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The Project Gutenberg eBook, Celtic Literature, by Matthew Arnold
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
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with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
Title: Celtic Literature
Author: Matthew Arnold
Release Date: July 20, 2014 [eBook #5159]
[This file was first posted on May 20, 2002]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CELTIC LITERATURE***
</pre>
<p>Transcribed from the 1891 Smith, Elder and Co. edition by
David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org</p>
<p style="text-align: center">
<a href="images/coverb.jpg">
<img alt=
"Book cover"
title=
"Book cover"
src="images/covers.jpg" />
</a></p>
<h1>THE STUDY<br />
<span class="GutSmall">OF</span><br />
CELTIC LITERATURE</h1>
<div class="gapspace"> </div>
<p style="text-align: center"><span
class="GutSmall">BY</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center">MATTHEW ARNOLD</p>
<div class="gapspace"> </div>
<p style="text-align: center"><b>Popular Edition</b></p>
<div class="gapspace"> </div>
<p style="text-align: center">LONDON</p>
<p style="text-align: center">SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15
WATERLOO PLACE<br />
1891</p>
<p style="text-align: center">[<i>All rights reserved</i>]</p>
<h2>INTRODUCTION.</h2>
<p><span class="smcap">The</span> 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 <i>Cornhill Magazine</i>, 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <i>Taliesin</i>, <i>or the Bards and Druids of
Britain</i>, 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 mediæval 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, <a name="citation0a"></a><a
href="#footnote0a" class="citation">[0a]</a> 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.</p>
<p>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:—</p>
<p>‘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.</p>
<p>‘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, <i>The Literature of the Cymry</i>, shows how perfectly
Welshmen can avoid this danger if they will.</p>
<p>‘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.’</p>
<p>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. <a name="citation0b"></a><a href="#footnote0b"
class="citation">[0b]</a> 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, ‘<i>de humana impotentia non nisi parce
loqui curabit</i>, <i>at largiter de humana virtute
seupotentia</i>.’ But so far as condemnation of
Celtic failure was needful towards preparing the way for the
growth of Celtic virtue, I used condemnation.</p>
<p>The <i>Times</i>, 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. <i>Cease to do evil</i>, <i>learn to
do good</i>, was the upshot of its exhortations to the Welsh; by
<i>evil</i>, the <i>Times</i> understanding all things Celtic,
and by <i>good</i>, 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.’</p>
<p>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
<i>Times</i>, 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.’</p>
<p>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 <i>Times</i>, 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: ‘<i>Behold
England’s difficulty in governing Ireland</i>!’</p>
<p>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 <i>Times</i> 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 be achieved. When these
papers of mine on the Celtic genius and literature first appeared
in the <i>Cornhill Magazine</i>, 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 <i>Times</i> 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?</p>
<p>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 <i>Times</i> 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 <i>Times</i> 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
<i>Times</i> 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
<i>Journal des Débats</i> 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 <i>Times</i> may scold
them and rate them, and assure them there is nobody on earth so
admirable.</p>
<p>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!’</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h2>THE STUDY OF CELTIC LITERATURE</h2>
<blockquote><p>‘They went forth to the war, but they always
fell.’</p>
<p style="text-align: right"><span
class="smcap">Ossian</span>.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><span class="smcap">Some</span> 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 aërial 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, <i>the bloody city</i>, 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, <i>the place of feasting</i>,
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 <i>Sands of
Lamentation</i> and Llys Helig, <i>Heilig’s Mansion</i>, a
mansion under the waves, a sea-buried palace and realm.
<i>Hac ibat Simois</i>; <i>hic est Sigeia tellus</i>.</p>
<p>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
Cæsar! <i>Blanc</i>, <i>rouge</i>, <i>rocher
champ</i>, <i>église</i>, <i>seigneur</i>,—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,
<a name="citation4"></a><a href="#footnote4"
class="citation">[4]</a> <i>gwyn</i>, <i>goch</i>, <i>craig</i>,
<i>maes</i>, <i>llan</i>, <i>arglwydd</i>; 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <i>Saturday
Review</i>, 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 Cæsar 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 <i>has</i> been, what it <i>has</i> 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.</p>
<p>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 <i>science des origines</i>, 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; <a name="citation14"></a><a
href="#footnote14" class="citation">[14]</a> 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 <i>Myvyrian
Archæology</i>, 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.</p>
<p>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, <i>aliens in blood</i> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h3>I.</h3>
<p>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 <i>Black Book
of Caermarthen</i>, or of the <i>Red Book of Hergest</i>, 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 <i>Myvyrian
Archæology</i>, there are a vast number of collections of
Welsh manuscripts in London, and in the libraries of the gentry
of the principality.’ The <i>Myvyrian
Archæology</i>, 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
<i>statesman</i>, 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 archæology. 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 <i>Archæologia
Britannica</i>, 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 <i>Myvyrian Archæology of
Wales</i>. 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,—<i>si quid mentem mortalia tangunt</i>,—he may
be satisfied.</p>
<p>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 <i>Annals of the Four
Masters</i> (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
<i>Book of the Dun Cow</i>, the <i>Book of Leinster</i>, the
<i>Book of Ballymote</i>, the <i>Speckled Book</i>, the <i>Book
of Lecain</i>, the <i>Yellow Book of Lecain</i>,—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 <i>Tales</i>, consisting of <i>Historic Tales</i>
and <i>Imaginative Tales</i>, distributes the contents of its
<i>Historic Tales</i> 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
<i>Annals of the Four Masters</i> 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.’ <a name="citation25"></a><a
href="#footnote25" class="citation">[25]</a> Through other
divisions of this mass of materials,—the books of pedigrees
and genealogies, the martyrologies and festologies, such as the
<i>Féliré of Angus the Culdee</i>, the
topographical tracts, such as the <i>Dinnsenchas</i>,—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.’ <a
name="citation26"></a><a href="#footnote26"
class="citation">[26]</a></p>
<p>And then, besides, to our knowledge of the Celtic genius, Mr.
