altogether, to treat
+them as a heap of rubbish, a mass of middle-age forgeries, is to fall
+into the greatest possible error.  Granted that all the manuscripts
+of Welsh poetry (to take that branch of Celtic literature which has
+had, in Mr. Nash, the ablest disparager), granted that all such
+manuscripts that we possess are, with the most insignificant
+exception, not older than the twelfth century; granted that the
+twelfth and thirteenth centuries were a time of great poetical
+activity in Wales, a time when the mediaeval literature flourished
+there, as it flourished in England, France, and other countries;
+granted that a great deal of what Welsh enthusiasts have attributed
+to their great traditional poets of the sixth century belongs to this
+later epoch,--what then?  Does that get rid of the great traditional
+poets,--the Cynveirdd or old bards, Aneurin, Taliesin, Llywarch Hen,
+and their compeers,--does that get rid of the great poetical
+tradition of the sixth century altogether, does it merge the whole
+literary antiquity of Wales in her mediaeval literary antiquity, or,
+at least, reduce all other than this to insignificance?  Mr. Nash
+says it does; all his efforts are directed to show how much of the so
+called sixth-century pieces may be resolved into mediaeval, twelfth-
+century work; his grand thesis is that there is nothing primitive and
+pre-Christian in the extant Welsh literature, no traces of the
+Druidism and Paganism every one associates with Celtic antiquity; all
+this, he says, was extinguished by Paulinus in AD. 59, and never
+resuscitated.  'At the time the Mabinogion and the Taliesin ballads
+were composed, no tradition or popular recollection of the Druids or
+the Druidical mythology existed in Wales.  The Welsh bards knew of no
+older mystery, nor of any mystic creed, unknown to the rest of the
+Christian world.'  And Mr. Nash complains that 'the old opinion that
+the Welsh poems contain notices of Druid or Pagan superstitions of a
+remote origin' should still find promulgators; what we find in them
+is only, he says, what was circulating in Wales in the twelfth
+century, and one great mistake in these investigations has been the
+supposing that the Welsh of the twelfth, or even of the sixth
+century, were wiser as well as more Pagan than their neighbours.'
+
+Why, what a wonderful thing is this!  We have, in the first place,
+the most weighty and explicit testimony,--Strabo's, Caesar's,
+Lucan's,--that this race once possessed a special, profound,
+spiritual discipline, that they were, to use Mr. Nash's words, 'wiser
+than their neighbours.'  Lucan's words are singularly clear and
+strong, and serve well to stand as a landmark in this controversy, in
+which one is sometimes embarrassed by hearing authorities quoted on
+this side or that, when one does not feel sure precisely what they
+say, how much or how little; Lucan, addressing those hitherto under
+the pressure of Rome, but now left by the Roman civil war to their
+own devices, says:-
+
+'Ye too, ye bards, who by your praises perpetuate the memory of the
+fallen brave, without hindrance poured forth your strains.  And ye,
+ye Druids, now that the sword was removed, began once more your
+barbaric rites and weird solemnities.  To you only is given knowledge
+or ignorance (whichever it be) of the gods and the powers of heaven;
+your dwelling is in the lone heart of the forest.  From you we learn,
+that the bourne of man's ghost is not the senseless grave, not the
+pale realm of the monarch below; in another world his spirit survives
+still;--death, if your lore be true, is but the passage to enduring
+life.'
+
+There is the testimony of an educated Roman, fifty years after
+Christ, to the Celtic race being then 'wiser than their neighbours;'
+testimony all the more remarkable because civilised nations, though
+very prone to ascribe to barbarous people an ideal purity and
+simplicity of life and manners, are by no means naturally inclined to
+ascribe to them high attainment in intellectual and spiritual things.
+And now, along with this testimony of Lucan's, one has to carry in
+mind Caesar's remark, that the Druids, partly from a religious
+scruple, partly from a desire to discipline the memory of their
+pupils, committed nothing to writing.  Well, then come the crushing
+defeat of the Celtic race in Britain and the Roman conquest; but the
+Celtic race subsisted here still, and any one can see that, while the
+race subsisted, the traditions of a discipline such as that of which
+Lucan has drawn the picture were not likely to be so very speedily
+'extinguished.'  The withdrawal of the Romans, the recovered
+independence of the native race here, the Saxon invasion, the
+struggle with the Saxons, were just the ground for one of those
+bursts of energetic national life and self-consciousness which find a
+voice in a burst of poets and poetry.  Accordingly, to this time, to
+the sixth century, the universal Welsh tradition attaches the great
+group of British poets, Taliesin and his fellows.  In the twelfth
+century there began for Wales, along with another burst of national
+life, another burst of poetry; and this burst LITERARY in the
+stricter sense of the word,--a burst which left, for the first time,
+written records.  It wrote the records of its predecessors, as well
+as of itself, and therefore Mr. Nash wants to make it the real author
+of the whole poetry, one may say, of the sixth century, as well as
+its own.  No doubt one cannot produce the texts of the poetry of the
+sixth century; no doubt we have this only as the twelfth and
+succeeding centuries wrote it down; no doubt they mixed and changed
+it a great deal in writing it down.  But, since a continuous stream
+of testimony shows the enduring existence and influence among the
+kindred Celts of Wales and Brittany, from the sixth century to the
+twelfth, of an old national literature, it seems certain that much of
+this must be traceable in the documents of the twelfth century, and
+the interesting thing is to trace it.  It cannot be denied that there
+is such a continuous stream of testimony; there is Gildas in the
+sixth century, Nennius in the eighth, the laws of Howel in the tenth;
+in the eleventh, twenty or thirty years before the new literary epoch
+began, we hear of Rhys ap Tudor having 'brought with him from
+Brittany the system of the Round Table, which at home had become
+quite forgotten, and he restored it as it is, with regard to
+minstrels and bards, as it had been at Caerleon-upon-Usk, under the
+Emperor Arthur, in the time of the sovereignty of the race of the
+Cymry over the island of Britain and its adjacent islands.'  Mr.
+Nash's own comment on this is:  'We here see the introduction of the
+Arthurian romance from Brittany, preceding by nearly one generation
+the revival of music and poetry in North Wales;' and yet he does not
+seem to perceive what a testimony is here to the reality, fulness,
+and subsistence of that primitive literature about which he is so
+sceptical.  Then in the twelfth century testimony to this primitive
+literature absolutely abounds; one can quote none better than that of
+Giraldus de Barri, or Giraldus Cambrensis, as he is usually called.
+Giraldus is an excellent authority, who knew well what he was writing
+about, and he speaks of the Welsh bards and rhapsodists of his time
+as having in their possession 'ancient and authentic books' in the
+Welsh language.  The apparatus of technical terms of poetry, again,
+and the elaborate poetical organisation which we find, both in Wales
+and Ireland, existing from the very commencement of the mediaeval
+literary period in each, and to which no other mediaeval literature,
+so far as I know, shows at its first beginnings anything similar,
+indicates surely, in these Celtic peoples, the clear and persistent
+tradition of an older poetical period of great development, and
+almost irresistibly connects itself in one's mind with the elaborate
+Druidic discipline which Caesar mentions.
+
+But perhaps the best way to get a full sense of the storied
+antiquity, forming as it were the background to those mediaeval
+documents which in Mr. Nash's eyes pretty much begin and end with
+themselves, is to take, almost at random, a passage from such a tale
+as Kilhwch and Olwen, in the Mabinogion,--that charming collection,
+for which we owe such a debt of gratitude to Lady Charlotte Guest (to
+call her still by the name she bore when she made her happy entry
+into the world of letters), and which she so unkindly suffers to
+remain out of print.  Almost every page of this tale points to
+traditions and personages of the most remote antiquity, and is
+instinct with the very breath of the primitive world.  Search is made
+for Mabon, the son of Modron, who was taken when three nights old
+from between his mother and the wall.  The seekers go first to the
+Ousel of Cilgwri; the Ousel had lived long enough to peck a smith's
+anvil down to the size of a nut, but he had never heard of Mabon.
+'But there is a race of animals who were formed before me, and I will
+be your guide to them.'  So the Ousel guides them to the Stag of
+Redynvre.  The Stag has seen an oak sapling, in the wood where he
+lived, grow up to be an oak with a hundred branches, and then slowly
+decay down to a withered stump, yet he had never heard of Mabon.
+'But I will be your guide to the place where there is an animal which
+was formed before I was;' and he guides them to the Owl of Cwm
+Cawlwyd.  'When first I came hither,' says the Owl, 'the wide valley
+you see was a wooded glen.  And a race of men came and rooted it up.
+And there grew a second wood; and this wood is the third.  My wings,
+are they not withered stumps?'  Yet the Owl, in spite of his great
+age, had never heard of Mabon; but he offered to be guide 'to where
+is the oldest animal in the world, and the one that has travelled
+most, the Eagle of Gwern Abwy.'  The Eagle was so old, that a rock,
+from the top of which he pecked at the stars every evening, was now
+not so much as a span high.  He knew nothing of Mabon; but there was
+a monster Salmon, into whom he once struck his claws in Llyn Llyw,
+who might, perhaps, tell them something of him.  And at last the
+Salmon of Llyn Llyw told them of Mabon.  'With every tide I go along
+the river upwards, until I come near to the walls of Gloucester, and
+there have I found such wrong as I never found elsewhere.'  And the
+Salmon took Arthur's messengers on his shoulders up to the wall of
+the prison in Gloucester, and they delivered Mabon.
+
+Nothing could better give that sense of primitive and pre-mediaeval
+antiquity which to the observer with any tact for these things is, I
+think, clearly perceptible in these remains, at whatever time they
+may have been written; or better serve to check too absolute an
+acceptance of Mr. Nash's doctrine,--in some respects very salutary,--
+'that the common assumption of such remains of the date of the sixth
+century, has been made upon very unsatisfactory grounds.'  It is
+true, it has; it is true, too, that, as he goes on to say, 'writers
+who claim for productions actually existing only in manuscripts of
+the twelfth, an origin in the sixth century, are called upon to
+demonstrate the links of evidence, either internal or external, which
+bridge over this great intervening period of at least five hundred
+years.'  Then Mr. Nash continues:  'This external evidence is
+altogether wanting.'  Not altogether, as we have seen; that assertion
+is a little too strong.  But I am content to let it pass, because it
+is true, that without internal evidence in this matter the external
+evidence would be of no moment.  But when Mr. Nash continues further:
+'And the internal evidence even of the so-called historic poems
+themselves, is, in some instances at least, opposed to their claims
+to an origin in the sixth century,' and leaves the matter there, and
+finishes his chapter, I say that is an unsatisfactory turn to give to
+the matter, and a lame and impotent conclusion to his chapter;
+because the one interesting, fruitful question here is, not in what
+instances the internal evidence opposes the claims of these poems to
+a sixth-century origin, but in what instances it supports them, and
+what these sixth-century remains, thus established, signify.
+
+So again with the question as to the mythological import of these
+poems.  Mr. Nash seems to me to have dealt with this, too, rather in
+the spirit of a sturdy enemy of the Celts and their pretensions,--
+often enough chimerical,--than in the spirit of a disinterested man
+of science.  'We find in the oldest compositions in the Welsh
+language no traces,' he says, 'of the Druids, or of a pagan
+mythology.'  He will not hear of there being, for instance, in these
+compositions, traces of the doctrine of the transmigration of souls,
+attributed to the Druids in such clear words by Caesar.  He is very
+severe upon a German scholar, long and favourably known in this
+country, who has already furnished several contributions to our
+knowledge of the Celtic race, and of whose labours the main fruit
+has, I believe, not yet been given us,--Mr. Meyer.  He is very severe
+upon Mr. Meyer, for finding in one of the poems ascribed to Taliesin,
+'a sacrificial hymn addressed to the god Pryd, in his character of
+god of the Sun.'  It is not for me to pronounce for or against this
+notion of Mr. Meyer's.  I have not the knowledge which is needed in
+order to make one's suffrage in these matters of any value; speaking
+merely as one of the unlearned public, I will confess that allegory
+seems to me to play, in Mr. Meyer's theories, a somewhat excessive
+part; Arthur and his Twelve (?) Knights of the Round Table signifying
+solely the year with its twelve months; Percival and the Miller
+signifying solely steel and the grindstone; Stonehenge and the
+Gododin put to purely calendarial purposes; the Nibelungen, the
+Mahabharata, and the Iliad, finally following the fate of the
+Gododin; all this appears to me, I will confess, a little prematurely
+grasped, a little unsubstantial.  But that any one who knows the set
+of modern mythological science towards astronomical and solar myths,
+a set which has already justified itself in many respects so
+victoriously, and which is so irresistible that one can hardly now
+look up at the sun without having the sensations of a moth;--that any
+one who knows this, should find in the Welsh remains no traces of
+mythology, is quite astounding.  Why, the heroes and heroines of the
+old Cymric world are all in the sky as well as in Welsh story; Arthur
+is the Great Bear, his harp is the constellation Lyra; Cassiopeia's
+chair is Llys Don, Don's Court; the daughter of Don was Arianrod, and
+the Northern Crown is Caer Arianrod; Gwydion was Don's son, and the
+Milky Way is Caer Gwydion.  With Gwydion is Math, the son of
+Mathonwy, the 'man of illusion and phantasy;' and the moment one goes
+below the surface,--almost before one goes below the surface,--all is
+illusion and phantasy, double-meaning, and far-reaching mythological
+import, in the world which all these personages inhabit.  What are
+the three hundred ravens of Owen, and the nine sorceresses of
+Peredur, and the dogs of Annwn the Welsh Hades, and the birds of
+Rhiannon, whose song was so sweet that warriors remained spell-bound
+for eighty years together listening to them?  What is the Avanc, the
+water-monster, of whom every lake-side in Wales, and her proverbial
+speech, and her music, to this day preserve the tradition?  What is
+Gwyn the son of Nudd, king of fairie, the ruler of the Tylwyth Teg,
+or family of beauty, who till the day of doom fights on every first
+day of May,--the great feast of the sun among the Celtic peoples,--
+with Gwythyr, for the fair Cordelia, the daughter of Lear?  What is
+the wonderful mare of Teirnyon, which on the night of every first of
+May foaled, and no one ever knew what became of the colt?  Who is the
+mystic Arawn, the king of Annwn, who changed semblance for a year
+with Pwyll, prince of Dyved, and reigned in his place?  These are no
+mediaeval personages; they belong to an older, pagan, mythological
+world.  The very first thing that strikes one, in reading the
+Mabinogion, is how evidently the mediaeval story-teller is pillaging
+an antiquity of which he does not fully possess the secret; he is
+like a peasant building his hut on the site of Halicarnassus or
+Ephesus; he builds, but what he builds is full of materials of which
+he knows not the history, or knows by a glimmering tradition merely;-
+-stones 'not of this building,' but of an older architecture,
+greater, cunninger, more majestical.  In the mediaeval stories of no
+Latin or Teutonic people does this strike one as in those of the
+Welsh.  Kilhwch, in the story, already quoted, of Kilhwch and Olwen,
+asks help at the hand of Arthur's warriors; a list of these warriors
+is given, which fills I know not how many pages of Lady Charlotte
+Guest's book; this list is a perfect treasure-house of mysterious
+ruins:-
+
+'Teithi Hen, the son of Gwynham--(his domains were swallowed up by
+the sea, and he himself hardly escaped, and he came to Arthur, and
+his knife had this peculiarity, that from the time that he came there
+no haft would ever remain upon it, and owing to this a sickness came
+over him, and he pined away during the remainder of his life, and of
+this he died).
+
+'Drem, the son of Dremidyd--(when the gnat arose in the morning with
+the sun, Drem could see it from Gelli Wic in Cornwall, as far off as
+Pen Blathaon in North Britain).
+
+'Kynyr Keinvarvawc--(when he was told he had a son born, he said to
+his wife:  Damsel, if thy son be mine, his heart will be always cold,
+and there will be no warmth in his hands).'
+
+How evident, again, is the slightness of the narrator's hold upon the
+Twrch-Trwyth and his strange story!  How manifest the mixture of
+known and unknown, shadowy and clear, of different layers and orders
+of tradition jumbled together, in the story of Bran the Blessed, a
+story whose personages touch a comparatively late and historic time.
+Bran invades Ireland, to avenge one of 'the three unhappy blows of
+this island,' the daily striking of Branwen by her husband Matholwch,
+King of Ireland.  Bran is mortally wounded by a poisoned dart, and
+only seven men of Britain, 'the Island of the Mighty,' escape, among
+them Taliesin:-
+
+'And Bran commanded them that they should cut off his head.  And take
+you my head, said he, and bear it even unto the White Mount in
+London, and bury it there with the face towards France.  And a long
+time will you be upon the road.  In Harlech you will be feasting
+seven years, the birds of Rhiannon singing unto you the while.  And
+all that time the head will be to you as pleasant company as it ever
+was when on my body.  And at Gwales in Penvro you will be fourscore
+years, and you may remain there, and the head with you uncorrupted,
+until you open the door that looks towards Aber Henvelen and towards
+Cornwall.  And after you have opened that door, there you may no
+longer tarry; set forth then to London to bury the head, and go
+straight forward.
+
+'So they cut off his head, and those seven went forward therewith.
+And Branwen was the eighth with them, and they came to land at Aber
+Alaw in Anglesey, and they sate down to rest.  And Branwen looked
+towards Ireland and towards the Island of the Mighty, to see if she
+could descry them.  "Alas," said she, "woe is me that I was ever
+born; two islands have been destroyed because of me."  Then she
+uttered a loud groan, and there broke her heart.  And they made her a
+four-sided grave, and buried her upon the banks of the Alaw.
+
+'Then they went to Harlech, and sate down to feast and to drink
+there; and there came three birds and began singing, and all the
+songs they had ever heard were harsh compared thereto; and at this
+feast they continued seven years.  Then they went to Gwales in
+Penvro, and there they found a fair and regal spot overlooking the
+ocean, and a spacious hall was therein.  And they went into the hall,
+and two of its doors were open, but the third door was closed, that
+which looked towards Cornwall.  "See yonder," said Manawyddan, "is
+the door that we may not open."  And that night they regaled
+themselves and were joyful.  And there they remained fourscore years,
+nor did they think they had ever spent a time more joyous and
+mirthful.  And they were not more weary than when first they came,
+neither did they, any of them, know the time they had been there.
