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