Norris has brought us from Cornwall, M. de la Villemarqué
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.</p>
<p>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, <i>The Mythology and Rites of the British
Druids</i>, 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:—</p>
<p>‘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.’</p>
<p>Nothing could well be simpler; but what Davies finds in this
simple opening of Taliesin’s story is
prodigious:—</p>
<p>‘Let us take a brief view of the proprietor of this
estate. Tegid Voel—<i>bald
serenity</i>—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.’</p>
<p>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.’</p>
<p>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.’</p>
<p>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 <i>Taliesin</i> 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-dæmonic
worship, Edward Davies gives this translation of an old Welsh
poem, entitled <i>The Panegyric of Lludd the
Great</i>:—</p>
<p>‘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; <a name="citation29"></a><a
href="#footnote29" class="citation">[29]</a> 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.’</p>
<p>That looks Helio-dæmonic enough, undoubtedly; especially
when Davies prints <i>O Brithi</i>, <i>O Brithoi</i>! in Hebrew
characters, as being ‘vestiges of sacred hymns in the
Phœnician language.’ But then comes Mr. Nash,
and says that the poem is a middle-age composition, with nothing
Helio-dæmonic about it; that it is meant to ridicule the
monks; and that <i>O Brithi</i>, <i>O Brithoi</i>! 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:—</p>
<p>‘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.’</p>
<p>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
<i>Panegyric on Lludd the Great</i>, and one is very grateful to
Mr. Nash.</p>
<p>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:—</p>
<p>‘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.’</p>
<p>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 (<i>henfon</i>) 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 <i>henfon</i> 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 <i>heb eppa</i>, ‘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.</p>
<p>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 Villemarqué,—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 <i>Vindication of the
Ancient British Poems</i> 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 <i>Spoils of Annwn</i>, 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 <i>Mabinogion</i>, 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 <i>Spoils of Annwn</i> 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 <i>Mabinogion</i>,—manuscripts written,
like the famous <i>Red Book of Hergest</i>, 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 <i>Brut y Tywysogion</i>, 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 <i>Domhnach Airgid</i>, 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 <i>Domhnach Airgid</i> 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
<i>Domhnach Airgid</i> with his own hands; and one reads
on:—</p>
<p>‘As St. Patrick, says an ancient life of St. Mac
Carthainn preserved by Colgan in his <i>Acta Sanctorum
Hiberniæ</i>, 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!”</p>
<p>‘“Upon my good word,” said the Saint,
“it was not usual with you to make that noise.”</p>
<p>‘“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.”</p>
<p>‘“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.”</p>
<p>‘And the Saint then left Bishop Mac Carthainn there, at
Clogher, and bestowed the <i>Domhnach Airgid</i> upon him, which
had been given to Patrick from heaven, when he was on the sea,
coming to Erin.’</p>
<p>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?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h3>II.</h3>
<p>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
archæologists 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:—</p>
<p>‘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 <i>Books of Ballymote and
Lecain</i>, <i>The Speckled Book</i>, <i>The Annals of the Four
Masters</i>, 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 <i>Book of Ballymote</i> 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.”’</p>
<p>And from that day Moore, it is said, lost all heart for going
on with his <i>History of Ireland</i>, and it was only the
importunity of the publishers which induced him to bring out the
remaining volume.</p>
<p><i>Could not have been written by fools or for any foolish
purpose</i>. 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 <i>Red
Book of Hergest</i>. 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 mediæval 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 mediæval 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
mediæval, 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.’</p>
<p>Why, what a wonderful thing is this! We have, in the
first place, the most weighty and explicit
testimony,—Strabo’s, Cæsar’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:—</p>
<p>‘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.’</p>
<p>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
Cæsar’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 <i>literary</i> 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 mediæval literary period
in each, and to which no other mediæval 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
Cæsar mentions.</p>
<p>But perhaps the best way to get a full sense of the storied
antiquity, forming as it were the background to those
mediæval 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 <i>Kilhwch and Olwen</i>, in the
<i>Mabinogion</i>,—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.</p>
<p>Nothing could better give that sense of primitive and