+And it was as pleasant to them having the head with them as if Bran
+had been with them himself.
+
+'But one day said Heilyn, the son of Gwyn:  "Evil betide me if I do
+not open the door to know if that is true which is said concerning
+it."  So he opened the door and looked towards Cornwall and Aber
+Henvelen.  And when they had looked, they were as conscious of all
+the evils they had ever sustained, and of all the friends and
+companions they had lost, and of all the misery that had befallen
+them, as if all had happened in that very spot; and especially of the
+fate of their lord.  And because of their perturbation they could not
+rest, but journeyed forth with the head towards London.  And they
+buried the head in the White Mount.'
+
+Arthur afterwards, in his pride and self-confidence, disinterred the
+head, and this was one of 'the three unhappy disclosures of the
+island of Britain.'
+
+There is evidently mixed here, with the newer legend, a detritus, as
+the geologists would say, of something far older; and the secret of
+Wales and its genius is not truly reached until this detritus,
+instead of being called recent because it is found in contact with
+what is recent, is disengaged, and is made to tell its own story.
+
+But when we show him things of this kind in the Welsh remains, Mr.
+Nash has an answer for us.  'Oh,' he says, 'all this is merely a
+machinery of necromancers and magic, such as has probably been
+possessed by all people in all ages, more or less abundantly.  How
+similar are the creations of the human mind in times and places the
+most remote!  We see in this similarity only an evidence of the
+existence of a common stock of ideas, variously developed according
+to the formative pressure of external circumstances.  The materials
+of these tales are not peculiar to the Welsh.'  And then Mr. Nash
+points out, with much learning and ingenuity, how certain incidents
+of these tales have their counterparts in Irish, in Scandinavian, in
+Oriental romance.  He says, fairly enough, that the assertions of
+Taliesin, in the famous Hanes Taliesin, or History of Taliesin, that
+he was present with Noah in the Ark, at the Tower of Babel, and with
+Alexander of Macedon, 'we may ascribe to the poetic fancy of the
+Christian priest of the thirteenth century, who brought this romance
+into its present form.  We may compare these statements of the
+universal presence of the wonder-working magician with those of the
+gleeman who recites the Anglo-Saxon metrical tale called the
+Traveller's Song.'  No doubt, lands the most distant can be shown to
+have a common property in many marvellous stories.  This is one of
+the most interesting discoveries of modern science; but modern
+science is equally interested in knowing how the genius of each
+people has differentiated, so to speak, this common property of
+theirs; in tracking out, in each case, that special 'variety of
+development,' which, to use Mr. Nash's own words, 'the formative
+pressure of external circumstances' has occasioned; and not the
+formative pressure from without only, but also the formative pressure
+from within.  It is this which he who deals with the Welsh remains in
+a philosophic spirit wants to know.  Where is the force, for
+scientific purposes, of telling us that certain incidents by which
+Welsh poetry has been supposed to indicate a surviving tradition of
+the doctrine of transmigration, are found in Irish poetry also, when
+Irish poetry has, like Welsh, its roots in that Celtism which is said
+to have held this doctrine of transmigration so strongly?  Where is
+even the great force, for scientific purposes, of proving, if it were
+possible to prove, that the extant remains of Welsh poetry contain
+not one plain declaration of Druidical, Pagan, pre-Christian
+doctrine, if one has in the extant remains of Breton poetry such
+texts as this from the prophecy of Gwenchlan:  'Three times must we
+all die, before we come to our final repose'? or as the cry of the
+eagles, in the same poem, of fierce thirst for Christian blood, a cry
+in which the poet evidently gives vent to his own hatred? since the
+solidarity, to use that convenient French word, of Breton and Welsh
+poetry is so complete, that the ideas of the one may be almost
+certainly assumed not to have been wanting to those of the other.
+The question is, when Taliesin says, in the Battle of the Trees:  'I
+have been in many shapes before I attained a congenial form.  I have
+been a narrow blade of a sword, I have been a drop in the air, I have
+been a shining star, I have been a word in a book, I have been a book
+in the beginning, I have been a light in a lantern a year and a half,
+I have been a bridge for passing over three-score rivers; I have
+journeyed as an eagle, I have been a boat on the sea, I have been a
+director in battle, I have been a sword in the hand, I have been a
+shield in fight, I have been the string of a harp, I have been
+enchanted for a year in the foam of water.  There is nothing in which
+I have not been,'--the question is, have these 'statements of the
+universal presence of the wonder-working magician' nothing which
+distinguishes them from 'similar creations of the human mind in times
+and places the most remote;' have they not an inwardness, a severity
+of form, a solemnity of tone, which indicates the still reverberating
+echo of a profound doctrine and discipline, such as was Druidism?
+Suppose we compare Taliesin, as Mr. Nash invites us, with the gleeman
+of the Anglo-Saxon Traveller's Song.  Take the specimen of this song
+which Mr. Nash himself quotes:  'I have been with the Israelites and
+with the Essyringi, with the Hebrews and with the Indians and with
+the Egyptians; I have been with the Medes and with the Persians and
+with the Myrgings.'  It is very well to parallel with this extract
+Taliesin's:  'I carried the banner before Alexander; I was in Canaan
+when Absalom was slain; I was on the horse's crupper of Elias and
+Enoch; I was on the high cross of the merciful son of God; I was the
+chief overseer at the building of the tower of Nimrod; I was with my
+King in the manger of the ass; I supported Moses through the waters
+of Jordan; I have been in the buttery in the land of the Trinity; it
+is not known what is the nature of its meat and its fish.'  It is
+very well to say that these assertions 'we may fairly ascribe to the
+poetic fancy of a Christian priest of the thirteenth century.'
+Certainly we may; the last of Taliesin's assertions more especially;
+though one must remark at the same time that the Welshman shows much
+more fire and imagination than the Anglo-Saxon.  But Taliesin adds,
+after his:  'I was in Canaan when Absalom was slain,' 'I WAS IN THE
+HALL OF DON BEFORE GWYDION WAS BORN;' he adds, after:  'I was chief
+overseer at the building of the tower of Nimrod,' 'I HAVE BEEN THREE
+TIMES RESIDENT IN THE CASTLE OF ARIANROD;' he adds, after:  'I was at
+the cross with Mary Magdalene,' 'I OBTAINED MY INSPIRATION FROM THE
+CAULDRON OF CERIDWEN.'  And finally, after the mediaeval touch of the
+visit to the buttery in the land of the Trinity, he goes off at
+score:  'I have been instructed in the whole system of the universe;
+I shall be till the day of judgment on the face of the earth.  I have
+been in an uneasy chair above Caer Sidin, and the whirling round
+without motion between three elements.  Is it not the wonder of the
+world that cannot be discovered?'  And so he ends the poem.  But here
+is the Celtic, the essential part of the poem:  it is here that the
+'formative pressure' has been really in operation; and here surely is
+paganism and mythology enough, which the Christian priest of the
+thirteenth century can have had nothing to do with.  It is
+unscientific, no doubt, to interpret this part as Edward Davies and
+Mr. Herbert do; but it is unscientific also to get rid of it as Mr.
+Nash does.  Wales and the Welsh genius are not to be known without
+this part; and the true critic is he who can best disengage its real
+significance.
+
+I say, then, what we want is to KNOW the Celt and his genius; not to
+exalt him or to abase him, but to know him.  And for this a
+disinterested, positive, and constructive criticism is needed.
+Neither his friends nor his enemies have yet given us much of this.
+His friends have given us materials for criticism, and for these we
+ought to be grateful; his enemies have given us negative criticism,
+and for this, too, up to a certain point, we may be grateful; but the
+criticism we really want neither of them has yet given us.
+
+Philology, however, that science which in our time has had so many
+successes, has not been abandoned by her good fortune in touching the
+Celt; philology has brought, almost for the first time in their
+lives, the Celt and sound criticism together.  The Celtic grammar of
+Zeuss, whose death is so grievous a loss to science, offers a
+splendid specimen of that patient, disinterested way of treating
+objects of knowledge, which is the best and most attractive
+characteristic of Germany.  Zeuss proceeds neither as a Celt-lover
+nor as a Celt-hater; not the slightest trace of a wish to glorify
+Teutonism or to abase Celtism, appears in his book.  The only desire
+apparent there, is the desire to know his object, the language of the
+Celtic peoples, as it really is.  In this he stands as a model to
+Celtic students; and it has been given to him, as a reward for his
+sound method, to establish certain points which are henceforth
+cardinal points, landmarks, in all the discussion of Celtic matters,
+and which no one had so established before.  People talked at random
+of Celtic writings of this or that age; Zeuss has definitely fixed
+the age of what we actually have of these writings.  To take the
+Cymric group of languages:  our earliest Cornish document is a
+vocabulary of the thirteenth century; our earliest Breton document is
+a short description of an estate in a deed of the ninth century; our
+earliest Welsh documents are Welsh glosses of the eighth century to
+Eutychus, the grammarian, and Ovid's Art of Love, and the verses
+found by Edward Lhuyd in the Juvencus manuscript at Cambridge.  The
+mention of this Juvencus fragment, by-the-by, suggests the difference
+there is between an interested and a disinterested critical habit.
+Mr. Nash deals with this fragment; but, in spite of all his great
+acuteness and learning, because he has a bias, because he does not
+bring to these matters the disinterested spirit they need, he is
+capable of getting rid, quite unwarrantably, of a particular word in
+the fragment which does not suit him; his dealing with the verses is
+an advocate's dealing, not a critic's.  Of this sort of thing Zeuss
+is incapable.
+
+The test which Zeuss used for establishing the age of these documents
+is a scientific test, the test of orthography and of declensional and
+syntactical forms.  These matters are far out of my province, but
+what is clear, sound, and simple, has a natural attraction for us
+all, and one feels a pleasure in repeating it.  It is the grand sign
+of age, Zeuss says, in Welsh and Irish words, when what the
+grammarians call the 'destitutio tenuium' has not yet taken place;
+when the sharp consonants have not yet been changed into flat, P or t
+into B or D; when, for instance, map, a son, has not yet become mab;
+coet a wood, coed; ocet, a harrow, oged.  This is a clear, scientific
+test to apply, and a test of which the accuracy can be verified; I do
+not say that Zeuss was the first person who knew this test or applied
+it, but I say that he is the first person who in dealing with Celtic
+matters has invariably proceeded by means of this and similar
+scientific tests; the first person, therefore, the body of whose work
+has a scientific, stable character; and so he stands as a model to
+all Celtic inquirers.
+
+His influence has already been most happy; and as I have enlarged on
+a certain failure in criticism of Eugene O'Curry's,--whose business,
+after all, was the description and classification of materials rather
+than criticism,--let me show, by another example from Eugene O'Curry,
+this good influence of Zeuss upon Celtic studies.  Eugene O'Curry
+wants to establish that compositions of an older date than the
+twelfth century existed in Ireland in the twelfth century, and thus
+he proceeds.  He takes one of the great extant Irish manuscripts, the
+Leabhar na h'Uidhre; or, Book of the Dun Cow.  The compiler of this
+book was, he says, a certain Maelmuiri, a member of the religious
+house of Cluainmacnois.  This he establishes from a passage in the
+manuscript itself:  'This is a trial of his pen here, by Maelmuiri,
+son of the son of Conn na m'Bocht.'  The date of Maelmuiri he
+establishes from a passage in the Annals of the Four Masters, under
+the year 1106:  'Maelmuiri, son of the son of Conn na m'Bocht, was
+killed in the middle of the great stone church of Cluainmacnois, by a
+party of robbers.'  Thus he gets the date of the Book of the Dun Cow.
+This book contains an elegy on the death of St. Columb.  Now, even
+before 1106, the language of this elegy was so old as to require a
+gloss to make it intelligible, for it is accompanied by a gloss
+written between the lines.  This gloss quotes, for the explanation of
+obsolete words, a number of more ancient compositions; and these
+compositions, therefore, must, at the beginning of the twelfth
+century, have been still in existence.  Nothing can be sounder; every
+step is proved, and fairly proved, as one goes along.  O'Curry thus
+affords a good specimen of the sane mode of proceeding so much wanted
+in Celtic researches, and so little practised by Edward Davies and
+his brethren; and to found this sane method, Zeuss, by the example he
+sets in his own department of philology, has mainly contributed.
+
+Science's reconciling power, too, on which I have already touched,
+philology, in her Celtic researches, again and again illustrates.
+Races and languages have been absurdly joined, and unity has been
+often rashly assumed at stages where one was far, very far, from
+having yet really reached unity.  Science has and will long have to
+be a divider and a separatist, breaking arbitrary and fanciful
+connections, and dissipating dreams of a premature and impossible
+unity.  Still, science,--true science,--recognises in the bottom of
+her soul a law of ultimate fusion, of conciliation.  To reach this,
+but to reach it legitimately, she tends.  She draws, for instance,
+towards the same idea which fills her elder and diviner sister,
+poetry,--the idea of the substantial unity of man; though she draws
+towards it by roads of her own.  But continually she is showing us
+affinity where we imagined there was isolation.  What school-boy of
+us has not rummaged his Greek dictionary in vain for a satisfactory
+account of that old name for the Peloponnese, the Apian Land? and
+within the limits of Greek itself there is none.  But the Scythian
+name for earth 'apia,' watery, water-issued, meaning first isle and
+then land--this name, which we find in 'avia,' ScandinAVIA, and in
+'ey' for AldernEY, not only explains the Apian Land of Sophocles for
+us, but points the way to a whole world of relationships of which we
+knew nothing.  The Scythians themselves again,--obscure, far-
+separated Mongolian people as they used to appear to us,--when we
+find that they are essentially Teutonic and Indo-European, their very
+name the same word as the common Latin word 'scutum,' the SHIELDED
+people, what a surprise they give us!  And then, before we have
+recovered from this surprise we learn that the name of their father
+and god, Targitavus, carries us I know not how much further into
+familiar company.  This divinity, Shining with the targe, the Greek
+Hercules, the Sun, contains in the second half of his name, tavus,
+'shining,' a wonderful cement to hold times and nations together.
+Tavus, 'shining,' from 'tava'--in Sanscrit, as well as Scythian, 'to
+burn' or 'shine,'--is Divus, dies, Zeus, [Greek], Deva, and I know not
+how much more; and Taviti, the bright and burnt, fire, the place of
+fire, the hearth, the centre of the family, becomes the family
+itself, just as our word family, the Latin familia, is from thymele,
+the sacred centre of fire.  The hearth comes to mean home.  Then from
+home it comes to mean the group of homes, the tribe; from the tribe
+the entire nation; and in this sense of nation or people, the word
+appears in Gothic, Norse, Celtic, and Persian, as well as in
+Scythian; the Theuthisks, Deutschen, Tudesques, are the men of one
+theuth, nation, or people; and of this our name Germans itself is,
+perhaps, only the Roman translation, meaning the men of one germ or
+stock.  The Celtic divinity, Teutates, has his name from the Celtic
+teuta, people; taviti, fire, appearing here in its secondary and
+derived sense of PEOPLE, just as it does in its own Scythian language
+in Targitavus's second name, Tavit-varus, Teutaros, the protector of
+the people.  Another Celtic divinity, the Hesus of Lucan, finds his
+brother in the Gaisos, the sword, symbolising the god of battles of
+the Teutonic Scythians. {66}  And after philology has thus related to
+each other the Celt and the Teuton, she takes another branch of the
+Indo-European family, the Sclaves, and shows us them as having the
+same name with the German Suevi, the SOLAR people; the common ground
+here, too, being that grand point of union, the sun, fire.  So, also,
+we find Mr. Meyer, whose Celtic studies I just now mentioned, harping
+again and again on the connection even in Europe, if you go back far
+enough, between Celt and German.  So, after all we have heard, and
+truly heard, of the diversity between all things Semitic and all
+things Indo-European, there is now an Italian philologist at work
+upon the relationship between Sanscrit and Hebrew.
+
+Both in small and great things, philology, dealing with Celtic
+matters, has exemplified this tending of science towards unity.  Who
+has not been puzzled by the relation of the Scots with Ireland--that
+vetus et major Scotia, as Colgan calls it?  Who does not feel what
+pleasure Zeuss brings us when he suggests that Gael, the name for the
+Irish Celt, and Scot, are at bottom the same word, both having their
+origin in a word meaning wind, and both signifying the violent stormy
+people? {68}  Who does not feel his mind agreeably cleared about our
+friends the Fenians, when he learns that the root of their name, fen,
+'white,' appears in the hero Fingal; in Gwynned, the Welsh name for
+North Wales in the Roman Venedotia; in Vannes in Brittany; in Venice?
+The very name of Ireland, some say, comes from the famous Sanscrit
+word Arya, the land of the Aryans, or noble men; although the weight
+of opinion seems to be in favour of connecting it rather with another
+Sanscrit word, avara, occidental, the western land or isle of the
+west. {69}  But, at any rate, who that has been brought up to think
+the Celts utter aliens from us and our culture, can come without a
+start of sympathy upon such words as heol (sol), or buaist (fuisti)?
+or upon such a sentence as this, 'Peris Duw dui funnaun' ('God
+prepared two fountains')?  Or when Mr. Whitley Stokes, one of the
+very ablest scholars formed in Zeuss's school, a born philologist,--
+he now occupies, alas! a post under the Government of India, instead
+of a chair of philology at home, and makes one think mournfully of
+Montesquieu's saying, that had he been an Englishman he should never
+have produced his great work, but have caught the contagion of
+practical life, and devoted himself to what is called 'rising in the
+world,' when Mr. Whitley Stokes, in his edition of Cormac's Glossary,
+holds up the Irish word traith, the sea, and makes us remark that,
+though the names Triton, Amphitrite, and those of corresponding
+Indian and Zend divinities, point to the meaning sea, yet it is only
+Irish which actually supplies the vocable, how delightfully that
+brings Ireland into the Indo-European concert!  What a wholesome
+buffet it gives to Lord Lyndhurst's alienation doctrines!
