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Title: Celtic Literature

Author: Matthew Arnold

Release Date: February, 2004  [EBook #5159]
[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
[This file was first posted on May 20, 2002]
[Most recently updated: May 20, 2002]

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, CELTIC LITERATURE ***




Transcribed from the 1891 Smith, Elder and Co. edition by David
Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk




CELTIC LITERATURE




INTRODUCTION



The following remarks on the study of Celtic Literature formed the
substance of four lectures given by me in the chair of poetry at
Oxford.  They were first published in the Cornhill Magazine, and are
now reprinted from thence.  Again and again, in the course of them, I
have marked the very humble scope intended; which is, not to treat
any special branch of scientific Celtic studies (a task for which I
am quite incompetent), but to point out the many directions in which
the results of those studies offer matter of general interest, and to
insist on the benefit we may all derive from knowing the Celt and
things Celtic more thoroughly.  It was impossible, however, to avoid
touching on certain points of ethnology and philology, which can be
securely handled only by those who have made these sciences the
object of special study.  Here the mere literary critic must owe his
whole safety to his tact in choosing authorities to follow, and
whatever he advances must be understood as advanced with a sense of
the insecurity which, after all, attaches to such a mode of
proceeding, and as put forward provisionally, by way of hypothesis
rather than of confident assertion.

To mark clearly to the reader both this provisional character of much
which I advance, and my own sense of it, I have inserted, as a check
upon some of the positions adopted in the text, notes and comments
with which Lord Strangford has kindly furnished me.  Lord Strangford
is hardly less distinguished for knowing ethnology and languages so
scientifically than for knowing so much of them; and his interest,
even from the vantage-ground of his scientific knowledge, and after
making all due reserves on points of scientific detail, in my
treatment,--with merely the resources and point of view of a literary
critic at my command,--of such a subject as the study of Celtic
Literature, is the most encouraging assurance I could have received
that my attempt is not altogether a vain one.

Both Lord Strangford and others whose opinion I respect have said
that I am unjust in calling Mr. Nash, the acute and learned author of
Taliesin, or the Bards and Druids of Britain, a 'Celt-hater.'  'He is
a denouncer,' says Lord Strangford in a note on this expression, 'of
Celtic extravagance, that is all; he is an anti-Philocelt, a very
different thing from an anti-Celt, and quite indispensable in
scientific inquiry.  As Philoceltism has hitherto,--hitherto,
remember,--meant nothing but uncritical acceptance and irrational
admiration of the beloved object's sayings and doings, without
reference to truth one way or the other, it is surely in the interest
of science to support him in the main.  In tracing the workings of
old Celtic leaven in poems which embody the Celtic soul of all time
in a mediaeval form, I do not see that you come into any necessary
opposition with him, for your concern is with the spirit, his with
the substance only.'  I entirely agree with almost all which Lord
Strangford here urges, and indeed, so sincere is my respect for Mr.
Nash's critical discernment and learning, and so unhesitating my
recognition of the usefulness, in many respects, of the work of
demolition performed by him, that in originally designating him as a
Celt-hater, I hastened to add, as the reader will see by referring to
the passage, {0a} words of explanation and apology for so calling
him.  But I thought then, and I think still, that Mr. Nash, in
pursuing his work of demolition, too much puts out of sight the
positive and constructive performance for which this work of
demolition is to clear the ground.  I thought then, and I think
still, that in this Celtic controversy, as in other controversies, it
is most desirable both to believe and to profess that the work of
construction is the fruitful and important work, and that we are
demolishing only to prepare for it.  Mr. Nash's scepticism seems to
me,--in the aspect in which his work, on the whole, shows it,--too
absolute, too stationary, too much without a future; and this tends
to make it, for the non-Celtic part of his readers, less fruitful
than it otherwise would be, and for his Celtic readers, harsh and
repellent.  I have therefore suffered my remarks on Mr. Nash still to
stand, though with a little modification; but I hope he will read
them by the light of these explanations, and that he will believe my
sense of esteem for his work to be a thousand times stronger than my
sense of difference from it.

To lead towards solid ground, where the Celt may with legitimate
satisfaction point to traces of the gifts and workings of his race,
and where the Englishman may find himself induced to sympathise with
that satisfaction and to feel an interest in it, is the design of all
the considerations urged in the following essay.  Kindly taking the
will for the deed, a Welshman and an old acquaintance of mine, Mr.
Hugh Owen, received my remarks with so much cordiality, that he asked
me to come to the Eisteddfod last summer at Chester, and there to
read a paper on some topic of Celtic literature or antiquities.  In
answer to this flattering proposal of Mr. Owen's, I wrote him a
letter which appeared at the time in several newspapers, and of which
the following extract preserves all that is of any importance

'My knowledge of Welsh matters is so utterly insignificant that it
would be impertinence in me, under any circumstances, to talk about
those matters to an assemblage of persons, many of whom have passed
their lives in studying them.