pre-mediæval 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.</p>
<p>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 Cæsar. 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 <i>Gododin</i> put to purely
calendarial purposes; the <i>Nibelungen</i>, the
<i>Mahabharata</i>, and the <i>Iliad</i>, finally following the
fate of the <i>Gododin</i>; 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 mediæval
personages; they belong to an older, pagan, mythological
world. The very first thing that strikes one, in reading
the <i>Mabinogion</i>, is how evidently the mediæval
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 mediæval stories
of no Latin or Teutonic people does this strike one as in those
of the Welsh. Kilhwch, in the story, already quoted, of
<i>Kilhwch and Olwen</i>, 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:—</p>
<p>‘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).</p>
<p>‘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).</p>
<p>‘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).’</p>
<p>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:—</p>
<p>‘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.</p>
<p>‘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.</p>
<p>‘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.</p>
<p>‘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.’</p>
<p>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.’</p>
<p>There is evidently mixed here, with the newer legend, a
<i>detritus</i>, as the geologists would say, of something far
older; and the secret of Wales and its genius is not truly
reached until this <i>detritus</i>, 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.</p>
<p>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 <i>Hanes
Taliesin</i>, or <i>History of Taliesin</i>, 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 <i>Traveller’s
Song</i>.’ 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 <i>Battle of the Trees</i>: ‘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
<i>Traveller’s Song</i>. 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>I was in the hall of Don before Gwydion
was born</i>;’ he adds, after: ‘I was chief overseer
at the building of the tower of Nimrod,’ ‘<i>I have
been three times resident in the castle of Arianrod</i>;’
he adds, after: ‘I was at the cross with Mary
Magdalene,’ ‘<i>I obtained my inspiration from the
cauldron of Ceridwen</i>.’ And finally, after the
mediæval 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.</p>
<p>I say, then, what we want is to <i>know</i> 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.</p>
<p>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 <i>Art of Love</i>,
and the verses found by Edward Lhuyd in the <i>Juvencus</i>
manuscript at Cambridge. The mention of this
<i>Juvencus</i> 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.</p>
<p>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
‘<i>destitutio tenuium</i>’ has not yet taken place;
when the sharp consonants have not yet been changed into flat,
<i>p</i> or t into <i>b</i> or <i>d</i>; when, for instance,
<i>map</i>, a son, has not yet become <i>mab</i>; <i>coet</i> a
wood, <i>coed</i>; <i>ocet</i>, a harrow, <i>oged</i>. 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.</p>
<p>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 <i>Leabhar
na h’Uidhre</i>; or, <i>Book of the Dun Cow</i>. 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 <i>Annals of the Four
Masters</i>, 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 <i>Book of the
Dun Cow</i>. 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.</p>
<p>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 <i>Apian Land</i>? and within the limits of Greek itself
there is none. But the Scythian name for earth
‘apia,’ <i>watery</i>, <i>water-issued</i>, meaning
first <i>isle</i> and then <i>land</i>—this name, which we
find in ‘avia,’ Scandin<i>avia</i>, and in
‘ey’ for Aldern<i>ey</i>, not only explains the
<i>Apian Land</i> 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 <i>shielded</i> 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, <i>Shining with the targe</i>, the Greek Hercules, the
Sun, contains in the second half of his name, <i>tavus</i>,
‘shining,’ a wonderful cement to hold times and
nations together. <i>Tavus</i>, ‘shining,’ from
‘tava’—in Sanscrit, as well as Scythian,
‘to burn’ or ‘shine,’—is
<i>Divus</i>, <i>dies</i>, <i>Zeus</i>,
<i>Θεός</i>, <i>Dêva</i>, and I
know not how much more; and <i>Taviti</i>, 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
<i>familia</i>, is from <i>thymelé</i>, 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 <i>Theuthisks</i>, Deutschen, Tudesques, are
the men of one <i>theuth</i>, nation, or people; and of this our
name <i>Germans</i> 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
<i>teuta</i>, people; <i>taviti</i>, fire, appearing here in its
secondary and derived sense of <i>people</i>, just as it does in
its own Scythian language in Targitavus’s second name,
<i>Tavit-varus</i>, <i>Teutaros</i>, 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. <a name="citation66"></a><a
href="#footnote66" class="citation">[66]</a> 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 <i>solar</i> 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.</p>
<p>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 <i>vetus et major Scotia</i>, as
Colgan calls it? Who does not feel what pleasure Zeuss
brings us when he suggests that <i>Gael</i>, the name for the
Irish Celt, and <i>Scot</i>, are at bottom the same word, both
having their origin in a word meaning <i>wind</i>, and both
signifying <i>the violent stormy people</i>? <a
name="citation68"></a><a href="#footnote68"