+
+To go a little further.  Of the two great Celtic divisions of
+language, the Gaelic and the Cymric, the Gaelic, say the
+philologists, is more related to the younger, more synthetic, group
+of languages, Sanscrit, Greek, Zend, Latin and Teutonic; the Cymric
+to the older, more analytic Turanian group.  Of the more synthetic
+Aryan group, again, Zend and Teutonic are, in their turn, looser and
+more analytic than Sanscrit and Greek, more in sympathy with the
+Turanian group and with Celtic.  What possibilities of affinity and
+influence are here hinted at; what lines of inquiry, worth exploring,
+at any rate, suggest themselves to one's mind.  By the forms of its
+language a nation expresses its very self.  Our language is the
+loosest, the most analytic, of all European languages.  And we, then,
+what are we? what is England?  I will not answer, A vast obscure
+Cymric basis with a vast visible Teutonic superstructure; but I will
+say that that answer sometimes suggests itself, at any rate,--
+sometimes knocks at our mind's door for admission; and we begin to
+cast about and see whether it is to be let in.
+
+But the forms of its language are not our only key to a people; what
+it says in its language, its literature, is the great key, and we
+must get back to literature.  The literature of the Celtic peoples
+has not yet had its Zeuss, and greatly it wants him.  We need a Zeuss
+to apply to Celtic literature, to all its vexed questions of dates,
+authenticity, and significance, the criticism, the sane method, the
+disinterested endeavour to get at the real facts, which Zeuss has
+shown in dealing with Celtic language.  Science is good in itself,
+and therefore Celtic literature,--the Celt-haters having failed to
+prove it a bubble,--Celtic literature is interesting, merely as an
+object of knowledge.  But it reinforces and redoubles our interest in
+Celtic literature if we find that here, too, science exercises the
+reconciling, the uniting influence of which I have said so much; if
+we find here, more than anywhere else, traces of kinship, and the
+most essential sort of kinship, spiritual kinship, between us and the
+Celt, of which we had never dreamed.  I settle nothing, and can
+settle nothing; I have not the special knowledge needed for that.  I
+have no pretension to do more than to try and awaken interest; to
+seize on hints, to point out indications, which, to any one with a
+feeling for literature, suggest themselves; to stimulate other
+inquirers.  I must surely be without the bias which has so often
+rendered Welsh and Irish students extravagant; why, my very name
+expresses that peculiar Semitico-Saxon mixture which makes the
+typical Englishman; I can have no ends to serve in finding in Celtic
+literature more than is there.  What IS there, is for me the only
+question.
+
+
+III.
+
+
+We have seen how philology carries us towards ideas of affinity of
+race which are new to us.  But it is evident that this affinity, even
+if proved, can be no very potent affair, unless it goes beyond the
+stage at which we have hitherto observed it.  Affinity between races
+still, so to speak, in their mother's womb, counts for something,
+indeed, but cannot count for very much.  So long as Celt and Teuton
+are in their embryo rudimentary state, or, at least, no such great
+while out of their cradle, still engaged in their wanderings, changes
+of place and struggle for development, so long as they have not yet
+crystallised into solid nations, they may touch and mix in passing,
+and yet very little come of it.  It is when the embryo has grown and
+solidified into a distinct nation, into the Gaul or German of
+history, when it has finally acquired the characters which make the
+Gaul of history what he is, the German of history what he is, that
+contact and mixture are important, and may leave a long train of
+effects; for Celt and Teuton by this time have their formed, marked,
+national, ineffaceable qualities to oppose or to communicate.  The
+contact of the German of the Continent with the Celt was in the pre-
+historic times, and the definite German type, as we know it, was
+fixed later, and from the time when it became fixed was not
+influenced by the Celtic type.  But here in our country, in historic
+times, long after the Celtic embryo had crystallised into the Celt
+proper, long after the Germanic embryo had crystallised into the
+German proper, there was an important contact between the two
+peoples; the Saxons invaded the Britons and settled themselves in the
+Britons' country.  Well, then, here was a contact which one might
+expect would leave its traces; if the Saxons got the upper hand, as
+we all know they did, and made our country be England and us be
+English, there must yet, one would think, be some trace of the Saxon
+having met the Briton; there must be some Celtic vein or other
+running through us.  Many people say there is nothing at all of the
+kind, absolutely nothing; the Saturday Review treats these matters of
+ethnology with great power and learning, and the Saturday Review says
+we are 'a nation into which a Norman element, like a much smaller
+Celtic element, was so completely absorbed that it is vain to seek
+after Norman or Celtic elements in any modern Englishman.'  And the
+other day at Zurich I read a long essay on English literature by one
+of the professors there, in which the writer observed, as a
+remarkable thing, that while other countries conquered by the
+Germans,--France, for instance, and Italy,--had ousted all German
+influence from their genius and literature, there were two countries,
+not originally Germanic, but conquered by the Germans, England and
+German Switzerland, of which the genius and the literature were
+purely and unmixedly German; and this he laid down as a position
+which nobody would dream of challenging.
+
+I say it is strange that this should be so, and we in particular have
+reason for inquiring whether it really is so; because though, as I
+have said, even as a matter of science the Celt has a claim to be
+known, and we have an interest in knowing him, yet this interest is
+wonderfully enhanced if we find him to have actually a part in us.
+The question is to be tried by external and by internal evidence; the
+language and the physical type of our race afford certain data for
+trying it, and other data are afforded by our literature, genius, and
+spiritual production generally.  Data of this second kind belong to
+the province of the literary critic; data of the first kind to the
+province of the philologist and of the physiologist.
+
+The province of the philologist and of the physiologist is not mine;
+but this whole question as to the mixture of Celt with Saxon in us
+has been so little explored, people have been so prone to settle it
+off-hand according to their prepossessions, that even on the
+philological and physiological side of it I must say a few words in
+passing.  Surely it must strike with surprise any one who thinks of
+it, to find that without any immense inpouring of a whole people,
+that by mere expeditions of invaders having to come over the sea, and
+in no greater numbers than the Saxons, so far as we can make out,
+actually came, the old occupants of this island, the Celtic Britons,
+should have been completely annihilated, or even so completely
+absorbed that it is vain to seek after Celtic elements in the
+existing English race.  Of deliberate wholesale extermination of the
+Celtic race, all of them who could not fly to Wales or Scotland, we
+hear nothing; and without some such extermination one would suppose
+that a great mass of them must have remained in the country, their
+lot the obscure and, so to speak, underground lot of a subject race,
+but yet insensibly getting mixed with their conquerors, and their
+blood entering into the composition of a new people, in which the
+stock of the conquerors counts for most, but the stock of the
+conquered, too, counts for something.  How little the triumph of the
+conqueror's laws, manners, and language, proves the extinction of the
+old race, we may see by looking at France; Gaul was Latinised in
+language, manners, and laws, and yet her people remained essentially
+Celtic.  The Germanisation of Britain went far deeper than the
+Latinisation of France, and not only laws, manners, and language, but
+the main current of the blood became Germanic; but how, without some
+process of radica extirpation, of which, as I say, there is no
+evidence, can there have failed to subsist in Britain, as in Gaul, a
+Celtic current too?  The indications of this in our language have
+never yet been thoroughly searched out; the Celtic names of places
+prove nothing, of course, as to the point here in question; they come
+from the pre-historic times, the times before the nations, Germanic
+or Celtic, had crystallised, and they are everywhere, as the
+impetuous Celt was formerly everywhere,--in the Alps, the Apennines,
+the Cevennes, the Rhine, the Po, as well as in the Thames, the
+Humber, Cumberland, London.  But it is said that the words of Celtic
+origin for things having to do with every-day peaceful life,--the
+life of a settled nation,--words like basket (to take an instance
+which all the world knows) form a much larger body in our language
+than is commonly supposed; it is said that a number of our raciest,
+most idiomatic, popular words--for example, bam, kick, whop, twaddle,
+fudge, hitch, muggy,--are Celtic.  These assertions require to be
+carefully examined, and it by no means follows that because an
+English word is found in Celtic, therefore we get it from thence; but
+they have not yet had the attention which, as illustrating through
+language this matter of the subsistence and intermingling in our
+nation of a Celtic part, they merit.
+
+Nor have the physiological data which illustrate this matter had much
+more attention from us in England.  But in France, a physician, half
+English by blood though a Frenchman by home and language, Monsieur W.
+F. Edwards, brother to Monsieur Milne-Edwards, the well-known
+zoologist, published in 1839 a letter to Monsieur Amedee Thierry with
+this title:  Des Caracteres Physiologiques des Races Humaines
+consideres dans leurs Rapports avec l'Histoire.  The letter attracted
+great attention on the Continent; it fills not much more than a
+hundred pages, and they are a hundred pages which well deserve
+reading and re-reading.  Monsieur Thierry in his Histoire des Gaulois
+had divided the population of Gaul into certain groups, and the
+object of Monsieur Edwards was to try this division by physiology.
+Groups of men have, he says, their physical type which distinguishes
+them, as well as their language; the traces of this physical type
+endure as the traces of language endure, and physiology is enabled to
+verify history by them.  Accordingly, he determines the physical type
+of each of the two great Celtic families, the Gaels and the Cymris,
+who are said to have been distributed in a certain order through
+Gaul, and then he tracks these types in the population of France at
+the present day, and so verifies the alleged original order of
+distribution.  In doing this, he makes excursions into neighbouring
+countries where the Gaels and the Cymris have been, and he declares
+that in England he finds abundant traces of the physical type which
+he has established as the Cymric, still subsisting in our population,
+and having descended from the old British possessors of our soil
+before the Saxon conquest.  But if we are to believe the current
+English opinion, says Monsieur Edwards, the stock of these old
+British possessors is clean gone.  On this opinion he makes the
+following comment:-
+
+'In the territory occupied by the Saxons, the Britons were no longer
+an independent nation, nor even a people with any civil existence at
+all.  For history, therefore, they were dead, above all for history
+as it was then written; but they had not perished; they still lived
+on, and undoubtedly in such numbers as the remains of a great nation,
+in spite of its disasters, might still be expected to keep.  That the
+Britons were destroyed or expelled from England, properly so called,
+is, as I have said, a popular opinion in that country.  It is founded
+on the exaggeration of the writers of history; but in these very
+writers, when we come to look closely at what they say, we find the
+confession that the remains of this people were reduced to a state of
+strict servitude.  Attached to the soil, they will have shared in
+that emancipation which during the course of the middle ages
+gradually restored to political life the mass of the population in
+the countries of Western Europe; recovering by slow degrees their
+rights without resuming their name, and rising gradually with the
+rise of industry, they will have got spread through all ranks of
+society.  The gradualness of this movement, and the obscurity which
+enwrapped its beginnings, allowed the contempt of the conqueror and
+the shame of the conquered to become fixed feelings; and so it turns
+out, that an Englishman who now thinks himself sprung from the Saxons
+or the Normans, is often in reality the descendant of the Britons.'
+
+So physiology, as well as language, incomplete though the application
+of their tests to this matter has hitherto been, may lead us to
+hesitate before accepting the round assertion that it is vain to
+search for Celtic elements in any modern Englishman.  But it is not
+only by the tests of physiology and language that we can try this
+matter.  As there are for physiology physical marks, such as the
+square heads of the German, the round head of the Gael, the oval head
+of the Cymri, which determine the type of a people, so for criticism
+there are spiritual marks which determine the type, and make us speak
+of the Greek genius, the Teutonic genius, the Celtic genius, and so
+on.  Here is another test at our service; and this test, too, has
+never yet been thoroughly employed.  Foreign critics have indeed
+occasionally hazarded the idea that in English poetry there is a
+Celtic element traceable; and Mr. Morley, in his very readable as
+well as very useful book on the English writers before Chaucer, has a
+sentence which struck my attention when I read it, because it
+expresses an opinion which I, too, have long held.  Mr. Morley says:
+--'The main current of English literature cannot be disconnected from
+the lively Celtic wit in which it has one of its sources.  The Celts
+do not form an utterly distinct part of our mixed population.  But
+for early, frequent, and various contact with the race that in its
+half-barbarous days invented Ossian's dialogues with St. Patrick, and
+that quickened afterwards the Northmen's blood in France, Germanic
+England would not have produced a Shakspeare.'  But there Mr. Morley
+leaves the matter.  He indicates this Celtic element and influence,
+but he does not show us,--it did not come within the scope of his
+work to show us,--how this influence has declared itself.  Unlike the
+physiological test, or the linguistic test, this literary, spiritual
+test is one which I may perhaps be allowed to try my hand at
+applying.  I say that there is a Celtic element in the English
+nature, as well as a Germanic element, and that this element
+manifests itself in our spirit and literature.  But before I try to
+point out how it manifests itself, it may be as well to get a clear
+notion of what we mean by a Celtic element, a Germanic element; what
+characters, that is, determine for us the Celtic genius, the Germanic
+genius, as we commonly conceive the two.
+
+
+IV.
+
+
+Let me repeat what I have often said of the characteristics which
+mark the English spirit, the English genius.  This spirit, this
+genius, judged, to be sure, rather from a friend's than an enemy's
+point of view, yet judged on the whole fairly, is characterised, I
+have repeatedly said, by ENERGY WITH HONESTY.  Take away some of the
+energy which comes to us, as I believe, in part from Celtic and Roman
+sources; instead of energy, say rather STEADINESS; and you have the
+Germanic genius STEADINESS WITH HONESTY.  It is evident how nearly
+the two characterisations approach one another; and yet they leave,
+as we shall see, a great deal of room for difference.  Steadiness
+with honesty; the danger for a national spirit thus composed is the
+humdrum, the plain and ugly, the ignoble:  in a word, das Gemeine,
+die Gemeinheit, that curse of Germany, against which Goethe was all
+his life fighting.  The excellence of a national spirit thus composed
+is freedom from whim, flightiness, perverseness; patient fidelity to
+Nature, in a word, SCIENCE,--leading it at last, though slowly, and
+not by the most brilliant road, out of the bondage of the humdrum and
+common, into the better life.  The universal dead-level of plainness
+and homeliness, the lack of all beauty and distinction in form and
+feature, the slowness and clumsiness of the language, the eternal
+beer, sausages, and bad tobacco, the blank commonness everywhere,
+pressing at last like a weight on the spirits of the traveller in
+Northern Germany, and making him impatient to be gone, this is the
+weak side; the industry, the well-doing, the patient steady
+elaboration of things, the idea of science governing all departments
+of human activity--this is the strong side; and through this side of
+her genius, Germany has already obtained excellent results, and is
+destined, we may depend upon it, however her pedantry, her slowness,
+her fumbling, her ineffectiveness, her bad government, may at times
+make us cry out, to an immense development. {82}
+
+FOR DULNESS, THE CREEPING SAXONS,--says an old Irish poem, assigning
+the characteristics for which different nations are celebrated:-
+
+
+For acuteness and valour, the Greeks,
+For excessive pride, the Romans,
+For dulness, the creeping Saxons;
+For beauty and amorousness, the Gaedhils.
+
+
+We have seen in what sense, and with what explanation, this
+characterisation of the German may be allowed to stand; now let us
+come to the beautiful and amorous Gaedhil.  Or rather, let us find a
+definition which may suit both branches of the Celtic family, the
+Cymri as well as the Gael.  It is clear that special circumstances
+may have developed some one side in the national character of Cymri
+or Gael, Welshman or Irishman, so that the observer's notice shall be
+readily caught by this side, and yet it may be impossible to adopt it
+as characteristic of the Celtic nature generally.  For instance, in
+his beautiful essay on the poetry of the Celtic races, M. Renan, with
+his eyes fixed on the Bretons and the Welsh, is struck with the
+timidity, the shyness, the delicacy of the Celtic nature, its
+preference for a retired life, its embarrassment at having to deal
+with the great world.  He talks of the douce petite race
+naturellement chretienne, his race fiere et timide, a l'exterieur
+gauche et embarrassee.  But it is evident that this description,
+however well it may do for the Cymri, will never do for the Gael,
+never do for the typical Irishman of Donnybrook fair.  Again, M.
+Renan's infinie delicatesse de sentiment qui caracterise la race
+Celtique, how little that accords with the popular conception of an
+Irishman who wants to borrow money!  SENTIMENT is, however, the word
+which marks where the Celtic races really touch and are one;
+sentimental, if the Celtic nature is to be characterised by a single
+term, is the best term to take.  An organisation quick to feel
+impressions, and feeling them very strongly; a lively personality
+therefore, keenly sensitive to joy and to sorrow; this is the main
+point.  If the downs of life too much outnumber the ups, this
+temperament, just because it is so quickly and nearly conscious of
+all impressions, may no doubt be seen shy and wounded; it may be seen
+in wistful regret, it may be seen in passionate, penetrating
+melancholy; but its essence is to aspire ardently after life, light,
+and emotion, to be expansive, adventurous, and gay.  Our word GAY, it
+is said, is itself Celtic.  It is not from gaudium, but from the
+Celtic gair, to laugh; {84} and the impressionable Celt, soon up and
+soon down, is the more down because it is so his nature to be up to
+be sociable, hospitable, eloquent, admired, figuring away
+brilliantly.  He loves bright colours, he easily becomes audacious,
+overcrowing, full of fanfaronade.  The German, say the physiologists,
+has the larger volume of intestines (and who that has ever seen a
+German at a table-d'hote will not readily believe this?), the
+Frenchman has the more developed organs of respiration.  That is just
+the expansive, eager Celtic nature; the head in the air, snuffing and
+snorting; A PROUD LOOK AND A HIGH STOMACH, as the Psalmist says, but
+without any such settled savage temper as the Psalmist seems to
+impute by those words.  For good and for bad, the Celtic genius is
+more airy and unsubstantial, goes less near the ground, than the
+German.  The Celt is often called sensual; but it is not so much the
+vulgar satisfactions of sense that attract him as emotion and
+excitement; he is truly, as I began by saying, sentimental.