'Your gathering acquires more interest every year.  Let me venture to
say that you have to avoid two dangers in order to work all the good
which your friends could desire.  You have to avoid the danger of
giving offence to practical men by retarding the spread of the
English language in the principality.  I believe that to preserve and
honour the Welsh language and literature is quite compatible with not
thwarting or delaying for a single hour the introduction, so
undeniably useful, of a knowledge of English among all classes in
Wales.  You have to avoid, again, the danger of alienating men of
science by a blind partial, and uncritical treatment of your national
antiquities.  Mr. Stephens's excellent book, The Literature of the
Cymry, shows how perfectly Welshmen can avoid this danger if they
will.

'When I see the enthusiasm these Eisteddfods can awaken in your whole
people, and then think of the tastes, the literature, the amusements,
of our own lower and middle class, I am filled with admiration for
you.  It is a consoling thought, and one which history allows us to
entertain, that nations disinherited of political success may yet
leave their mark on the world's progress, and contribute powerfully
to the civilisation of mankind.  We in England have come to that
point when the continued advance and greatness of our nation is
threatened by one cause, and one cause above all.  Far more than by
the helplessness of an aristocracy whose day is fast coming to an
end, far more than by the rawness of a lower class whose day is only
just beginning, we are emperilled by what I call the "Philistinism"
of our middle class.  On the side of beauty and taste, vulgarity; on
the side of morals and feeling, coarseness; on the side of mind and
spirit, unintelligence,--this is Philistinism.  Now, then, is the
moment for the greater delicacy and spirituality of the Celtic
peoples who are blended with us, if it be but wisely directed, to
make itself prized and honoured.  In a certain measure the children
of Taliesin and Ossian have now an opportunity for renewing the
famous feat of the Greeks, and conquering their conquerors.  No
service England can render the Celts by giving you a share in her
many good qualities, can surpass that which the Celts can at this
moment render England, by communicating to us some of theirs.'

Now certainly, in that letter, written to a Welshman and on the
occasion of a Welsh festival, I enlarged on the merits of the Celtic
spirit and of its works, rather than on their demerits.  It would
have been offensive and inhuman to do otherwise.  When an
acquaintance asks you to write his father's epitaph, you do not
generally seize that opportunity for saying that his father was blind
of one eye, and had an unfortunate habit of not paying his
tradesmen's bills.  But the weak side of Celtism and of its Celtic
glorifiers, the danger against which they have to guard, is clearly
indicated in that letter; and in the remarks reprinted in this
volume,--remarks which were the original cause of Mr. Owen's writing
to me, and must have been fully present to his mind when he read my
letter,--the shortcomings both of the Celtic race, and of the Celtic
students of its literature and antiquities, are unreservedly marked,
and, so far as is necessary, blamed. {0b}  It was, indeed, not my
purpose to make blame the chief part of what I said; for the Celts,
like other people, are to be meliorated rather by developing their
gifts than by chastising their defects.  The wise man, says Spinoza
admirably, 'de humana impotentia non nisi parce loqui curabit, at
largiter de humana virtute seupotentia.'  But so far as condemnation
of Celtic failure was needful towards preparing the way for the
growth of Celtic virtue, I used condemnation.

The Times, however, prefers a shorter and sharper method of dealing
with the Celts, and in a couple of leading articles, having the
Chester Eisteddfod and my letter to Mr. Hugh Owen for their text, it
developed with great frankness, and in its usual forcible style, its
own views for the amelioration of Wales and its people.  Cease to do
evil, learn to do good, was the upshot of its exhortations to the
Welsh; by evil, the Times understanding all things Celtic, and by
good, all things English.  'The Welsh language is the curse of Wales.
Its prevalence, and the ignorance of English have excluded, and even
now exclude the Welsh people from the civilisation of their English
neighbours.  An Eisteddfod is one of the most mischievous and selfish
pieces of sentimentalism which could possibly be perpetrated.  It is
simply a foolish interference with the natural progress of
civilisation and prosperity.  If it is desirable that the Welsh
should talk English, it is monstrous folly to encourage them in a
loving fondness for their old language.  Not only the energy and
power, but the intelligence and music of Europe have come mainly from
Teutonic sources, and this glorification of everything Celtic, if it
were not pedantry, would be sheer ignorance.  The sooner all Welsh
specialities disappear from the face of the earth the better.'