class="citation">[68]</a> Who does not feel his mind
agreeably cleared about our friends the Fenians, when he learns
that the root of their name, <i>fen</i>, ‘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 <i>Arya</i>, 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, <i>avara</i>,
occidental, the western land or isle of the west. <a
name="citation69"></a><a href="#footnote69"
class="citation">[69]</a> 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
<i>heol</i> (sol), or <i>buaist</i> (fuisti)? or upon such a
sentence as this, ‘<i>Peris Duw dui funnaun</i>’
(‘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 <i>Cormac’s Glossary</i>, holds
up the Irish word <i>traith</i>, the sea, and makes us remark
that, though the names <i>Triton</i>, <i>Amphitrite</i>, and
those of corresponding Indian and Zend divinities, point to the
meaning <i>sea</i>, 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!</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <i>is</i> there, is for me the only
question.</p>
<h3>III.</h3>
<p>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
<i>Saturday Review</i> treats these matters of ethnology with
great power and learning, and the <i>Saturday Review</i> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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
<i>basket</i> (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, <i>bam</i>,
<i>kick</i>, <i>whop</i>, <i>twaddle</i>, <i>fudge</i>,
<i>hitch</i>, <i>muggy</i>,—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.</p>
<p>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 Amédée Thierry with this title:
<i>Des Caractères Physiologiques des Races Humaines
considérés dans leurs Rapports avec
l’Histoire</i>. 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 <i>Histoire des
Gaulois</i> 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:—</p>
<p>‘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.’</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h3>IV.</h3>
<p>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
<i>energy with honesty</i>. 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 <i>steadiness</i>; and you
have the Germanic genius <i>steadiness with honesty</i>. 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, <i>das Gemeine</i>, <i>die
Gemeinheit</i>, 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,
<i>science</i>,—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. <a name="citation82"></a><a
href="#footnote82" class="citation">[82]</a></p>
<p><i>For dulness</i>, <i>the creeping Saxons</i>,—says an
old Irish poem, assigning the characteristics for which different
nations are celebrated:—</p>
<blockquote><p>For acuteness and valour, the Greeks,<br />
For excessive pride, the Romans,<br />
For dulness, the creeping Saxons;<br />
For beauty and amorousness, the Gaedhils.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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 <i>douce petite
race naturellement chrétienne</i>, his <i>race
fière et timide</i>, <i>à l’extérieur
gauche et embarrassée</i>. 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 <i>infinie
délicatesse de sentiment qui caractérise la race
Celtique</i>, how little that accords with the popular conception
of an Irishman who wants to borrow money! <i>Sentiment</i>
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 <i>gay</i>, it is
said, is itself Celtic. It is not from <i>gaudium</i>, but
from the Celtic <i>gair</i>, to laugh; <a
name="citation84"></a><a href="#footnote84"
class="citation">[84]</a> 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’hôte
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; <i>a proud look and a high stomach</i>, 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.</p>
<p>Sentimental,—<i>always ready to react against the
despotism of fact</i>; that is the description a great friend <a
name="citation85"></a><a href="#footnote85"
class="citation">[85]</a> 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 <i>measure</i>;
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 <i>architectonicé</i>
which shapes great works, such as the <i>Agamemnon</i> or the
<i>Divine Comedy</i>, 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.</p>
<p>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 Baiæ, 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 <i>Battle of Moytura of the
Fomorians</i>, 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.</p>
<p>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, ‘<i>but they always
fell</i>.’</p>
<p>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; <i>to be a bard</i>, <i>freed a man</i>,—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?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <i>Saturday
Review</i>, 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h3>V.</h3>
<p>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 <i>Times</i> 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 <i>Cologne Gazette</i> talk in this other fashion:
‘Nachdem die Vorbereitungen zu dem auf dem
GürzenichSaale zu Ebren der Abgeordneten Statt finden
sollenden Bankette bereits vollständig getroffen worden
waren, fand heute vormittag auf polizeiliche Anordnung die
Schliessung sämmtlicher Zugänge zum Gürzenich
Statt’? <a name="citation97"></a><a href="#footnote97"
class="citation">[97]</a> 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.</p>
<p>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 Dürer 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 Dürer and Rubens. And observe in what
points our English pair succeed, and in what they fall
short. They fall short in <i>architectonicé</i>, 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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:—</p>