+
+Sentimental,--ALWAYS READY TO REACT AGAINST THE DESPOTISM OF FACT;
+that is the description a great friend {85} of the Celt gives of him;
+and it is not a bad description of the sentimental temperament; it
+lets us into the secret of its dangers and of its habitual want of
+success.  Balance, measure, and patience, these are the eternal
+conditions, even supposing the happiest temperament to start with, of
+high success; and balance, measure, and patience are just what the
+Celt has never had.  Even in the world of spiritual creation, he has
+never, in spite of his admirable gifts of quick perception and warm
+emotion, succeeded perfectly, because he never has had steadiness,
+patience, sanity enough to comply with the conditions under which
+alone can expression be perfectly given to the finest perceptions and
+emotions.  The Greek has the same perceptive, emotional temperament
+as the Celt; but he adds to this temperament the sense of MEASURE;
+hence his admirable success in the plastic arts, in which the Celtic
+genius, with its chafing against the despotism of fact, its perpetual
+straining after mere emotion, has accomplished nothing.  In the
+comparatively petty art of ornamentation, in rings, brooches,
+crosiers, relic-cases, and so on, he has done just enough to show his
+delicacy of taste, his happy temperament; but the grand difficulties
+of painting and sculpture, the prolonged dealings of spirit with
+matter, he has never had patience for.  Take the more spiritual arts
+of music and poetry.  All that emotion alone can do in music the Celt
+has done; the very soul of emotion breathes in the Scotch and Irish
+airs; but with all this power of musical feeling, what has the Celt,
+so eager for emotion that he has not patience for science, effected
+in music, to be compared with what the less emotional German,
+steadily developing his musical feeling with the science of a
+Sebastian Bach or a Beethoven, has effected?  In poetry, again,
+poetry which the Celt has so passionately, so nobly loved; poetry
+where emotion counts for so much, but where reason, too, reason,
+measure, sanity, also count for so much,--the Celt has shown genius,
+indeed, splendid genius; but even here his faults have clung to him,
+and hindered him from producing great works, such as other nations
+with a genius for poetry,--the Greeks, say, or the Italians,--have
+produced.  The Celt has not produced great poetical works, he has
+only produced poetry with an air of greatness investing it all, and
+sometimes giving, moreover, to short pieces, or to passages, lines,
+and snatches of long pieces, singular beauty and power.  And yet he
+loved poetry so much that he grudged no pains to it; but the true
+art, the architectonice which shapes great works, such as the
+Agamemnon or the Divine Comedy, comes only after a steady, deep-
+searching survey, a firm conception of the facts of human life, which
+the Celt has not patience for.  So he runs off into technic, where he
+employs the utmost elaboration, and attains astonishing skill; but in
+the contents of his poetry you have only so much interpretation of
+the world as the first dash of a quick, strong perception, and then
+sentiment, infinite sentiment, can bring you.  Here, too, his want of
+sanity and steadfastness has kept the Celt back from the highest
+success.
+
+If his rebellion against fact has thus lamed the Celt even in
+spiritual work, how much more must it have lamed him in the world of
+business and politics!  The skilful and resolute appliance of means
+to ends which is needed both to make progress in material
+civilisation, and also to form powerful states, is just what the Celt
+has least turn for.  He is sensual, as I have said, or at least
+sensuous; loves bright colours, company, and pleasure; and here he is
+like the Greek and Latin races; but compare the talent the Greek and
+Latin (or Latinised) races have shown for gratifying their senses,
+for procuring an outward life, rich, luxurious, splendid, with the
+Celt's failure to reach any material civilisation sound and
+satisfying, and not out at elbows, poor, slovenly, and half-
+barbarous.  The sensuousness of the Greek made Sybaris and Corinth,
+the sensuousness of the Latin made Rome and Baiae, the sensuousness
+of the Latinised Frenchman makes Paris; the sensuousness of the Celt
+proper has made Ireland.  Even in his ideal heroic times, his gay and
+sensuous nature cannot carry him, in the appliances of his favourite
+life of sociability and pleasure, beyond the gross and creeping Saxon
+whom he despises; the regent Breas, we are told in the Battle of
+Moytura of the Fomorians, became unpopular because 'the knives of his
+people were not greased at his table, nor did their breath smell of
+ale at the banquet.'  In its grossness and barbarousness is not that
+Saxon, as Saxon as it can be? just what the Latinised Norman,
+sensuous and sociable like the Celt, but with the talent to make this
+bent of his serve to a practical embellishment of his mode of living,
+found so disgusting in the Saxon.
+
+And as in material civilisation he has been ineffectual, so has the
+Celt been ineffectual in politics.  This colossal, impetuous,
+adventurous wanderer, the Titan of the early world, who in primitive
+times fills so large a place on earth's scene, dwindles and dwindles
+as history goes on, and at last is shrunk to what we now see him.
+For ages and ages the world has been constantly slipping, ever more
+and more out of the Celt's grasp.  'They went forth to the war,'
+Ossian says most truly, 'BUT THEY ALWAYS FELL.'
+
+And yet, if one sets about constituting an ideal genius, what a great
+deal of the Celt does one find oneself drawn to put into it!  Of an
+ideal genius one does not want the elements, any of them, to be in a
+state of weakness; on the contrary, one wants all of them to be in
+the highest state of power; but with a law of measure, of harmony,
+presiding over the whole.  So the sensibility of the Celt, if
+everything else were not sacrificed to it, is a beautiful and
+admirable force.  For sensibility, the power of quick and strong
+perception and emotion, is one of the very prime constituents of
+genius, perhaps its most positive constituent; it is to the soul what
+good senses are to the body, the grand natural condition of
+successful activity.  Sensibility gives genius its materials; one
+cannot have too much of it, if one can but keep its master and not be
+its slave.  Do not let us wish that the Celt had had less
+sensibility, but that he had been more master of it.  Even as it is,
+if his sensibility has been a source of weakness to him, it has been
+a source of power too, and a source of happiness.  Some people have
+found in the Celtic nature and its sensibility the main root out of
+which chivalry and romance and the glorification of a feminine ideal
+spring; this is a great question, with which I cannot deal here.  Let
+me notice in passing, however, that there is, in truth, a Celtic air
+about the extravagance of chivalry, its reaction against the
+despotism of fact, its straining human nature further than it will
+stand.  But putting all this question of chivalry and its origin on
+one side, no doubt the sensibility of the Celtic nature, its nervous
+exaltation, have something feminine in them, and the Celt is thus
+peculiarly disposed to feel the spell of the feminine idiosyncrasy;
+he has an affinity to it; he is not far from its secret.  Again, his
+sensibility gives him a peculiarly near and intimate feeling of
+nature and the life of nature; here, too, he seems in a special way
+attracted by the secret before him, the secret of natural beauty and
+natural magic, and to be close to it, to half-divine it.  In the
+productions of the Celtic genius, nothing, perhaps, is so interesting
+as the evidences of this power:  I shall have occasion to give
+specimens of them by-and-by.  The same sensibility made the Celts
+full of reverence and enthusiasm for genius, learning, and the things
+of the mind; TO BE A BARD, FREED A MAN,--that is a characteristic
+stroke of this generous and ennobling ardour of theirs, which no race
+has ever shown more strongly.  Even the extravagance and exaggeration
+of the sentimental Celtic nature has often something romantic and
+attractive about it, something which has a sort of smack of
+misdirected good.  The Celt, undisciplinable, anarchical, and
+turbulent by nature, but out of affection and admiration giving
+himself body and soul to some leader, that is not a promising
+political temperament, it is just the opposite of the Anglo-Saxon
+temperament, disciplinable and steadily obedient within certain
+limits, but retaining an inalienable part of freedom and self-
+dependence; but it is a temperament for which one has a kind of
+sympathy notwithstanding.  And very often, for the gay defiant
+reaction against fact of the lively Celtic nature one has more than
+sympathy; one feels, in spite of the extravagance, in spite of good
+sense disapproving, magnetised and exhilarated by it.  The Gauls had
+a rule inflicting a fine on every warrior who, when he appeared on
+parade, was found to stick out too much in front,--to be corpulent,
+in short.  Such a rule is surely the maddest article of war ever
+framed, and to people to whom nature has assigned a large volume of
+intestines, must appear, no doubt, horrible; but yet has it not an
+audacious, sparkling, immaterial manner with it, which lifts one out
+of routine, and sets one's spirits in a glow?
+
+All tendencies of human nature are in themselves vital and
+profitable; when they are blamed, they are only to be blamed
+relatively, not absolutely.  This holds true of the Saxon's phlegm as
+well as of the Celt's sentiment.  Out of the steady humdrum habit of
+the creeping Saxon, as the Celt calls him,--out of his way of going
+near the ground,--has come, no doubt, Philistinism, that plant of
+essentially Germanic growth, flourishing with its genuine marks only
+in the German fatherland, Great Britain and her colonies, and the
+United States of America; but what a soul of goodness there is in
+Philistinism itself! and this soul of goodness I, who am often
+supposed to be Philistinism's mortal enemy merely because I do not
+wish it to have things all its own way, cherish as much as anybody.
+This steady-going habit leads at last, as I have said, up to science,
+up to the comprehension and interpretation of the world.  With us in
+Great Britain, it is true, it does not seem to lead so far as that;
+it is in Germany, where the habit is more unmixed, that it can lead
+to science.  Here with us it seems at a certain point to meet with a
+conflicting force, which checks it and prevents its pushing on to
+science; but before reaching this point what conquests has it not
+won! and all the more, perhaps, for stopping short at this point, for
+spending its exertions within a bounded field, the field of plain
+sense, of direct practical utility.  How it has augmented the
+comforts and conveniences of life for us!  Doors that open, windows
+that shut, locks that turn, razors that shave, coats that wear,
+watches that go, and a thousand more such good things, are the
+invention of the Philistines.
+
+Here, then, if commingling there is in our race, are two very unlike
+elements to commingle; the steady-going Saxon temperament and the
+sentimental Celtic temperament.  But before we go on to try and
+verify, in our life and literature, the alleged fact of this
+commingling, we have yet another element to take into account, the
+Norman element.  The critic in the Saturday Review, whom I have
+already quoted, says that in looking for traces of Normanism in our
+national genius, as in looking for traces of Celtism in it, we do but
+lose our labour; he says, indeed, that there went to the original
+making of our nation a very great deal more of a Norman element than
+of a Celtic element, but he asserts that both elements have now so
+completely disappeared, that it is vain to look for any trace of
+either of them in the modern Englishman.  But this sort of assertion
+I do not like to admit without trying it a little.  I want,
+therefore, to get some plain notion of the Norman habit and genius,
+as I have sought to get some plain notion of the Saxon and Celtic.
+Some people will say that the Normans are Teutonic, and that
+therefore the distinguishing characters of the German genius must be
+those of their genius also; but the matter cannot be settled in this
+speedy fashion.  No doubt the basis of the Norman race is Teutonic;
+but the governing point in the history of the Norman race,--so far,
+at least, as we English have to do with it,--is not its Teutonic
+origin, but its Latin civilisation.  The French people have, as I
+have already remarked, an undoubtedly Celtic basis, yet so decisive
+in its effect upon a nation's habit and character can be the contact
+with a stronger civilisation, that Gaul, without changing the basis
+of her blood, became, for all practical intents and purposes, a Latin
+country, France and not Ireland, through the Roman conquest.
+Latinism conquered Celtism in her, as it also conquered the Germanism
+imported by the Frankish and other invasions; Celtism is, however, I
+need not say, everywhere manifest still in the French nation; even
+Germanism is distinctly traceable in it, as any one who attentively
+compares the French with other Latin races will see.  No one can look
+carefully at the French troops in Rome, amongst the Italian
+population, and not perceive this trace of Germanism; I do not mean
+in the Alsatian soldiers only, but in the soldiers of genuine France.
+But the governing character of France, as a power in the world, is
+Latin; such was the force of Greek and Roman civilisation upon a race
+whose whole mass remained Celtic, and where the Celtic language still
+lingered on, they say, among the common people, for some five or six
+centuries after the Roman conquest.  But the Normans in Neustria lost
+their old Teutonic language in a wonderfully short time; when they
+conquered England they were already Latinised; with them were a
+number of Frenchmen by race, men from Anjou and Poitou, so they
+brought into England more non-Teutonic blood, besides what they had
+themselves got by intermarriage, than is commonly supposed; the great
+point, however, is, that by civilisation this vigorous race, when it
+took possession of England, was Latin.
+
+These Normans, who in Neustria had lost their old Teutonic tongue so
+rapidly, kept in England their new Latin tongue for some three
+centuries.  It was Edward the Third's reign before English came to be
+used in law-pleadings and spoken at court.  Why this difference?
+Both in Neustria and in England the Normans were a handful; but in
+Neustria, as Teutons, they were in contact with a more advanced
+civilisation than their own; in England, as Latins, with a less
+advanced.  The Latinised Normans in England had the sense for fact,
+which the Celts had not; and the love of strenuousness, clearness,
+and rapidity, the high Latin spirit, which the Saxons had not.  They
+hated the slowness and dulness of the creeping Saxon; it offended
+their clear, strenuous talent for affairs, as it offended the Celt's
+quick and delicate perception.  The Normans had the Roman talent for
+affairs, the Roman decisiveness in emergencies.  They have been
+called prosaic, but this is not a right word for them; they were
+neither sentimental, nor, strictly speaking, poetical.  They had more
+sense for rhetoric than for poetry, like the Romans; but, like the
+Romans, they had too high a spirit not to like a noble intellectual
+stimulus of some kind, and thus they were carried out of the region
+of the merely prosaic.  Their foible,--the bad excess of their
+characterising quality of strenuousness,--was not a prosaic flatness,
+it was hardness and insolence.
+
+I have been obliged to fetch a very wide circuit, but at last I have
+got what I went to seek.  I have got a rough, but, I hope, clear
+notion of these three forces, the Germanic genius, the Celtic genius,
+the Norman genius.  The Germanic genius has steadiness as its main
+basis, with commonness and humdrum for its defect, fidelity to nature
+for its excellence.  The Celtic genius, sentiment as its main basis,
+with love of beauty, charm, and spirituality for its excellence,
+ineffectualness and self-will for its defect.  The Norman genius,
+talent for affairs as its main basis, with strenuousness and clear
+rapidity for its excellence, hardness and insolence for its defect.
+And now to try and trace these in the composite English genius.
+
+
+V.
+
+
+To begin with what is more external.  If we are so wholly Anglo-Saxon
+and Germanic as people say, how comes it that the habits and gait of
+the German language are so exceedingly unlike ours?  Why while the
+Times talks in this fashion:  'At noon a long line of carriages
+extended from Pall Mall to the Peers' entrance of the Palace of
+Westminster,' does the Cologne Gazette talk in this other fashion:
+'Nachdem die Vorbereitungen zu dem auf dem GurzenichSaale zu Ebren
+der Abgeordneten Statt finden sollenden Bankette bereits vollstandig
+getroffen worden waren, fand heute vormittag auf polizeiliche
+Anordnung die Schliessung sammtlicher Zugange zum Gurzenich Statt'?
+{97}  Surely the mental habit of people who express their thoughts in
+so very different a manner, the one rapid, the other slow, the one
+plain, the other embarrassed, the one trailing, the other striding,
+cannot be essentially the same.  The English language, strange
+compound as it is, with its want of inflections, and with all the
+difficulties which this want of inflections brings upon it, has yet
+made itself capable of being, in good hands, a business-instrument as
+ready, direct, and clear, as French or Latin.  Again:  perhaps no
+nation, after the Greeks and Romans, has so clearly felt in what true
+rhetoric, rhetoric of the best kind, consists, and reached so high a
+pitch of excellence in this, as the English.  Our sense for rhetoric
+has in some ways done harm to us in our cultivation of literature,
+harm to us, still more, in our cultivation of science; but in the
+true sphere of rhetoric, in public speaking, this sense has given us
+orators whom I do think we may, without fear of being contradicted
+and accused of blind national vanity, assert to have inherited the
+great Greek and Roman oratorical tradition more than the orators of
+any other country.  Strafford, Bolingbroke, the two Pitts, Fox,--to
+cite no other names,--I imagine few will dispute that these call up
+the notion of an oratory, in kind, in extent, in power, coming nearer
+than any other body of modern oratory to the oratory of Greece and
+Rome.  And the affinity of spirit in our best public life and
+greatest public men to those of Rome, has often struck observers,
+foreign as well as English.  Now, not only have the Germans shown no
+eminent aptitude for rhetoric such as the English have shown,--that
+was not to be expected, since our public life has done so much to
+develop an aptitude of this kind, and the public life of the Germans
+has done so little,--but they seem in a singular degree devoid of any
+aptitude at all for rhetoric.  Take a speech from the throne in
+Prussia, and compare it with a speech from the throne in England.
+Assuredly it is not in speeches from the throne that English rhetoric
+or any rhetoric shows its best side;--they are often cavilled at,
+often justly cavilled at;--no wonder, for this form of composition is
+beset with very trying difficulties.  But what is to be remarked is
+this;--a speech from the throne falls essentially within the sphere
+of rhetoric, it is one's sense of rhetoric which has to fix its tone
+and style, so as to keep a certain note always sounding in it; in an
+English speech from the throne, whatever its faults, this rhetorical
+note is always struck and kept to; in a Prussian speech from the
+throne, never.  An English speech from the throne is rhetoric; a
+Prussian speech is half talk,--heavy talk,--and half effusion.  This
+is one instance, it may be said; true, but in one instance of this
+kind the presence or the absence of an aptitude for rhetoric is
+decisively shown.  Well, then, why am I not to say that we English
+get our rhetorical sense from the Norman element in us,--our turn for
+this strenuous, direct, high-spirited talent of oratory, from the
+influence of the strenuous, direct, high-spirited Normans?  Modes of
+life, institutions, government, and other such causes, are
+sufficient, I shall be told, to account for English oratory.  Modes
+of life, institutions, government, climate, and so forth,--let me say
+it once for all,--will further or hinder the development of an
+aptitude, but they will not by themselves create the aptitude or
+explain it.  On the other hand, a people's habit and complexion of
+nature go far to determine its modes of life, institutions, and
+government, and even to prescribe the limits within which the
+influences of climate shall tell upon it.