<p>‘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.</p>
<p>‘“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?”</p>
<p>‘“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.”</p>
<p>‘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?”</p>
<p>‘“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.”’</p>
<p>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:—</p>
<p>‘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.</p>
<p>‘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.</p>
<p>‘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.</p>
<p>‘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.</p>
<p>‘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!</p>
<p>‘Then the stranger looked at the chamberlain; and the
chamberlain bent his eyes on the ground and sighed.’</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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
‘<i>bêtise</i> allemande,’ they talk of the
‘<i>gaucherie</i> anglaise;’ while they talk of the
‘Allemand <i>balourd</i>,’ they talk of the
‘Anglais <i>empêtré</i>;’ while they
call the German ‘<i>niais</i>,’ they call the
Englishman ‘<i>mélancolique</i>.’ The
difference between the epithets <i>balourd</i> and
<i>empêtré</i> exactly gives the difference in
character I wish to seize; <i>balourd</i> means heavy and dull,
<i>empêtré</i> 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:—</p>
<blockquote><p>. . . Gallois sont tous, par nature,<br />
Plus fous que bêtes en pâsture—</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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 <i>humour</i>, 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 (<i>gaucherie typique</i>) 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h3>VI.</h3>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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:—</p>
<blockquote><p>. . . nor sometimes forget<br />
Those other two equal with me in fate,<br />
So were I equall’d with them in renown,<br />
Blind Thamyris and blind Mæonides—</p>
</blockquote>
<p>with this from Goethe:—</p>
<blockquote><p>Es bildet ein Talent sich in der Stille,<br />
Sich ein Character in dem Strom der Welt.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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 <i>poetical</i> simplicity. One may say the same of the
simple passages in Shakspeare; they are perfect, their simplicity
being a <i>poetical</i> 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 <i>style</i> 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.</p>
<p>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
<i>Gemeinheit</i> 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.</p>
<p>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 <span class="GutSmall">A.D.</span>,
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 <i>Nibelungen</i>
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 <i>not</i> 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
<i>Nibelungen</i>, 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 <i>Nibelungen</i>. <a name="citation120"></a><a
href="#footnote120" class="citation">[120]</a> 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.</p>
<p>This something is <i>style</i>, 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 <i>Pindarism</i>, 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:—</p>
<blockquote><p>The grave of March is this, and this the grave of
Gwythyr;<br />
Here is the grave of Gwgawn Gleddyfreidd;<br />
But unknown is the grave of Arthur.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>That comes from the Welsh <i>Memorials of the Graves of the
Warriors</i>, 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):—</p>
<blockquote><p>Afflictions sore long time I bore,<br />
Physicians were in vain,<br />
Till God did please Death should me seize<br />
And ease me of my pain—</p>
</blockquote>
<p>if, I say, we compare the Welsh memorial lines with the
English, which in their <i>Gemeinheit</i> of style are truly
Germanic, we shall get a clear sense of what that Celtic talent
for style I have been speaking of is.</p>
<p>Or take this epitaph of an Irish Celt, Angus the Culdee, whose
<i>Féliré</i>, 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:—</p>
<blockquote><p>Angus in the assembly of Heaven,<br />
Here are his tomb and his bed;<br />
It is from hence he went to death,<br />
In the Friday, to holy Heaven.</p>
<p>It was in Cluain Eidhnech he was rear’d;<br />
It was in Cluain Eidhnech he was buried;<br />
In Cluain Eidhnech, of many crosses,<br />
He first read his psalms.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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:—</p>
<blockquote><p>Their Lord they will praise,<br />
Their speech they will keep,<br />
Their land they will lose,<br />
Except wild Wales.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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!</p>
<p>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 <i>Book of Praise</i>; 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
<i>Golden Treasury</i>; but yet no sound critic can doubt that,
so far as poetry is concerned, while the <i>Golden Treasury</i>
is a monument of a nation’s strength, the <i>Book of
Praise</i> 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.</p>
<p>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 <i>Imitation</i>, the <i>Dies Iræ</i>, the
<i>Stabat Mater</i>—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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Its chord of penetrating passion and melancholy, again, its
<i>Titanism</i> 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 <i>Ossian</i>, carried in the last century
this vein like a flood of lava through Europe. I am not