+
+However, it is not my intention, in these remarks, to lay it down for
+certain that this or that part of our powers, shortcomings, and
+behaviour, is due to a Celtic, German, or Norman element in us.  To
+establish this I should need much wider limits, and a knowledge, too,
+far beyond what I possess; all I purpose is to point out certain
+correspondences, not yet, perhaps, sufficiently observed and attended
+to, which seem to lead towards certain conclusions.  The following up
+the inquiry till full proof is reached,--or perhaps, full disproof,--
+is what I want to suggest to more competent persons.  Premising this,
+I now go on to a second matter, somewhat more delicate and inward
+than that with which I began.  Every one knows how well the Greek and
+Latin races, with their direct sense for the visible, palpable world,
+have succeeded in the plastic arts.  The sheer German races, too,
+with their honest love of fact, and their steady pursuit of it,--
+their fidelity to nature, in short,--have attained a high degree of
+success in these arts; few people will deny that Albert Durer and
+Rubens, for example, are to be called masters in painting, and in the
+high kind of painting.  The Celtic races, on the other hand, have
+shown a singular inaptitude for the plastic arts; the abstract,
+severe character of the Druidical religion, its dealing with the eye
+of the mind rather than the eye of the body, its having no elaborate
+temples and beautiful idols, all point this way from the first; its
+sentiment cannot satisfy itself, cannot even find a resting-place for
+itself, in colour and form; it presses on to the impalpable, the
+ideal.  The forest of trees and the forest of rocks, not hewn timber
+and carved stones, suit its aspirations for something not to be
+bounded or expressed.  With this tendency, the Celtic races have, as
+I remarked before, been necessarily almost impotent in the higher
+branches of the plastic arts.  Ireland, that has produced so many
+powerful spirits, has produced no great sculptors or painters.  Cross
+into England.  The inaptitude for the plastic art strikingly
+diminishes, as soon as the German, not the Celtic element,
+preponderates in the race.  And yet in England, too, in the English
+race, there is something which seems to prevent our reaching real
+mastership in the plastic arts, as the more unmixed German races have
+reached it.  Reynolds and Turner are painters of genius, who can
+doubt it? but take a European jury, the only competent jury in these
+cases, and see if you can get a verdict giving them the rank of
+masters, as this rank is given to Raphael and Correggio, or to Albert
+Durer and Rubens.  And observe in what points our English pair
+succeed, and in what they fall short.  They fall short in
+architectonice, in the highest power of composition, by which
+painting accomplishes the very uttermost which it is given to
+painting to accomplish; the highest sort of composition, the highest
+application of the art of painting, they either do not attempt, or
+they fail in it.  Their defect, therefore, is on the side of art, of
+plastic art.  And they succeed in magic, in beauty, in grace, in
+expressing almost the inexpressible:  here is the charm of Reynolds's
+children and Turner's seas; the impulse to express the inexpressible
+carries Turner so far, that at last it carries him away, and even
+long before he is quite carried away, even in works that are justly
+extolled, one can see the stamp-mark, as the French say, of insanity.
+The excellence, therefore, the success, is on the side of spirit.
+Does not this look as if a Celtic stream met the main German current
+in us, and gave it a somewhat different course from that which it
+takes naturally?  We have Germanism enough in us, enough patient love
+for fact and matter, to be led to attempt the plastic arts, and we
+make much more way in them than the pure Celtic races make; but at a
+certain point our Celtism comes in, with its love of emotion,
+sentiment, the inexpressible, and gives our best painters a bias.
+And the point at which it comes in is just that critical point where
+the flowering of art into its perfection commences; we have plenty of
+painters who never reach this point at all, but remain always mere
+journeymen, in bondage to matter; but those who do reach it, instead
+of going on to the true consummation of the masters in painting, are
+a little overbalanced by soul and feeling, work too directly for
+these, and so do not get out of their art all that may be got out of
+it.
+
+The same modification of our Germanism by another force which seems
+Celtic, is visible in our religion.  Here, too, we may trace a
+gradation between Celt, Englishman, and German, the difference which
+distinguishes Englishman from German appearing attributable to a
+Celtic element in us.  Germany is the land of exegesis, England is
+the land of Puritanism.  The religion of Wales is more emotional and
+sentimental than English Puritanism; Romanism has indeed given way to
+Calvinism among the Welsh,--the one superstition has supplanted the
+other,--but the Celtic sentiment which made the Welsh such devout
+Catholics, remains, and gives unction to their Methodism; theirs is
+not the controversial, rationalistic, intellectual side of
+Protestantism, but the devout, emotional, religious side.  Among the
+Germans, Protestantism has been carried on into rationalism and
+science.  The English hold a middle place between the Germans and the
+Welsh; their religion has the exterior forms and apparatus of a
+rationalism, so far their Germanic nature carries them; but long
+before they get to science, their feeling, their Celtic element
+catches them, and turns their religion all towards piety and unction.
+So English Protestantism has the outside appearance of an
+intellectual system, and the inside reality of an emotional system:
+this gives it its tenacity and force, for what is held with the
+ardent attachment of feeling is believed to have at the same time the
+scientific proof of reason.  The English Puritan, therefore (and
+Puritanism is the characteristic form of English Protestantism),
+stands between the German Protestant and the Celtic Methodist; his
+real affinity indeed, at present, being rather with his Welsh
+kinsman, if kinsman he may be called, than with his German.
+
+Sometimes one is left in doubt from whence the check and limit to
+Germanism in us proceeds, whether from a Celtic source or from a
+Norman source.  Of the true steady-going German nature the bane is,
+as I remarked, flat commonness; there seems no end to its capacity
+for platitude; it has neither the quick perception of the Celt to
+save it from platitude, nor the strenuousness of the Norman; it is
+only raised gradually out of it by science, but it jogs through
+almost interminable platitudes first.  The English nature is not
+raised to science, but something in us, whether Celtic or Norman,
+seems to set a bound to our advance in platitude, to make us either
+shy of platitude, or impatient of it.  I open an English reading-book
+for children, and I find these two characteristic stories in it, one
+of them of English growth, the other of German.  Take the English
+story first:-
+
+'A little boy accompanied his elder sister while she busied herself
+with the labours of the farm, asking questions at every step, and
+learning the lessons of life without being aware of it.
+
+'"Why, dear Jane," he said, "do you scatter good grain on the ground;
+would it not be better to make good bread of it than to throw it to
+the greedy chickens?"
+
+'"In time," replied Jane, "the chickens will grow big, and each of
+them will fetch money at the market.  One must think on the end to be
+attained without counting trouble, and learn to wait."
+
+'Perceiving a colt, which looked eagerly at him, the little boy cried
+out:  "Jane, why is the colt not in the fields with the labourers
+helping to draw the carts?"
+
+'"The colt is young," replied Jane, "and he must lie idle till he
+gets the necessary strength; one must not sacrifice the future to the
+present."'
+
+The reader will say that is most mean and trivial stuff, the vulgar
+English nature in full force; just such food as the Philistine would
+naturally provide for his young.  He will say he can see the boy fed
+upon it growing up to be like his father, to be all for business, to
+despise culture, to go through his dull days, and to die without
+having ever lived.  That may be so; but now take the German story
+(one of Krummacher's), and see the difference:-
+
+'There lived at the court of King Herod a rich man who was the king's
+chamberlain.  He clothed himself in purple and fine linen, and fared
+like the king himself.
+
+'Once a friend of his youth, whom he had not seen for many years,
+came from a distant land to pay him a visit.  Then the chamberlain
+invited all his friends and made a feast in honour of the stranger.
+
+'The tables were covered with choice food placed on dishes of gold
+and silver, and the finest wines of all kinds.  The rich man sat at
+the head of the table, glad to do the honours to his friend who was
+seated at his right hand.  So they ate and drank, and were merry.
+
+'Then the stranger said to the chamberlain of King Herod:  "Riches
+and splendour like thine are nowhere to be found in my country."  And
+he praised his greatness, and called him happy above all men on
+earth.
+
+'Well, the rich man took an apple from a golden vessel.  The apple
+was large, and red, and pleasant to the eye.  Then said be:  "Behold,
+this apple hath rested on gold, and its form is very beautiful."  And
+he presented it to the stranger, the friend of his youth.  The
+stranger cut the apple in two; and behold, in the middle of it there
+was a worm!
+
+'Then the stranger looked at the chamberlain; and the chamberlain
+bent his eyes on the ground and sighed.'
+
+There it ends.  Now I say, one sees there an abyss of platitude open,
+and the German nature swimming calmly about in it, which seems in
+some way or other to have its entry screened off for the English
+nature.  The English story leads with a direct issue into practical
+life:  a narrow and dry practical life, certainly, but yet enough to
+supply a plain motive for the story; the German story leads simply
+nowhere except into bathos.  Shall we say that the Norman talent for
+affairs saves us here, or the Celtic perceptive instinct? one of them
+it must be, surely.  The Norman turn seems most germane to the matter
+here immediately in hand; on the other hand, the Celtic turn, or some
+degree of it, some degree of its quick perceptive instinct, seems
+necessary to account for the full difference between the German
+nature and ours.  Even in Germans of genius or talent the want of
+quick light tact, of instinctive perception of the impropriety or
+impossibility of certain things, is singularly remarkable.  Herr
+Gervinus's prodigious discovery about Handel being an Englishman and
+Shakspeare a German, the incredible mare's-nest Goethe finds in
+looking for the origin of Byron's Manfred,--these are things from
+which no deliberate care or reflection can save a man; only an
+instinct can save him from them, an instinct that they are absurd;
+who can imagine Charles Lamb making Herr Gervinus's blunder, or
+Shakspeare making Goethe's? but from the sheer German nature this
+intuitive tact seems something so alien, that even genius fails to
+give it.  And yet just what constitutes special power and genius in a
+man seems often to be his blending with the basis of his national
+temperament, some additional gift or grace not proper to that
+temperament; Shakspeare's greatness is thus in his blending an
+openness and flexibility of spirit, not English, with the English
+basis; Addison's, in his blending a moderation and delicacy, not
+English, with the English basis; Burke's in his blending a largeness
+of view and richness of thought, not English, with the English basis.
+In Germany itself, in the same way, the greatness of their great
+Frederic lies in his blending a rapidity and clearness, not German,
+with the German basis; the greatness of Goethe in his blending a love
+of form, nobility, and dignity,--the grand style,--with the German
+basis.  But the quick, sure, instinctive perception of the
+incongruous and absurd not even genius seems to give in Germany; at
+least, I can think of only one German of genius, Lessing (for Heine
+was a Jew, and the Jewish temperament is quite another thing from the
+German), who shows it in an eminent degree.
+
+If we attend closely to the terms by which foreigners seek to hit off
+the impression which we and the Germans make upon them, we shall
+detect in these terms a difference which makes, I think, in favour of
+the notion I am propounding.  Nations in hitting off one another's
+characters are apt, we all know, to seize the unflattering side
+rather than the flattering; the mass of mankind always do this, and
+indeed they really see what is novel, and not their own, in a
+disfiguring light.  Thus we ourselves, for instance, popularly say
+'the phlegmatic Dutchman' rather than 'the sensible Dutchman,' or
+'the grimacing Frenchman' rather than 'the polite Frenchman.'
+Therefore neither we nor the Germans should exactly accept the
+description strangers give of us, but it is enough for my purpose
+that strangers, in characterising us with a certain shade of
+difference, do at any rate make it clear that there appears this
+shade of difference, though the character itself, which they give us
+both, may be a caricature rather than a faithful picture of us.  Now
+it is to be noticed that those sharp observers, the French,--who have
+a double turn for sharp observation, for they have both the quick
+perception of the Celt and the Latin's gift for coming plump upon the
+fact,--it is to be noticed, I say, that the French put a curious
+distinction in their popular, depreciating, we will hope inadequate,
+way of hitting off us and the Germans.  While they talk of the
+'betise allemande,' they talk of the 'gaucherie anglaise;' while they
+talk of the 'Allemand balourd,' they talk of the 'Anglais empetre;'
+while they call the German 'niais,' they call the Englishman
+'melancolique.'  The difference between the epithets balourd and
+empetre exactly gives the difference in character I wish to seize;
+balourd means heavy and dull, empetre means hampered and embarrassed.
+This points to a certain mixture and strife of elements in the
+Englishman; to the clashing of a Celtic quickness of perception with
+a Germanic instinct for going steadily along close to the ground.
+The Celt, as we have seen, has not at all, in spite of his quick
+perception, the Latin talent for dealing with the fact, dexterously
+managing it and making himself master of it; Latin or Latinised
+people have felt contempt for him on this account, have treated him
+as a poor creature, just as the German, who arrives at fact in a
+different way from the Latins, but who arrives at it, has treated
+him.  The couplet of Chrestien of Troyes about the Welsh:-
+
+
+. . . Gallois sont tous, par nature,
+Plus fous que betes en pasture -
+
+
+is well known, and expresses the genuine verdict of the Latin mind on
+the Celts.  But the perceptive instinct of the Celt feels and
+anticipates, though he has that in him which cuts him off from
+command of the world of fact; he sees what is wanting to him well
+enough; his mere eye is not less sharp, nay, it is sharper, than the
+Latin's.  He is a quick genius, checkmated for want of strenuousness
+or else patience.  The German has not the Latin's sharp precise
+glance on the world of fact, and dexterous behaviour in it; he
+fumbles with it much and long, but his honesty and patience give him
+the rule of it in the long run,--a surer rule, some of us think, than
+the Latin gets; still, his behaviour in it is not quick and
+dexterous.  The Englishman, in so far as he is German,--and he is
+mainly German,--proceeds in the steady-going German fashion; if he
+were all German he would proceed thus for ever without self-
+consciousness or embarrassment; but, in so far as he is Celtic, he
+has snatches of quick instinct which often make him feel he is
+fumbling, show him visions of an easier, more dexterous behaviour,
+disconcert him and fill him with misgiving.  No people, therefore,
+are so shy, so self-conscious, so embarrassed as the English, because
+two natures are mixed in them, and natures which pull them such
+different ways.  The Germanic part, indeed, triumphs in us, we are a
+Germanic people; but not so wholly as to exclude hauntings of
+Celtism, which clash with our Germanism, producing, as I believe, our
+HUMOUR, neither German nor Celtic, and so affect us that we strike
+people as odd and singular, not to be referred to any known type, and
+like nothing but ourselves.  'Nearly every Englishman,' says an
+excellent and by no means unfriendly observer, George Sand, 'nearly
+every Englishman, however good-looking he may be, has always
+something singular about him which easily comes to seem comic;--a
+sort of typical awkwardness (gaucherie typique) in his looks or
+appearance, which hardly ever wears out.'  I say this strangeness is
+accounted for by the English nature being mixed as we have seen,
+while the Latin nature is all of a piece, and so is the German
+nature, and the Celtic nature.
+
+It is impossible to go very fast when the matter with which one has
+to deal, besides being new and little explored, is also by its nature
+so subtle, eluding one's grasp unless one handles it with all
+possible delicacy and care.  It is in our poetry that the Celtic part
+in us has left its trace clearest, and in our poetry I must follow it
+before I have done.
+
+
+VI.
+
+
+If I were asked where English poetry got these three things, its turn
+for style, its turn for melancholy, and its turn for natural magic,
+for catching and rendering the charm of nature in a wonderfully near
+and vivid way,--I should answer, with some doubt, that it got much of
+its turn for style from a Celtic source; with less doubt, that it got
+much of its melancholy from a Celtic source; with no doubt at all,
+that from a Celtic source it got nearly all its natural magic.
+
+Any German with penetration and tact in matters of literary criticism
+will own that the principal deficiency of German poetry is in style;
+that for style, in the highest sense, it shows but little feeling.
+Take the eminent masters of style, the poets who best give the idea
+of what the peculiar power which lies in style is, Pindar, Virgil,
+Dante, Milton.  An example of the peculiar effect which these poets
+produce, you can hardly give from German poetry.  Examples enough you
+can give from German poetry of the effect produced by genius,
+thought, and feeling expressing themselves in clear language, simple
+language, passionate language, eloquent language, with harmony and
+melody; but not of the peculiar effect exercised by eminent power of
+style.  Every reader of Dante can at once call to mind what the
+peculiar effect I mean is; I spoke of it in my lectures on
+translating Homer, and there I took an example of it from Dante, who
+perhaps manifests it more eminently than any other poet.  But from
+Milton, too, one may take examples of it abundantly; compare this
+from Milton:-
+
+
+. . . nor sometimes forget
+Those other two equal with me in fate,
+So were I equall'd with them in renown,
+Blind Thamyris and blind Maeonides -
+
+
+with this from Goethe:-
+
+
+Es bildet ein Talent sich in der Stille,
+Sich ein Character in dem Strom der Welt.
+
+
+Nothing can be better in its way than the style in which Goethe there
+presents his thought, but it is the style of prose as much as of
+poetry; it is lucid, harmonious, earnest, eloquent, but it has not
+received that peculiar kneading, heightening, and re-casting which is
+observable in the style of the passage from Milton,--a style which
+seems to have for its cause a certain pressure of emotion, and an
+ever-surging, yet bridled, excitement in the poet, giving a special
+intensity to his way of delivering himself.  In poetical races and
+epochs this turn for style is peculiarly observable; and perhaps it
+is only on condition of having this somewhat heightened and difficult
+manner, so different from the plain manner of prose, that poetry gets
+the privilege of being loosed, at its best moments, into that
+perfectly simple, limpid style, which is the supreme style of all,
+but the simplicity of which is still not the simplicity of prose.
+The simplicity of Menander's style is the simplicity of prose, and is
+the same kind of simplicity as that which Goethe's style, in the
+passage I have quoted, exhibits; but Menander does not belong to a
+great poetical moment, he comes too late for it; it is the simple
+passages in poets like Pindar or Dante which are perfect, being
+masterpieces of POETICAL simplicity.  One may say the same of the
+simple passages in Shakspeare; they are perfect, their simplicity
+being a POETICAL simplicity.  They are the golden, easeful, crowning
+moments of a manner which is always pitched in another key from that
+of prose; a manner changed and heightened; the Elizabethan style,
+regnant in most of our dramatic poetry to this day, is mainly the
+continuation of this manner of Shakspeare's.  It was a manner much
+more turbid and strewn with blemishes than the manner of Pindar,
+Dante, or Milton; often it was detestable; but it owed its existence
+to Shakspeare's instinctive impulse towards STYLE in poetry, to his
+native sense of the necessity for it; and without the basis of style
+everywhere, faulty though it may in some places be, we should not
+have had the beauty of expression, unsurpassable for effectiveness
+and charm, which is reached in Shakspeare's best passages.  The turn
+for style is perceptible all through English poetry, proving, to my
+mind, the genuine poetical gift of the race; this turn imparts to our
+poetry a stamp of high distinction, and sometimes it doubles the
+force of a poet not by nature of the very highest order, such as
+Gray, and raises him to a rank beyond what his natural richness and
+power seem to promise.  Goethe, with his fine critical perception,
+saw clearly enough both the power of style in itself, and the lack of
+style in the literature of his own country; and perhaps if we regard
+him solely as a German, not as a European, his great work was that he
+laboured all his life to impart style into German literature, and
+firmly to establish it there.  Hence the immense importance to him of
+the world of classical art, and of the productions of Greek or Latin
+genius, where style so eminently manifests its power.  Had he found
+in the German genius and literature an element of style existing by
+nature and ready to his hand, half his work, one may say, would have
+been saved him, and he might have done much more in poetry.  But as
+it was, he had to try and create out of his own powers, a style for
+German poetry, as well as to provide contents for this style to
+carry; and thus his labour as a poet was doubled.