going to criticise Macpherson’s <i>Ossian</i> 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 <i>Ossian</i> she may have stolen from that
<i>vetus et major Scotia</i>, 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 <i>Ossian</i> 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:—</p>
<p>‘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.’</p>
<p>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 <i>Werther</i>. 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 <i>Prometheus</i>,—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 <i>Sehnsucht</i> 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:—</p>
<blockquote><p>O my crutch! is it not autumn, when the fern is
red, the water-flag yellow? Have I not hated that which I
love?</p>
<p>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?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>O my crutch! stand straight, thou wilt support me the better;
it is very long since I was Llywarch.</p>
<p>Behold old age, which makes sport of me, from the hair of my
head to my teeth, to my eyes, which women loved.</p>
<p>The four things I have all my life most hated fall upon me
together,—coughing and old age, sickness and sorrow.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>How evil was the lot allotted to Llywarch, the night when he
was brought forth! sorrows without end, and no deliverance from
his burden.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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?</p>
<blockquote><p>The fire which on my bosom preys<br />
Is lone as some volcanic isle;<br />
No torch is kindled at its blaze;<br />
A funeral pile!</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Or, again:—</p>
<blockquote><p>Count o’er the joys thine hours have
seen,<br />
Count o’er thy days from anguish free,<br />
And know, whatever thou hast been,<br />
’Tis something better not to be.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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?</p>
<blockquote><p>. . . What though the field be lost?<br />
All is not lost; the unconquerable will,<br />
And study of revenge, immortal hate,<br />
And courage never to submit or yield,<br />
And what is else not to be overcome.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>There, surely, speaks a genius to whose composition the Celtic
fibre was not wholly a stranger!</p>
<p>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:—</p>
<blockquote><p>How evil was the lot allotted to Llywarch, the
night when he was brought forth—</p>
</blockquote>
<p>after Byron’s:—</p>
<blockquote><p>Count o’er the joys thine hours have
seen—</p>
</blockquote>
<p>take this of Southey’s, in answer to the question
whether he would like to have his youth over again:—</p>
<blockquote><p>Do I regret the past?<br />
Would I live o’er again<br />
The morning hours of life?<br />
Nay, William, nay, not so!<br />
Praise be to God who made me what I am,<br />
Other I would not be.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>There we have the other side of our being; the Germanic
goodness, docility, and fidelity to nature, in place of the
Celtic Titanism.</p>
<p>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. <a name="citation133"></a><a
href="#footnote133" class="citation">[133]</a> 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:—</p>
<p>‘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.’</p>
<p>And this, which is perhaps less striking, is not less
beautiful:—</p>
<p>‘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.’</p>
<p>And here the landscape, up to this point so Greek in its clear
beauty, is suddenly magicalised by the romance touch:—</p>
<p>‘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.’</p>
<p>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 Rückert, 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 <a name="citation136"></a><a
href="#footnote136" class="citation">[136]</a> 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.</p>
<p>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:—</p>
<blockquote><p>As when the moon, refulgent lamp of
night—</p>
</blockquote>
<p>to call up any number of instances. Latin poetry
supplies plenty of instances too; if we put this from
Propertius’s <i>Hylas</i>:—</p>
<blockquote><p>. . . manus heroum . . .<br />
Mollia composita litora fronde togit—</p>
</blockquote>
<p>side by side with the line of Theocritus by which it was
suggested:—</p>
<blockquote><p><i>λειμὼν
yάρ σφιν
ἔκειτο
μέyας</i>,
<i>στιβάδεσσιν
ὄνειαρ</i>—</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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:—</p>
<blockquote><p>What little town by river or seashore,<br />
Or mountain-built with quiet citadel,<br />
Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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 <i>Zueignung</i>, 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 <i>Wanderer</i>,—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:—</p>
<blockquote><p>What little town, by river or seashore—</p>
</blockquote>
<p>to his:—</p>
<blockquote><p>White hawthorn and the pastoral eglantine,<br />
Fast-fading violets cover’d up in leaves—</p>
</blockquote>
<p>or his:—</p>
<blockquote><p>. . . magic casements, opening on the foam<br />
Of perilous seas, in fairy lands forlorn—</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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:’—</p>
<blockquote><p>Muscosi fontes et somno mollior herba—</p>
</blockquote>
<p>as his charming flower-gatherer, who—</p>
<blockquote><p>Pallentes violas et summa papavera carpens<br />
Narcissum et florem jungit bene olentis anethi—</p>
</blockquote>
<p>as his quinces and chestnuts:—</p>
<blockquote><p>. . . cana legam tenera lanugine mala<br />
Castaneasque nuces . . .</p>