+
+It is to be observed that power of style, in the sense in which I am
+here speaking of style, is something quite different from the power
+of idiomatic, simple, nervous, racy expression, such as the
+expression of healthy, robust natures so often is, such as Luther's
+was in a striking degree.  Style, in my sense of the word, is a
+peculiar re-casting and heightening, under a certain condition of
+spiritual excitement, of what a man has to say, in such a manner as
+to add dignity and distinction to it; and dignity and distinction are
+not terms which suit many acts or words of Luther.  Deeply touched
+with the Gemeinheit which is the bane of his nation, as he is at the
+same time a grand example of the honesty which is his nation's
+excellence, he can seldom even show himself brave, resolute and
+truthful, without showing a strong dash of coarseness and commonness
+all the while; the right definition of Luther, as of our own Bunyan,
+is that he is a Philistine of genius.  So Luther's sincere idiomatic
+German,--such language is this:  'Hilf lieber Gott, wie manchen
+Jammer habe ich gesehen, dass der gemeine Mann doch so gar nichts
+weiss von der christlichen Lehre!'--no more proves a power of style
+in German literature, than Cobbett's sinewy idiomatic English proves
+it in English literature.  Power of style, properly so-called, as
+manifested in masters of style like Dante or Milton in poetry,
+Cicero, Bossuet or Bolingbroke in prose, is something quite
+different, and has, as I have said, for its characteristic effect,
+this:  to add dignity and distinction.
+
+Style, then, the Germans are singularly without, and it is strange
+that the power of style should show itself so strongly as it does in
+the Icelandic poetry, if the Scandinavians are such genuine Teutons
+as is commonly supposed.  Fauriel used to talk of the Scandinavian
+Teutons and the German Teutons, as if they were two divisions of the
+same people, and the common notion about them, no doubt, is very much
+this.  Since the war in Schleswig-Holstein, however, all one's German
+friends are exceedingly anxious to insist on the difference of nature
+between themselves and the Scandinavians; when one expresses surprise
+that the German sense of nationality should be so deeply affronted by
+the rule over Germans, not of Latins or Celts, but of brother Teutons
+or next door to it, a German will give you I know not how long a
+catalogue of the radical points of unlikeness, in genius and
+disposition, between himself and a Dane.  This emboldens me to remark
+that there is a fire, a sense of style, a distinction, in Icelandic
+poetry, which German poetry has not.  Icelandic poetry, too, shows a
+powerful and developed technic; and I wish to throw out, for
+examination by those who are competent to sift the matter, the
+suggestion that this power of style and development of technic in the
+Norse poetry seems to point towards an early Celtic influence or
+intermixture.  It is curious that Zeuss, in his grammar, quotes a
+text which gives countenance to this notion; as late as the ninth
+century, he says, there were Irish Celts in Iceland; and the text he
+quotes to show this, is as follows: --'In 870 A.D., when the
+Norwegians came to Iceland, there were Christians there, who
+departed, and left behind them Irish books, bells, and other things;
+from whence it may be inferred that these Christians were Irish.'  I
+speak, and ought to speak, with the utmost diffidence on all these
+questions of ethnology; but I must say that when I read this text in
+Zeuss, I caught eagerly at the clue it seemed to offer; for I had
+been hearing the Nibelungen read and commented on in German schools
+(German schools have the good habit of reading and commenting on
+German poetry, as we read and comment on Homer and Virgil, but do NOT
+read and comment on Chaucer and Shakspeare), and it struck me how the
+fatal humdrum and want of style of the Germans had marred their way
+of telling this magnificent tradition of the Nibelungen, and taken
+half its grandeur and power out of it; while in the Icelandic poems
+which deal with this tradition, its grandeur and power are much more
+fully visible, and everywhere in the poetry of the Edda there is a
+force of style and a distinction as unlike as possible to the want of
+both in the German Nibelungen. {120}  At the same time the
+Scandinavians have a realism, as it is called, in their genius, which
+abundantly proves their relationship with the Germans; any one whom
+Mr. Dasent's delightful books have made acquainted with the prose
+tales of the Norsemen, will be struck with the stamp of a Teutonic
+nature in them; but the Norse poetry seems to have something which
+from Teutonic sources alone it could not have derived; which the
+Germans have not, and which the Celts have.
+
+This something is STYLE, and the Celts certainly have it in a
+wonderful measure.  Style is the most striking quality of their
+poetry.  Celtic poetry seems to make up to itself for being unable to
+master the world and give an adequate interpretation of it, by
+throwing all its force into style, by bending language at any rate to
+its will, and expressing the ideas it has with unsurpassable
+intensity, elevation, and effect.  It has all through it a sort of
+intoxication of style,--a Pindarism, to use a word formed from the
+name of the poet, on whom, above all other poets, the power of style
+seems to have exercised an inspiring and intoxicating effect; and not
+in its great poets only, in Taliesin, or Llywarch Hen, or Ossian,
+does the Celtic genius show this Pindarism, but in all its
+productions:-
+
+
+The grave of March is this, and this the grave of Gwythyr;
+Here is the grave of Gwgawn Gleddyfreidd;
+But unknown is the grave of Arthur.
+
+
+That comes from the Welsh Memorials of the Graves of the Warriors,
+and if we compare it with the familiar memorial inscriptions of an
+English churchyard (for we English have so much Germanism in us that
+our productions offer abundant examples of German want of style as
+well as of its opposite):-
+
+
+Afflictions sore long time I bore,
+Physicians were in vain,
+Till God did please Death should me seize
+And ease me of my pain -
+
+
+if, I say, we compare the Welsh memorial lines with the English,
+which in their Gemeinheit of style are truly Germanic, we shall get a
+clear sense of what that Celtic talent for style I have been speaking
+of is.
+
+Or take this epitaph of an Irish Celt, Angus the Culdee, whose
+Felire, or festology, I have already mentioned; a festology in which,
+at the end of the eighth or beginning of the ninth century, he
+collected from 'the countless hosts of the illuminated books of Erin'
+(to use his own words) the festivals of the Irish saints, his poem
+having a stanza for every day in the year.  The epitaph on Angus, who
+died at Cluain Eidhnech, in Queen's County, runs thus:-
+
+
+Angus in the assembly of Heaven,
+Here are his tomb and his bed;
+It is from hence he went to death,
+In the Friday, to holy Heaven.
+
+It was in Cluain Eidhnech he was rear'd;
+It was in Cluain Eidhnech he was buried;
+In Cluain Eidhnech, of many crosses,
+He first read his psalms.
+
+
+That is by no eminent hand; and yet a Greek epitaph could not show a
+finer perception of what constitutes propriety and felicity of style
+in compositions of this nature.  Take the well-known Welsh prophecy
+about the fate of the Britons:-
+
+
+Their Lord they will praise,
+Their speech they will keep,
+Their land they will lose,
+Except wild Wales.
+
+
+To however late an epoch that prophecy belongs, what a feeling for
+style, at any rate, it manifests!  And the same thing may be said of
+the famous Welsh triads.  We may put aside all the vexed questions as
+to their greater or less antiquity, and still what important witness
+they bear to the genius for literary style of the people who produced
+them!
+
+Now we English undoubtedly exhibit very often the want of sense for
+style of our German kinsmen.  The churchyard lines I just now quoted
+afford an instance of it:  but the whole branch of our literature,--
+and a very popular branch it is, our hymnology,--to which those lines
+are to be referred, is one continued instance of it.  Our German
+kinsmen and we are the great people for hymns.  The Germans are very
+proud of their hymns, and we are very proud of ours; but it is hard
+to say which of the two, the German hymn-book or ours, has least
+poetical worth in itself, or does least to prove genuine poetical
+power in the people producing it.  I have not a word to say against
+Sir Roundell Palmer's choice and arrangement of materials for his
+Book of Praise; I am content to put them on a level (and that is
+giving them the highest possible rank) with Mr. Palgrave's choice and
+arrangement of materials for his Golden Treasury; but yet no sound
+critic can doubt that, so far as poetry is concerned, while the
+Golden Treasury is a monument of a nation's strength, the Book of
+Praise is a monument of a nation's weakness.  Only the German race,
+with its want of quick instinctive tact, of delicate, sure
+perception, could have invented the hymn as the Germans and we have
+it; and our non-German turn for style,--style, of which the very
+essence is a certain happy fineness and truth of poetical
+perception,--could not but desert us when our German nature carried
+us into a kind of composition which can please only when the
+perception is somewhat blunt.  Scarcely any one of us ever judges our
+hymns fairly, because works of this kind have two sides,--their side
+for religion and their side for poetry.  Everything which has helped
+a man in his religious life, everything which associates itself in
+his mind with the growth of that life, is beautiful and venerable to
+him; in this way, productions of little or no poetical value, like
+the German hymns and ours, may come to be regarded as very precious.
+Their worth in this sense, as means by which we have been edified, I
+do not for a moment hold cheap; but there is an edification proper to
+all our stages of development, the highest as well as the lowest, and
+it is for man to press on towards the highest stages of his
+development, with the certainty that for those stages, too, means of
+edification will not be found wanting.  Now certainly it is a higher
+state of development when our fineness of perception is keen than
+when it is blunt.  And if,--whereas the Semitic genius placed its
+highest spiritual life in the religious sentiment, and made that the
+basis of its poetry,--the Indo-European genius places its highest
+spiritual life in the imaginative reason, and makes that the basis of
+its poetry, we are none the better for wanting the perception to
+discern a natural law, which is, after all, like every natural law,
+irresistible; we are none the better for trying to make ourselves
+Semitic, when Nature has made us Indo-European, and to shift the
+basis of our poetry.  We may mean well; all manner of good may happen
+to us on the road we go; but we are not on our real right road, the
+road we must in the end follow.
+
+That is why, when our hymns betray a false tendency by losing a power
+which accompanies the poetical work of our race on our other more
+suitable lines, the indication thus given is of great value and
+instructiveness for us.  One of our main gifts for poetry deserts us
+in our hymns, and so gives us a hint as to the one true basis for the
+spiritual work of an Indo-European people, which the Germans, who
+have not this particular gift of ours, do not and cannot get in this
+way, though they may get it in others.  It is worth noticing that the
+masterpieces of the spiritual work of Indo-Europeans, taking the pure
+religious sentiment, and not the imaginative reason, for their basis,
+are works like the Imitation, the Dies Irae, the Stabat Mater--works
+clothing themselves in the middle-age Latin, the genuine native voice
+of no Indo-European nation.  The perfection of their kind, but that
+kind not perfectly legitimate, they take a language not perfectly
+legitimate; as if to show, that when mankind's Semitic age is once
+passed, the age which produced the great incomparable monuments of
+the pure religious sentiment, the books of Job and Isaiah, the
+Psalms,--works truly to be called inspired, because the same divine
+power which worked in those who produced them works no longer,--as if
+to show us, that, after this primitive age, we Indo-Europeans must
+feel these works without attempting to re-make them; and that our
+poetry, if it tries to make itself simply the organ of the religious
+sentiment, leaves the true course, and must conceal this by not
+speaking a living language.  The moment it speaks a living language,
+and still makes itself the organ of the religious sentiment only, as
+in the German and English hymns, it betrays weakness;--the weakness
+of all false tendency.
+
+But if by attending to the Germanism in us English and to its works,
+one has come to doubt whether we, too, are not thorough Germans by
+genius and with the German deadness to style, one has only to repeat
+to oneself a line of Milton,--a poet intoxicated with the passion for
+style as much as Taliesin or Pindar,--to see that we have another
+side to our genius beside the German one.  Whence do we get it?  The
+Normans may have brought in among us the Latin sense for rhetoric and
+style,--for, indeed, this sense goes naturally with a high spirit and
+a strenuousness like theirs,--but the sense for style which English
+poetry shows is something finer than we could well have got from a
+people so positive and so little poetical as the Normans; and it
+seems to me we may much more plausibly derive it from a root of the
+poetical Celtic nature in us.
+
+Its chord of penetrating passion and melancholy, again, its Titanism
+as we see it in Byron,--what other European poetry possesses that
+like the English, and where do we get it from?  The Celts, with their
+vehement reaction against the despotism of fact, with their sensuous
+nature, their manifold striving, their adverse destiny, their immense
+calamities, the Celts are the prime authors of this vein of piercing
+regret and passion,--of this Titanism in poetry.  A famous book,
+Macpherson's Ossian, carried in the last century this vein like a
+flood of lava through Europe.  I am not going to criticise
+Macpherson's Ossian here.  Make the part of what is forged, modern,
+tawdry, spurious, in the book, as large as you please; strip
+Scotland, if you like, of every feather of borrowed plumes which on
+the strength of Macpherson's Ossian she may have stolen from that
+vetus et major Scotia, the true home of the Ossianic poetry, Ireland;
+I make no objection.  But there will still be left in the book a
+residue with the very soul of the Celtic genius in it, and which has
+the proud distinction of having brought this soul of the Celtic
+genius into contact with the genius of the nations of modern Europe,
+and enriched all our poetry by it.  Woody Morven, and echoing Sora,
+and Selma with its silent halls!--we all owe them a debt of
+gratitude, and when we are unjust enough to forget it, may the Muse
+forget us!  Choose any one of the better passages in Macpherson's
+Ossian and you can see even at this time of day what an apparition of
+newness and power such a strain must have been to the eighteenth
+century:-
+
+'I have seen the walls of Balclutha, but they were desolate.  The fox
+looked out from the windows, the rank grass of the wall waved round
+her head.  Raise the song of mourning, O bards, over the land of
+strangers.  They have but fallen before us, for one day we must fall.
+Why dost thou build the hall, son of the winged days?  Thou lookest
+from thy towers to-day; yet a few years, and the blast of the desert
+comes; it howls in thy empty court, and whistles round thy half-worn
+shield.  Let the blast of the desert come! we shall be renowned in
+our day.'
+
+All Europe felt the power of that melancholy; but what I wish to
+point out is, that no nation of Europe so caught in its poetry the
+passionate penetrating accent of the Celtic genius, its strain of
+Titanism, as the English.  Goethe, like Napoleon, felt the spell of
+Ossian very powerfully, and he quotes a long passage from him in his
+Werther.  But what is there Celtic, turbulent, and Titanic about the
+German Werther, that amiable, cultivated, and melancholy young man,
+having for his sorrow and suicide the perfectly definite motive that
+Lotte cannot be his?  Faust, again, has nothing unaccountable,
+defiant and Titanic in him; his knowledge does not bring him the
+satisfaction he expected from it, and meanwhile he finds himself poor
+and growing old, and baulked of the palpable enjoyment of life; and
+here is the motive for Faust's discontent.  In the most energetic and
+impetuous of Goethe's creations,--his Prometheus,--it is not Celtic
+self-will and passion, it is rather the Germanic sense of justice and
+reason, which revolts against the despotism of Zeus.  The German
+Sehnsucht itself is a wistful, soft, tearful longing, rather than a
+struggling, fierce, passionate one.  But the Celtic melancholy is
+struggling, fierce, passionate; to catch its note, listen to Llywarch
+Hen in old age, addressing his crutch:-
+
+
+O my crutch! is it not autumn, when the fern is red, the water. flag
+yellow?  Have I not hated that which I love?
+
+O my crutch! is it not winter-time now, when men talk together after
+that they have drunken?  Is not the side of my bed left desolate?
+
+O my crutch! is it not spring, when the cuckoo passes through the
+air, when the foam sparkles on the sea?  The young maidens no longer
+love me.
+
+O my crutch! is it not the first day of May?  The furrows, are they
+not shining; the young corn, is it not springing?  Ah! the sight of
+thy handle makes me wroth.
+
+O my crutch! stand straight, thou wilt support me the better; it is
+very long since I was Llywarch.
+
+Behold old age, which makes sport of me, from the hair of my head to
+my teeth, to my eyes, which women loved.
+
+The four things I have all my life most hated fall upon me together,-
+-coughing and old age, sickness and sorrow.
+
+I am old, I am alone, shapeliness and warmth are gone from me; the
+couch of honour shall be no more mine:  I am miserable, I am bent on
+my crutch.
+
+How evil was the lot allotted to Llywarch, the night when he was
+brought forth! sorrows without end, and no deliverance from his
+burden.
+
+
+There is the Titanism of the Celt, his passionate, turbulent,
+indomitable reaction against the despotism of fact; and of whom does
+it remind us so much as of Byron?
+
+
+The fire which on my bosom preys
+Is lone as some volcanic isle;
+No torch is kindled at its blaze;
+   A funeral pile!
+
+
+Or, again:-
+
+
+Count o'er the joys thine hours have seen,
+Count o'er thy days from anguish free,
+And know, whatever thou hast been,
+'Tis something better not to be.
+
+
+One has only to let one's memory begin to fetch passages from Byron
+striking the same note as that passage from Llywarch Hen, and she
+will not soon stop.  And all Byron's heroes, not so much in collision
+with outward things, as breaking on some rock of revolt and misery in
+the depths of their own nature; Manfred, self-consumed, fighting
+blindly and passionately with I know not what, having nothing of the
+consistent development and intelligible motive of Faust,--Manfred,
+Lara, Cain, what are they but Titanic?  Where in European poetry are
+we to find this Celtic passion of revolt so warm-breathing, puissant,
+and sincere; except perhaps in the creation of a yet greater poet
+than Byron, but an English poet, too, like Byron,--in the Satan of
+Milton?
+
+
+. . . What though the field be lost?
+All is not lost; the unconquerable will,
+And study of revenge, immortal hate,
+And courage never to submit or yield,
+And what is else not to be overcome.
+
+
+There, surely, speaks a genius to whose composition the Celtic fibre
+was not wholly a stranger!
+
+And as, after noting the Celtic Pindarism or power of style present
+in our poetry, we noted the German flatness coming in in our hymns,
+and found here a proof of our compositeness of nature; so, after
+noting the Celtic Titanism or power of rebellious passion in our
+poetry, we may also note the Germanic patience and reasonableness in
+it, and get in this way a second proof how mixed a spirit we have.
+After Llywarch Hen's:-
+
+
+How evil was the lot allotted to Llywarch, the night when he was
+brought forth -
+
+
+after Byron's:-
+
+
+Count o'er the joys thine hours have seen -
+
+
+take this of Southey's, in answer to the question whether he would
+like to have his youth over again:-
+
+
+Do I regret the past?
+Would I live o'er again
+The morning hours of life?
+Nay, William, nay, not so!
+Praise be to God who made me what I am,
+Other I would not be.
+
+
+There we have the other side of our being; the Germanic goodness,
+docility, and fidelity to nature, in place of the Celtic Titanism.
+
+The Celt's quick feeling for what is noble and distinguished gave his
+poetry style; his indomitable personality gave it pride and passion;
+his sensibility and nervous exaltation gave it a better gift still,
+the gift of rendering with wonderful felicity the magical charm of
+nature.  The forest solitude, the bubbling spring, the wild flowers,
+are everywhere in romance.  They have a mysterious life and grace
+there; they are nature's own children, and utter her secret in a way
+which makes them something quite different from the woods, waters,
+and plants of Greek and Latin poetry.  Now of this delicate magic,
+Celtic romance is so pre-eminent a mistress, that it seems impossible
+to believe the power did not come into romance from the Celts. {133}
+Magic is just the word for it,--the magic of nature; not merely the
+beauty of nature,--that the Greeks and Latins had; not merely an
+honest smack of the soil, a faithful realism,--that the Germans had;
+but the intimate life of nature, her weird power and her fairy charm.
+As the Saxon names of places, with the pleasant wholesome smack of
+the soil in them,--Weathersfield, Thaxted, Shalford,--are to the
+Celtic names of places, with their penetrating, lofty beauty,--
+Velindra, Tyntagel, Caernarvon,--so is the homely realism of German
+and Norse nature to the fairy-like loveliness of Celtic nature.
+Gwydion wants a wife for his pupil:  'Well,' says Math, 'we will
+seek, I and thou, by charms and illusions, to form a wife for him out
+of flowers.  So they took the blossoms of the oak, and the blossoms
+of the broom, and the blossoms of the meadow-sweet, and produced from
+them a maiden, the fairest and most graceful that man ever saw.  And
+they baptized her, and gave her the name of Flower-Aspect.'  Celtic
+romance is full of exquisite touches like that, showing the delicacy
+of the Celt's feeling in these matters, and how deeply nature lets
+him come into her secrets.  The quick dropping of blood is called
+'faster than the fall of the dewdrop from the blade of reed-grass
+upon the earth, when the dew of June is at the heaviest.'  And thus
+is Olwen described:  'More yellow was her hair than the flower of the
+broom, and her skin was whiter than the foam of the wave, and fairer
+were her hands and her fingers than the blossoms of the wood-anemony
+amidst the spray of the meadow fountains.'  For loveliness it would
+be hard to beat that; and for magical clearness and nearness take the
+following:-
+
+'And in the evening Peredur entered a valley, and at the head of the
+valley he came to a hermit's cell, and the hermit welcomed him
+gladly, and there he spent the night.  And in the morning he arose,
+and when he went forth, behold, a shower of snow had fallen the night
+before, and a hawk had killed a wild-fowl in front of the cell.  And
+the noise of the horse scared the hawk away, and a raven alighted
+upon the bird.  And Peredur stood and compared the blackness of the
+raven, and the whiteness of the snow, and the redness of the blood,
+to the hair of the lady whom best he loved, which was blacker than
+the raven, and to her skin, which was whiter than the snow, and to
+her two cheeks, which were redder than the blood upon the snow
+appeared to be.'
+
+And this, which is perhaps less striking, is not less beautiful:-
+
+'And early in the day Geraint and Enid left the wood, and they came
+to an open country, with meadows on one hand and mowers mowing the
+meadows.  And there was a river before them, and the horses bent down
+and drank the water.  And they went up out of the river by a steep
+bank, and there they met a slender stripling with a satchel about his
+neck; and he had a small blue pitcher in his hand, and a bowl on the
+mouth of the pitcher.'
+
+And here the landscape, up to this point so Greek in its clear
+beauty, is suddenly magicalised by the romance touch:-
+
+'And they saw a tall tree by the side of the river, one-half of which
+was in flames from the root to the top, and the other half was green
+and in full leaf.'
+
+Magic is the word to insist upon,--a magically vivid and near
+interpretation of nature; since it is this which constitutes the
+special charm and power of the effect I am calling attention to, and
+it is for this that the Celt's sensibility gives him a peculiar
+aptitude.  But the matter needs rather fine handling, and it is easy
+to make mistakes here in our criticism.  In the first place, Europe
+tends constantly to become more and more one community, and we tend
+to become Europeans instead of merely Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans,
+Italians; so whatever aptitude or felicity one people imparts into
+spiritual work, gets imitated by the others, and thus tends to become
+the common property of all.  Therefore anything so beautiful and
+attractive as the natural magic I am speaking of, is sure, now-a-
+days, if it appears in the productions of the Celts, or of the
+English, or of the French, to appear in the productions of the
+Germans also, or in the productions of the Italians; but there will
+be a stamp of perfectness and inimitableness about it in the
+literatures where it is native, which it will not have in the
+literatures where it is not native.  Novalis or Ruckert, for
+instance, have their eye fixed on nature, and have undoubtedly a
+feeling for natural magic; a rough-and-ready critic easily credits
+them and the Germans with the Celtic fineness of tact, the Celtic
+nearness to nature and her secret; but the question is whether the
+strokes in the German's picture of nature {136} have ever the
+indefinable delicacy, charm, and perfection of the Celt's touch in
+the pieces I just now quoted, or of Shakspeare's touch in his
+daffodil, Wordsworth's in his cuckoo, Keats's in his Autumn,
+Obermann's in his mountain birch-tree, or his Easter-daisy among the
+Swiss farms.  To decide where the gift for natural magic originally
+lies, whether it is properly Celtic or Germanic, we must decide this
+question.
+
+In the second place, there are many ways of handling nature, and we
+are here only concerned with one of them; but a rough-and-ready
+critic imagines that it is all the same so long as nature is handled
+at all, and fails to draw the needful distinction between modes of
+handling her.  But these modes are many; I will mention four of them
+now:  there is the conventional way of handling nature, there is the
+faithful way of handling nature, there is the Greek way of handling
+nature, there is the magical way of handling nature.  In all these
+three last the eye is on the object, but with a difference; in the
+faithful way of handling nature, the eye is on the object, and that
+is all you can say; in the Greek, the eye is on the object, but
+lightness and brightness are added; in the magical, the eye is on the
+object, but charm and magic are added.  In the conventional way of
+handling nature, the eye is not on the object; what that means we all
+know, we have only to think of our eighteenth-century poetry:-
+
+
+As when the moon, refulgent lamp of night -
+
+
+to call up any number of instances.  Latin poetry supplies plenty of
+instances too; if we put this from Propertius's Hylas:-
+
+
+. . . manus heroum . . .
+Mollia composita litora fronde togit -
+
+
+side by side with the line of Theocritus by which it was suggested:-
+
+
+[Greek verse] -
+
+
+we get at the same moment a good specimen both of the conventional
+and of the Greek way of handling nature.  But from our own poetry we
+may get specimens of the Greek way of handling nature, as well as of
+the conventional:  for instance, Keats's:-
+
+
+What little town by river or seashore,
+Or mountain-built with quiet citadel,
+Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn?
+
+
+is Greek, as Greek as a thing from Homer or Theocritus; it is
+composed with the eye on the object, a radiancy and light clearness
+being added.  German poetry abounds in specimens of the faithful way
+of handling nature; an excellent example is to be found in the
+stanzas called Zueignung, prefixed to Goethe's poems; the morning
+walk, the mist, the dew, the sun, are as faithful as they can be,
+they are given with the eye on the object, but there the merit of the
+work, as a handling of nature, stops; neither Greek radiance nor
+Celtic magic is added; the power of these is not what gives the poem
+in question its merit, but a power of quite another kind, a power of
+moral and spiritual emotion.  But the power of Greek radiance Goethe
+could give to his handling of nature, and nobly too, as any one who
+will read his Wanderer,--the poem in which a wanderer falls in with a
+peasant woman and her child by their hut, built out of the ruins of a
+temple near Cuma,--may see.  Only the power of natural magic Goethe
+does not, I think, give; whereas Keats passes at will from the Greek
+power to that power which is, as I say, Celtic; from his:-
+
+
+What little town, by river or seashore -
+
+
+to his:-
+
+
+White hawthorn and the pastoral eglantine,
+Fast-fading violets cover'd up in leaves -
+
+
+or his:-
+
+
+. . . magic casements, opening on the foam
+Of perilous seas, in fairy lands forlorn -
+
+
+in which the very same note is struck as in those extracts which I
+quoted from Celtic romance, and struck with authentic and
+unmistakeable power.
+
+Shakspeare, in handling nature, touches this Celtic note so
+exquisitely, that perhaps one is inclined to be always looking for
+the Celtic note in him, and not to recognise his Greek note when it
+comes.  But if one attends well to the difference between the two
+notes, and bears in mind, to guide one, such things as Virgil's
+'moss-grown springs and grass softer than sleep:' -
+
+
+Muscosi fontes et somno mollior herba -
+
+
+as his charming flower-gatherer, who -
+
+
+Pallentes violas et summa papavera carpens
+Narcissum et florem jungit bene olentis anethi -
+
+
+as his quinces and chestnuts:-
+
+
+. . . cana legam tenera lanugine mala
+Castaneasque nuces . . .
+
+
+then, I think, we shall be disposed to say that in Shakspeare's -
+
+
+I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
+Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
+Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,
+With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine -
+
+
+it is mainly a Greek note which is struck.  Then, again in his:-
+
+
+. . . look how the floor of heaven
+Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold!
+
+
+we are at the very point of transition from the Greek note to the
+Celtic; there is the Greek clearness and brightness, with the Celtic
+aerialness and magic coming in.  Then we have the sheer, inimitable
+Celtic note in passages like this:-
+
+
+Met we on hill, in dale, forest or mead,
+By paved fountain or by rushy brook,
+Or in the beached margent of the sea -
+
+
+or this, the last I will quote:-
+
+
+The moon shines bright.  In such a night as this,
+When the sweet wind did gently kiss the trees,
+And they did make no noise, in such a night
+Troilus, methinks, mounted the Trojan walls -
+
+. . . in such a night
+Did Thisbe fearfully o'ertrip the dew -
+
+. . . in such a night
+Stood Dido, with a willow in her hand,
+Upon the wild sea-banks, and waved her love
+To come again to Carthage.
+
+
+And those last lines of all are so drenched and intoxicated with the
+fairy-dew of that natural magic which is our theme, that I cannot do
+better then end with them.
+
+And now, with the pieces of evidence in our hand, let us go to those
+who say it is vain to look for Celtic elements in any Englishman, and
+let us ask them, first, if they seize what we mean by the power of
+natural magic in Celtic poetry; secondly, if English poetry does not
+eminently exhibit this power; and, thirdly, where they suppose
+English poetry got it from?
+
+
+I perceive that I shall be accused of having rather the air, in what
+I have said, of denying this and that gift to the Germans, and of
+establishing our difference from them a little ungraciously and at
+their expense.  The truth is, few people have any real care to
+analyse closely in their criticism; they merely employ criticism as a
+means for heaping all praise on what they like, and all blame on what
+they dislike.  Those of us (and they are many) who owe a great debt
+of gratitude to the German spirit and to German literature, do not
+like to be told of any powers being lacking there; we are like the
+young ladies who think the hero of their novel is only half a hero
+unless he has all perfections united in him.  But nature does not
+work, either in heroes or races, according to the young ladies'
+notion.  We all are what we are, the hero and the great nation are
+what they are, by our limitations as well as by our powers, by
+lacking something as well as by possessing something.  It is not
+always gain to possess this or that gift, or loss to lack this or
+that gift.  Our great, our only first-rate body of contemporary
+poetry is the German; the grand business of modern poetry,--a moral
+interpretation, from an independent point of view, of man and the
+world,--it is only German poetry, Goethe's poetry, that has, since
+the Greeks, made much way with.  Campbell's power of style, and the
+natural magic of Keats and Wordsworth, and Byron's Titanic
+personality, may be wanting to this poetry; but see what it has
+accomplished without them!  How much more than Campbell with his
+power of style, and Keats and Wordsworth with their natural magic,
+and Byron with his Titanic personality!  Why, for the immense serious
+task it had to perform, the steadiness of German poetry, its going
+near the ground, its patient fidelity to nature, its using great
+plainness of speech, poetical drawbacks in one point of view, were
+safeguards and helps in another.  The plainness and earnestness of
+the two lines I have already quoted from Goethe:-
+
+
+Es bildet ein Talent sich in der Stille,
+Sich ein Character in dem Strom der Welt -
+
+
+compared with the play and power of Shakspeare's style or Dante's,
+suggest at once the difference between Goethe's task and theirs, and
+the fitness of the faithful laborious German spirit for its own task.
+Dante's task was to set forth the lesson of the world from the point
+of view of mediaeval Catholicism; the basis of spiritual life was
+given, Dante had not to make this anew.  Shakspeare's task was to set
+forth the spectacle of the world when man's spirit re-awoke to the
+possession of the world at the Renaissance.  The spectacle of human
+life, left to bear its own significance and tell its own story, but
+shown in all its fulness, variety, and power, is at that moment the
+great matter; but, if we are to press deeper, the basis of spiritual
+life is still at that time the traditional religion, reformed or
+unreformed, of Christendom, and Shakspeare has not to supply a new
+basis.  But when Goethe came, Europe had lost her basis of spiritual
+life; she had to find it again; Goethe's task was,--the inevitable
+task for the modern poet henceforth is,--as it was for the Greek poet
+in the days of Pericles, not to preach a sublime sermon on a given
+text like Dante, not to exhibit all the kingdoms of human life and
+the glory of them like Shakspeare, but to interpret human life
+afresh, and to supply a new spiritual basis to it.  This is not only
+a work for style, eloquence, charm, poetry; it is a work for science;
+and the scientific, serious German spirit, not carried away by this
+and that intoxication of ear, and eye, and self-will, has peculiar
+aptitudes for it.
+
+We, on the other hand, do not necessarily gain by the commixture of
+elements in us; we have seen how the clashing of natures in us
+hampers and embarrasses our behaviour; we might very likely be more
+attractive, we might very likely be more successful, if we were all
+of a piece.  Our want of sureness of taste, our eccentricity, come in
+great measure, no doubt, from our not being all of a piece, from our
+having no fixed, fatal, spiritual centre of gravity.  The Rue de
+Rivoli is one thing, and Nuremberg is another, and Stonehenge is
+another; but we have a turn for all three, and lump them all up
+together.  Mr. Tom Taylor's translations from Breton poetry offer a
+good example of this mixing; he has a genuine feeling for these
+Celtic matters, and often, as in the Evil Tribute of Nomenoe, or in
+Lord Nann and the Fairy, he is, both in movement and expression, true
+and appropriate; but he has a sort of Teutonism and Latinism in him
+too, and so he cannot forbear mixing with his Celtic strain such
+disparates as:-
+
+
+'Twas mirk, mirk night, and the water bright
+Troubled and drumlie flowed -
+
+
+which is evidently Lowland-Scotchy; or as:-
+
+
+Foregad, but thou'rt an artful hand!
+
+
+which is English-stagey; or as:-
+
+
+To Gradlon's daughter, bright of blee,
+Her lover he whispered tenderly -
+BETHINK THEE, SWEET DAHUT! THE KEY!
+
+
+which is Anacreontic in the manner of Tom Moore.  Yes, it is not a
+sheer advantage to have several strings to one's bow! if we had been
+all German, we might have had the science of Germany; if we had been
+all Celtic, we might have been popular and agreeable; if we had been
+all Latinised, we might have governed Ireland as the French govern
+Alsace, without getting ourselves detested.  But now we have
+Germanism enough to make us Philistines, and Normanism enough to make
+us imperious, and Celtism enough to make us self-conscious and
+awkward; but German fidelity to Nature, and Latin precision and clear
+reason, and Celtic quick-wittedness and spirituality, we fall short
+of.  Nay, perhaps, if we are doomed to perish (Heaven avert the
+omen!), we shall perish by our Celtism, by our self-will and want of
+patience with ideas, our inability to see the way the world is going;
+and yet those very Celts, by our affinity with whom we are perishing,
+will be hating and upbraiding us all the time.
+
+This is a somewhat unpleasant view to take of the matter; but if it
+is true, its being unpleasant does not make it any less true, and we
+are always the better for seeing the truth.  What we here see is not
+the whole truth, however.  So long as this mixed constitution of our
+nature possesses us, we pay it tribute and serve it; so soon as we
+possess it, it pays us tribute and serves us.  So long as we are
+blindly and ignorantly rolled about by the forces of our nature,
+their contradiction baffles us and lames us; so soon as we have
+clearly discerned what they are, and begun to apply to them a law of
+measure, control, and guidance, they may be made to work for our good
+and to carry us forward.  Then we may have the good of our German
+part, the good of our Latin part, the good of our Celtic part; and
+instead of one part clashing with the other, we may bring it in to
+continue and perfect the other, when the other has given us all the
+good it can yield, and by being pressed further, could only give us
+its faulty excess.  Then we may use the German faithfulness to Nature
+to give us science, and to free us from insolence and self-will; we
+may use the Celtic quickness of perception to give us delicacy, and
+to free us from hardness and Philistinism; we may use the Latin
+decisiveness to give us strenuous clear method, and to free us from
+fumbling and idling.  Already, in their untrained state, these
+elements give signs, in our life and literature, of their being
+present in us, and a kind of prophecy of what they could do for us if
+they were properly observed, trained, and applied.  But this they
+have not yet been; we ride one force of our nature to death; we will
+be nothing but Anglo-Saxons in the Old World or in the New; and when
+our race has built Bold Street, Liverpool, and pronounced it very
+good, it hurries across the Atlantic, and builds Nashville, and
+Jacksonville, and Milledgeville, and thinks it is fulfilling the
+designs of Providence in an incomparable manner.  But true Anglo-
+Saxons, simply and sincerely rooted in the German nature, we are not
+and cannot be; all we have accomplished by our onesidedness is to
+blur and confuse the natural basis in ourselves altogether, and to
+become something eccentric, unattractive, and inharmonious.