</blockquote>
<p>then, I think, we shall be disposed to say that in
Shakspeare’s—</p>
<blockquote><p>I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,<br />
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,<br />
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,<br />
With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine—</p>
</blockquote>
<p>it is mainly a Greek note which is struck. Then, again
in his:—</p>
<blockquote><p>. . . look how the floor of heaven<br />
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold!</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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 aërialness and magic coming in. Then we have
the sheer, inimitable Celtic note in passages like
this:—</p>
<blockquote><p>Met we on hill, in dale, forest or mead,<br />
By paved fountain or by rushy brook,<br />
Or in the beached margent of the sea—</p>
</blockquote>
<p>or this, the last I will quote:—</p>
<blockquote><p>The moon shines bright. In such a night as
this,<br />
When the sweet wind did gently kiss the trees,<br />
And they did make no noise, in such a night<br />
Troilus, methinks, mounted the Trojan walls—</p>
<p>. . . in such a night<br />
Did Thisbe fearfully o’ertrip the dew—</p>
<p>. . . in such a night<br />
<i>Stood Dido</i>, <i>with a willow in her hand</i>,<br />
<i>Upon the wild sea-banks</i>, <i>and waved her love</i><br />
<i>To come again to Carthage</i>.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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?</p>
<div class="gapspace"> </div>
<p>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:—</p>
<blockquote><p>Es bildet ein Talent sich in der Stille,<br />
Sich ein Character in dem Strom der Welt—</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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 mediæval 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.</p>
<p>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 <i>Evil
Tribute of Nomenoë</i>, or in <i>Lord Nann and the
Fairy</i>, 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:—</p>
<blockquote><p>’Twas mirk, mirk night, and the water
bright<br />
Troubled and drumlie flowed—</p>
</blockquote>
<p>which is evidently Lowland-Scotchy; or as:—</p>
<blockquote><p>Foregad, but thou’rt an artful hand!</p>
</blockquote>
<p>which is English-stagey; or as:—</p>
<blockquote><p>To Gradlon’s daughter, bright of blee,<br />
Her lover he whispered tenderly—<br />
<i>Bethink thee</i>, <i>sweet Dahut</i>! <i>the key</i>!</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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. <i>Aliens in speech</i>, <i>in religion</i>,
<i>in blood</i>! 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 <i>Lectures</i> 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.</p>
<p>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 <i>Daily
Telegraph</i>, 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.</p>
<h2>FOOTNOTES</h2>
<p><a name="footnote0a"></a><a href="#citation0a"
class="footnote">[0a]</a> See p. 28 of the following
essay. [Starts with “It is not difficult for the
other side . . . ”—DP.]</p>
<p><a name="footnote0b"></a><a href="#citation0b"
class="footnote">[0b]</a> See particularly pp. 9, 10, 11,
of the following essay.</p>
<p><a name="footnote4"></a><a href="#citation4"
class="footnote">[4]</a> 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 Cæsar, broadly speaking, what the
modern Romanic tongues are to Cæsar’s own
Latin. Welsh, in fact, is a <i>detritus</i>; a language in
the category of modern French, or, to speak less roughly and with
a closer approximation, of old Provençal, 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
<i>phonesis</i> 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.’</p>
<p><a name="footnote14"></a><a href="#citation14"
class="footnote">[14]</a> 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
<i>phonesis</i> 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 <i>Gramatica
Celtica</i>. 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
<i>Vergleichende Grammatik</i>, 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.’</p>
<p><a name="footnote25"></a><a href="#citation25"
class="footnote">[25]</a> Dr. O’Conor in his
<i>Catalogue of the Stowe MSS.</i> (quoted by O’Curry).</p>
<p><a name="footnote26"></a><a href="#citation26"
class="footnote">[26]</a> O’Curry.</p>
<p><a name="footnote29"></a><a href="#citation29"
class="footnote">[29]</a> Here, where Saturday should come,
something is wanting in the manuscript.</p>
<p><a name="footnote66"></a><a href="#citation66"
class="footnote">[66]</a> See <i>Les Scythes</i>, <i>les
Ancêtres des Peuples Germaniques et Slaves</i>, par F. G.
Bergmann, professeur à la faculté 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, <i>Meer-Umschlungon</i>, among the pre-Hellenic Greeks,
just as the same land is called Morea by the modern post-Hellenic
or Romaic Greeks from <i>more</i>, 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 <i>avia</i> of
Scandinavia, assuming that to be the true German word for
<i>water</i>, which, if it had come down to us in Gothic, would
have been <i>avi</i>, genitive <i>aujôs</i>, and not a mere
Latinised termination. Scythian is surely a negative rather
than a positive term, much like our <i>Indian</i>, or the
<i>Turanian</i> 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
<i>shoot</i>, <i>sceótan</i>, <i>skiutan</i>, Lithuanian
<i>szau-ti</i>. 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
Ταβιτι for the goddess Vesta is not
connected with the root <i>div</i> whence Dêvas, Deus,
&c., but the root <i>tap</i>, in Latin <i>tep</i> (of tepere,
tepefacere), Slavonic <i>tepl</i>, <i>topl</i> (for <i>tep</i> or
<i>top</i>), in modern Persian <i>tâb</i>.