+
+A man of exquisite intelligence and charming character, the late Mr.
+Cobden, used to fancy that a better acquaintance with the United
+States was the grand panacea for us; and once in a speech he bewailed
+the inattention of our seats of learning to them, and seemed to think
+that if our ingenuous youth at Oxford were taught a little less about
+Ilissus, and a little more about Chicago, we should all be the better
+for it.  Chicago has its claims upon us, no doubt; but it is evident
+that from the point of view to which I have been leading, a
+stimulation of our Anglo-Saxonism, such as is intended by Mr.
+Cobden's proposal, does not appear the thing most needful for us;
+seeing our American brothers themselves have rather, like us, to try
+and moderate the flame of Anglo-Saxonism in their own breasts, than
+to ask us to clap the bellows to it in ours.  So I am inclined to
+beseech Oxford, instead of expiating her over-addiction to the
+Ilissus by lectures on Chicago, to give us an expounder for a still
+more remote-looking object than the Ilissus,--the Celtic languages
+and literature.  And yet why should I call it remote? if, as I have
+been labouring to show, in the spiritual frame of us English
+ourselves, a Celtic fibre, little as we may have ever thought of
+tracing it, lives and works.  ALIENS IN SPEECH, IN RELIGION, IN
+BLOOD! said Lord Lyndhurst; the philologists have set him right about
+the speech, the physiologists about the blood; and perhaps, taking
+religion in the wide but true sense of our whole spiritual activity,
+those who have followed what I have been saying here will think that
+the Celt is not so wholly alien to us in religion.  But, at any rate,
+let us consider that of the shrunken and diminished remains of this
+great primitive race, all, with one insignificant exception, belongs
+to the English empire; only Brittany is not ours; we have Ireland,
+the Scotch Highlands, Wales, the Isle of Man, Cornwall.  They are a
+part of ourselves, we are deeply interested in knowing them, they are
+deeply interested in being known by us; and yet in the great and rich
+universities of this great and rich country there is no chair of
+Celtic, there is no study or teaching of Celtic matters; those who
+want them must go abroad for them.  It is neither right nor
+reasonable that this should be so.  Ireland has had in the last half
+century a band of Celtic students,--a band with which death, alas!
+has of late been busy,--from whence Oxford or Cambridge might have
+taken an admirable professor of Celtic; and with the authority of a
+university chair, a great Celtic scholar, on a subject little known,
+and where all would have readily deferred to him, might have by this
+time doubled our facilities for knowing the Celt, by procuring for
+this country Celtic documents which were inaccessible here, and
+preventing the dispersion of others which were accessible.  It is not
+much that the English Government does for science or literature; but
+if Eugene O'Curry, from a chair of Celtic at Oxford, had appealed to
+the Government to get him copies or the originals of the Celtic
+treasures in the Burgundian Library at Brussels, or in the library of
+St. Isidore's College at Rome, even the English Government could not
+well have refused him.  The invaluable Irish manuscripts in the Stowe
+Library the late Sir Robert Peel proposed, in 1849, to buy for the
+British Museum; Lord Macaulay, one of the trustees of the Museum,
+declared, with the confident shallowness which makes him so admired
+by public speakers and leading-article writers, and so intolerable to
+all searchers for truth, that he saw nothing in the whole collection
+worth purchasing for the Museum, except the correspondence of Lord
+Melville on the American war.  That is to say, this correspondence of
+Lord Melville's was the only thing in the collection about which Lord
+Macaulay himself knew or cared.  Perhaps an Oxford or Cambridge
+professor of Celtic might have been allowed to make his voice heard,
+on a matter of Celtic manuscripts, even against Lord Macaulay.  The
+manuscripts were bought by Lord Ashburnham, who keeps them shut up,
+and will let no one consult them (at least up to the date when
+O'Curry published his Lectures he did so), 'for fear an actual
+acquaintance with their contents should decrease their value as
+matter of curiosity at some future transfer or sale.'  Who knows?
+Perhaps an Oxford professor of Celtic might have touched the flinty
+heart of Lord Ashburnham.
+
+At this moment, when the narrow Philistinism which has long had
+things its own way in England, is showing its natural fruits, and we
+are beginning to feel ashamed, and uneasy, and alarmed at it; now,
+when we are becoming aware that we have sacrificed to Philistinism
+culture, and insight, and dignity, and acceptance, and weight among
+the nations, and hold on events that deeply concern us, and control
+of the future, and yet that it cannot even give us the fool's
+paradise it promised us, but is apt to break down, and to leave us
+with Mr. Roebuck's and Mr. Lowe's laudations of our matchless
+happiness, and the largest circulation in the world assured to the
+Daily Telegraph, for our only comfort; at such a moment it needs some
+moderation not to be attacking Philistinism by storm, but to mine it
+through such gradual means as the slow approaches of culture, and the
+introduction of chairs of Celtic.  But the hard unintelligence, which
+is just now our bane, cannot be conquered by storm; it must be
+suppled and reduced by culture, by a growth in the variety, fulness,
+and sweetness of our spiritual life; and this end can only be reached
+by studying things that are outside of ourselves, and by studying
+them disinterestedly.  Let us reunite ourselves with our better mind
+and with the world through science; and let it be one of our angelic
+revenges on the Philistines, who among their other sins are the
+guilty authors of Fenianism, to found at Oxford a chair of Celtic,
+and to send, through the gentle ministration of science, a message of
+peace to Ireland.
+
+
+
+Footnotes:-
+
+{0a}  See p. 28 of the following essay.  [Starts with "It is not
+difficult for the other side . . . "--DP.]
+
+{0b}  See particularly pp. 9, 10, 11, of the following essay.
+
+{4}  Lord Strangford remarks on this passage:- 'Your Gomer and your
+Cimmerians are of course only lay figures, to be accepted in the
+rhetorical and subjective sense.  As such I accept them, but I enter
+a protest against the "genuine tongue of his ancestors."  Modern
+Celtic tongues are to the old Celtic heard by Julius Caesar, broadly
+speaking, what the modern Romanic tongues are to Caesar's own Latin.
+Welsh, in fact, is a detritus; a language in the category of modern
+French, or, to speak less roughly and with a closer approximation, of
+old Provencal, not in the category of Lithuanian, much less in the
+category of Basque.  By true inductive research, based on an accurate
+comparison of such forms of Celtic speech, oral and recorded, as we
+now possess, modern philology has, in so far as was possible,
+succeeded in restoring certain forms of the parent speech, and in so
+doing has achieved not the least striking of its many triumphs; for
+those very forms thus restored have since been verified past all
+cavil by their actual discovery in the old Gaulish inscriptions
+recently come to light.  The phonesis of Welsh as it stands is
+modern, not primitive its grammar,--the verbs excepted,--is
+constructed out of the fragments of its earlier forms, and its
+vocabulary is strongly Romanised, two out of the six words here given
+being Latin of the Empire.  Rightly understood, this enhances the
+value of modern Celtic instead of depreciating it, because it serves
+to rectify it.  To me it is a wonder that Welsh should have retained
+so much of its integrity under the iron pressure of four hundred
+years of Roman dominion.  Modern Welsh tenacity and cohesive power
+under English pressure is nothing compared with what that must have
+been.'
+
+{14}  Here again let me have the pleasure of quoting Lord
+Strangford:- 'When the Celtic tongues were first taken in hand at the
+dawn of comparative philological inquiry, the tendency was, for all
+practical results, to separate them from the Indo-European aggregate,
+rather than to unite them with it.  The great gulf once fixed between
+them was narrowed on the surface, but it was greatly and indefinitely
+deepened.  Their vocabulary and some of their grammar were seen at
+once to be perfectly Indo-European, but they had no case-endings to
+their nouns, none at all in Welsh, none that could be understood in
+Gaelic; their phonesis seemed primeval and inexplicable, and nothing
+could be made out of their pronouns which could not be equally made
+out of many wholly un-Aryan languages.  They were therefore co-
+ordinated, not with each single Aryan tongue, but with the general
+complex of Aryan tongues, and were conceived to be anterior to them
+and apart from them, as it were the strayed vanguard of European
+colonisation or conquest from the East.  The reason of this
+misconception was, that their records lay wholly uninvestigated as
+far as all historical study of the language was concerned, and that
+nobody troubled himself about the relative age and the development of
+forms, so that the philologists were fain to take them as they were
+put into their hands by uncritical or perverse native commentators
+and writers, whose grammars and dictionaries teemed with blunders and
+downright forgeries.  One thing, and one thing alone, led to the
+truth:  the sheer drudgery of thirteen long years spent by Zeuss in
+the patient investigation of the most ancient Celtic records, in
+their actual condition, line by line and letter by letter.  Then for
+the first time the foundation of Celtic research was laid; but the
+great philologist did not live to see the superstructure which never
+could have been raised but for him.  Prichard was first to indicate
+the right path, and Bopp, in his monograph of 1839, displayed his
+incomparable and masterly sagacity as usual, but for want of any
+trustworthy record of Celtic words and forms to work upon, the truth
+remained concealed or obscured until the publication of the Gramatica
+Celtica.  Dr. Arnold, a man of the past generation, who made more use
+of the then uncertain and unfixed doctrines of comparative philology
+in his historical writings than is done by the present generation in
+the fullest noonday light of the Vergleichende Grammatik, was thus
+justified in his view by the philology of the period, to which he
+merely gave an enlarged historical expression.  The prime fallacy
+then as now, however, was that of antedating the distinction between
+Gaelic and Cymric Celts.'
+
+{25}  Dr. O'Conor in his Catalogue of the Stowe MSS. (quoted by
+O'Curry).
+
+{26}  O'Curry.
+
+{29}  Here, where Saturday should come, something is wanting in the
+manuscript.
+
+{66}  See Les Scythes, les Ancetres des Peuples Germaniques et
+Slaves, par F. G. Bergmann, professeur a la faculte des Lettres de
+Strasbourg:  Colmar, 1858.  But Professor Bergmann's etymologies are
+often, says Lord Strangford, 'false lights, held by an uncertain
+hand.'  And Lord Strangford continues: --'The Apian land certainly
+meant the watery land, Meer-Umschlungon, among the pre-Hellenic
+Greeks, just as the same land is called Morea by the modern post-
+Hellenic or Romaic Greeks from more, the name for the sea in the
+Slavonic vernacular of its inhabitants during the heart of the middle
+ages.  But it is only connected by a remote and secondary affinity,
+if connected at all, with the avia of Scandinavia, assuming that to
+be the true German word for water, which, if it had come down to us
+in Gothic, would have been avi, genitive aujos, and not a mere
+Latinised termination.  Scythian is surely a negative rather than a
+positive term, much like our Indian, or the Turanian of modern
+ethnologists, used to comprehend nomads and barbarians of all sorts
+and races north and east of the Black and Caspian seas.  It is unsafe
+to connect their name with anything as yet; it is quite as likely
+that it refers to the bow and arrow as to the shield, and is
+connected with our word to shoot, sceotan, skiutan, Lithuanian szau-
+ti.  Some of the Scythian peoples may have been Anarian, Allophylic,
+Mongolian; some were demonstrably Aryan, and not only that, but
+Iranian as well, as is best shown in a memoir read before the Berlin
+Academy this last year; the evidence having been first indicated in
+the rough by Schaffarik the Slavonic antiquary.  Coins, glosses,
+proper names, and inscriptions prove it.  Targitaos (not -tavus) and
+the rest is guess-work or wrong.  Herodotus's [Greek] for the goddess
+Vesta is not connected with the root div whence Devas, Deus, &c., but
+the root tap, in Latin tep (of tepere, tepefacere), Slavonic tepl,
+topl (for tep or top), in modern Persian tab.  Thymele refers to the
+hearth as the place of smoke ([Greek], thus, fumus), but familia
+denotes household from famulus for fagmulus, the root fag being
+equated with the Sansk. bhaj, servira.  Lucan's Hesus or Esus may
+fairly be compared with the Welsh Hu Gadarn by legitimate process,
+but no letter-change can justify his connection with Gaisos, the
+spear, not the sword, Virgil's gaesum, A. S. gar, our verb to gore,
+retained in its outer form in gar-fish.  For Theuthisks lege
+Thiudisks, from thiuda, populus; in old high German Diutisk, Diotisk,
+popularis, vulgaris, the country vernacular as distinguished from the
+cultivated Latin; hence the word Dutch, Deutsch.  With our ancestors
+theod stood for nation generally and getheode for any speech.  Our
+diet in the political sense is the same word, but borrowed from our
+German cousins, not inherited from our fathers.  The modern Celtic
+form is the Irish tuath, in ancient Celtic it must have been teuta,
+touta, of which we actually have the adjective toutius in the Gaulish
+inscription of Nismes.  In Oscan we have it as turta, tuta, its
+adjective being handed down in Livy's meddix tuticus, the mayor or
+chief magistrate of the tuta.  In the Umbrian inscriptions it is
+tota.  In Lithuanian tauta, the country opposed to the town, and in
+old Prussian tauta, the country generally, en Prusiskan tautan, im
+Land zu Preussen.'
+
+{68}  Lord Strangford observes here: --'The original forms of Gael
+should be mentioned--Gaedil, Goidil:  in modern Gaelic orthography
+Gaoidheal where the dh is not realised in pronunciation.  There is
+nothing impossible in the connection of the root of this with that of
+Scot, IF the s of the latter be merely prosthetic.  But the whole
+thing is in nubibus, and given as a guess only.'
+
+{69}  'The name of Erin,' says Lord Strangford, 'is treated at length
+in a masterly note by Whitley Stokes in the 1st series of Max
+Muller's lectures (4th ed.) p. 255, where its earliest TANGIBLE form
+is shown to have been Iverio.  Pictet's connection with Arya is quite
+baseless.'
+
+{82}  It is to be remembered that the above was written before the
+recent war between Prussia and Austria.
+
+{84}  The etymology is Monsieur Henri Martin's, but Lord Strangford
+says--'Whatever gai may be, it is assuredly not Celtic.  Is there any
+authority for this word gair, to laugh, or rather "laughter," beyond
+O'Reilly?  O'Reilly is no authority at all except in so far as tested
+and passed by the new school.  It is hard to give up gavisus.  But
+Diez, chief authority in Romanic matters, is content to accept
+Muratori's reference to an old High-German gahi, modern jahe, sharp,
+quick, sudden, brisk, and so to the sense of lively, animated, high
+in spirits.'
+
+{85}  Monsieur Henri Martin, whose chapters on the Celts, in his
+Histoire de France, are full of information and interest.
+
+{97}  The above is really a sentence taken from the Cologne Gazette.
+Lord Strangford's comment here is as follows: --'Modern Germanism, in
+a general estimate of Germanism, should not be taken, absolutely and
+necessarily, as the constant, whereof we are the variant.  The Low-
+Dutch of Holland, anyhow, are indisputably as genuine Dutch as the
+High-Dutch of Germany Proper.  But do they write sentences like this
+one--informe, ingens, cui lumen ademptum?  If not, the question must
+be asked, not how we have come to deviate, but how the Germans have
+come to deviate.  Our modern English prose in plain matters is often
+all just the same as the prose of King Alfred and the Chronicle.
+Ohthere's North Sea Voyage and Wulfstan's Baltic Voyage is the sort
+of thing which is sent in every day, one may say, to the Geographical
+or Ethnological Society, in the whole style and turn of phrase and
+thought.'
+
+The mass of a stock must supply our data for judging the stock.  But
+see, moreover, what I have said at p. 100.
+
+{120}  Lord Strangford's note on this is: --'The Irish monks whose
+bells and books were found in Iceland could not have contributed
+anything to the old Norse spirit, for they had perished before the
+first Norseman had set foot on the island.  The form of the old Norse
+poetry known to us as Icelandic, from the accident of its
+preservation in that island alone, is surely Pan-Teutonic from old
+times; the ar and method of its strictly literary cultivation must
+have been much influenced by the contemporary Old-English national
+poetry, with which the Norsemen were in constant contact; and its
+larger, freer, and wilder spirit must have been owing to their freer
+and wilder life, to say nothing of their roused and warring paganism.
+They could never have known any Celts save when living in embryo with
+other Teutons.'
+
+Very likely Lord Strangford is right, but the proposition with which
+he begins is at variance with what the text quoted by Zeuss alleges.
+
+{133}  Rhyme,--the most striking characteristic of our modern poetry
+as distinguished from that of the ancients, and a main source, to our
+poetry, of its magic and charm, of what we call its romantic
+element,--rhyme itself, all the weight of evidence tends to show,
+comes into our poetry from the Celts.
+
+{136}  Take the following attempt to render the natural magic
+supposed to pervade Tieck's poetry: --'In diesen Dichtungen herrscht
+eine geheimnissvolle Innigkeit, ein sonderbares Einverstandniss mit
+der Natur, besonders mit der Pflanzen--und Steinreich.  Der Leser
+fuhlt sich da wie in einem verzauberten Walde; er hort die
+unterirdischen Quellen melodisch rauschen; wildfremde Wunderblumen
+schauen ihn an mit ihren bunten schnsuchtigen Augen; unsichtbare
+Lippen kussen seine Wangen mit neckender Zartlichkeit; hohe Pilze,
+wie goldne Glocken, wachsen klingend empor am Fusse der Baume;' and
+so on.  Now that stroke of the hohe Pilze, the great funguses, would
+have been impossible to the tact and delicacy of a born lover of
+nature like the Celt, and could only have come from a German who has
+hineinstudirt himself into natural magic.  It is a crying false note,
+which carries us at once out of the world of nature-magic and the
+breath of the woods, into the world of theatre-magic and the smell of
+gas and orange-peel.
+
+
+
+
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