<i>Thymele</i> refers to the hearth as the place of smoke
(θύω, <i>thus</i>, <i>fumus</i>), but
<i>familia</i> denotes household from <i>famulus</i> for
<i>fagmulus</i>, the root <i>fag</i> being equated with the
Sansk. <i>bhaj</i>, <i>servira</i>. Lucan’s Hesus or
Esus may fairly be compared with the Welsh <i>Hu</i> Gadarn by
legitimate process, but no letter-change can justify his
connection with <i>Gaisos</i>, the spear, not the sword,
Virgil’s <i>gæsum</i>, A. S. <i>gár</i>, our
verb to <i>gore</i>, retained in its outer form in
<i>gar</i>-fish. For <i>Theuthisks lege Thiudisks</i>, from
<i>thiuda</i>, <i>populus</i>; in old high German Diutisk,
Diotisk, <i>popularis</i>, <i>vulgaris</i>, the country
vernacular as distinguished from the cultivated Latin; hence the
word <i>Dutch</i>, <i>Deutsch</i>. With our ancestors
<i>theód</i> stood for nation generally and
<i>getheóde</i> 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 <i>tuath</i>, in ancient Celtic it must have
been <i>teuta</i>, <i>touta</i>, of which we actually have the
adjective <i>toutius</i> in the Gaulish inscription of
Nismes. In Oscan we have it as <i>turta</i>, <i>tuta</i>,
its adjective being handed down in Livy’s <i>meddix
tuticus</i>, the mayor or chief magistrate of the
<i>tuta</i>. In the Umbrian inscriptions it is
<i>tota</i>. In Lithuanian <i>tauta</i>, the country
opposed to the town, and in old Prussian <i>tauta</i>, the
country generally, <i>en Prusiskan tautan</i>, <i>im Land zu
Preussen</i>.’</p>
<p><a name="footnote68"></a><a href="#citation68"
class="footnote">[68]</a> Lord Strangford observes
here:—‘The original forms of Gael should be
mentioned—Gaedil, Goidil: in modern Gaelic orthography
Gaoidheal where the <i>dh</i> is not realised in
pronunciation. There is nothing impossible in the
connection of the root of this with that of Scot, <i>if</i> the
<i>s</i> of the latter be merely prosthetic. But the whole
thing is <i>in nubibus</i>, and given as a guess only.’</p>
<p><a name="footnote69"></a><a href="#citation69"
class="footnote">[69]</a> ‘The name of Erin,’
says Lord Strangford, ‘is treated at length in a masterly
note by Whitley Stokes in the 1st series of Max
Müller’s lectures (4th ed.) p. 255, where its earliest
<i>tangible</i> form is shown to have been Iverio.
Pictet’s connection with Arya is quite baseless.’</p>
<p><a name="footnote82"></a><a href="#citation82"
class="footnote">[82]</a> It is to be remembered that the
above was written before the recent war between Prussia and
Austria.</p>
<p><a name="footnote84"></a><a href="#citation84"
class="footnote">[84]</a> The etymology is Monsieur Henri
Martin’s, but Lord Strangford says—‘Whatever
<i>gai</i> may be, it is assuredly not Celtic. Is there any
authority for this word <i>gair</i>, 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
<i>gavisus</i>. But Diez, chief authority in Romanic
matters, is content to accept Muratori’s reference to an
old High-German <i>gâhi</i>, modern <i>jähe</i>,
sharp, quick, sudden, brisk, and so to the sense of lively,
animated, high in spirits.’</p>
<p><a name="footnote85"></a><a href="#citation85"
class="footnote">[85]</a> Monsieur Henri Martin, whose
chapters on the Celts, in his <i>Histoire de France</i>, are full
of information and interest.</p>
<p><a name="footnote97"></a><a href="#citation97"
class="footnote">[97]</a> The above is really a sentence
taken from the <i>Cologne Gazette</i>. 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—<i>informe</i>, <i>ingens</i>, <i>cui lumen
ademptum</i>? 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 <i>King Alfred</i> and the
<i>Chronicle</i>. Ohthere’s <i>North Sea Voyage</i>
and Wulfstan’s <i>Baltic Voyage</i> 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.’</p>
<p>The mass of a stock must supply our data for judging the
stock. But see, moreover, what I have said at p. 100.</p>
<p><a name="footnote120"></a><a href="#citation120"
class="footnote">[120]</a> 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.’</p>
<p>Very likely Lord Strangford is right, but the proposition with
which he begins is at variance with what the text quoted by Zeuss
alleges.</p>
<p><a name="footnote133"></a><a href="#citation133"
class="footnote">[133]</a> 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 <i>romantic element</i>,—rhyme
itself, all the weight of evidence tends to show, comes into our
poetry from the Celts.</p>
<p><a name="footnote136"></a><a href="#citation136"
class="footnote">[136]</a> Take the following attempt to
render the natural magic supposed to pervade Tieck’s
poetry:—‘In diesen Dichtungen herrscht eine
geheimnissvolle Innigkeit, ein sonderbares Einverständniss
mit der Natur, besonders mit der Pflanzen—und
Steinreich. Der Leser fühlt sich da wie in einem
verzauberten Walde; er hört die unterirdischen Quellen
melodisch rauschen; wildfremde Wunderblumen schauen ihn an mit
ihren bunten schnsüchtigen Augen; unsichtbare Lippen
küssen seine Wangen mit neckender Zärtlichkeit; <i>hohe
Pilze</i>, <i>wie goldne Glocken</i>, <i>wachsen klingend empor
am Fusse der Bäume</i>;’ and so on. Now that
stroke of the <i>hohe Pilze</i>, 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 <i>hineinstudirt</i> 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.</p>
<p>***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CELTIC LITERATURE***</p>
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