And I need hardly say, that I myself, as so often happens to me at
the hands of my own countrymen, was cruelly judged by the Times, and
most severely treated.  What I said to Mr. Owen about the spread of
the English language in Wales being quite compatible with preserving
and honouring the Welsh language and literature, was tersely set down
as 'arrant nonsense,' and I was characterised as 'a sentimentalist
who talks nonsense about the children of Taliesin and Ossian, and
whose dainty taste requires something more flimsy than the strong
sense and sturdy morality of his fellow Englishmen.'

As I said before, I am unhappily inured to having these harsh
interpretations put by my fellow Englishmen upon what I write, and I
no longer cry out about it.  And then, too, I have made a study of
the Corinthian or leading article style, and know its exigencies, and
that they are no more to be quarrelled with than the law of
gravitation.  So, for my part, when I read these asperities of the
Times, my mind did not dwell very much on my own concern in them; but
what I said to myself, as I put the newspaper down, was this:
'Behold England's difficulty in governing Ireland!'

I pass by the dauntless assumption that the agricultural peasant whom
we in England, without Eisteddfods, succeed in developing, is so much
finer a product of civilisation than the Welsh peasant, retarded by
these 'pieces of sentimentalism.'  I will be content to suppose that
our 'strong sense and sturdy morality' are as admirable and as
universal as the Times pleases.  But even supposing this, I will ask
did any one ever hear of strong sense and sturdy morality being
thrust down other people's throats in this fashion?  Might not these
divine English gifts, and the English language in which they are
preached, have a better chance of making their way among the poor
Celtic heathen, if the English apostle delivered his message a little
more agreeably?  There is nothing like love and admiration for
bringing people to a likeness with what they love and admire; but the
Englishman seems never to dream of employing these influences upon a
race he wants to fuse with himself.  He employs simply material
interests for his work of fusion; and, beyond these, nothing except
scorn and rebuke.  Accordingly there is no vital union between him
and the races he has annexed; and while France can truly boast of her
'magnificent unity,' a unity of spirit no less than of name between
all the people who compose her, in England the Englishman proper is
in union of spirit with no one except other Englishmen proper like
himself.  His Welsh and Irish fellow-citizens are hardly more
amalgamated with him now than they were when Wales and Ireland were
first conquered, and the true unity of even these small islands has
yet to he achieved.  When these papers of mine on the Celtic genius
and literature first appeared in the Cornhill Magazine, they brought
me, as was natural, many communications from Welshmen and Irishmen
having an interest in the subject; and one could not but be painfully
struck, in reading these communications, to see how profound a
feeling of aversion and severance from the English they in general
manifested.  Who can be surprised at it, when he observes the strain
of the Times in the articles just quoted, and remembers that this is
the characteristic strain of the Englishman in commenting on
whatsoever is not himself?  And then, with our boundless faith in
machinery, we English expect the Welshman as a matter of course to
grow attached to us, because we invite him to do business with us,
and let him hold any number of public meetings and publish all the
newspapers he likes!  When shall we learn, that what attaches people
to us is the spirit we are of, and not the machinery we employ?

Last year there was a project of holding a Breton Eisteddfod at
Quimper in Brittany, and the French Home Secretary, whether wishing
to protect the magnificent unity of France from inroads of Bretonism,
or fearing lest the design should be used in furtherance of
Legitimist intrigues, or from whatever motive, issued an order which
prohibited the meeting.  If Mr. Walpole had issued an order
prohibiting the Chester Eisteddfod, all the Englishmen from Cornwall
to John o' Groat's House would have rushed to the rescue; and our
strong sense and sturdy morality would never have stopped gnashing
their teeth and rending their garments till the prohibition was
rescinded.  What a pity our strong sense and sturdy morality fail to
perceive that words like those of the Times create a far keener sense
of estrangement and dislike than acts like those of the French
Minister!  Acts like those of the French Minister are attributed to
reasons of State, and the Government is held blameable for them, not
the French people.  Articles like those of the Times are attributed
to the want of sympathy and of sweetness of disposition in the
English nature, and the whole English people gets the blame of them.
And deservedly; for from some such ground of want of sympathy and
sweetness in the English nature, do articles like those of the Times
come, and to some such ground do they make appeal.  The sympathetic
and social virtues of the French nature, on the other hand, actually
repair the breaches made by oppressive deeds of the Government, and
create, among populations joined with France as the Welsh and Irish
are joined with England, a sense of liking and attachment towards the
French people.  The French Government may discourage the German
language in Alsace and prohibit Eisteddfods in Brittany; but the
Journal des Debats never treats German music and poetry as
mischievous lumber, nor tells the Bretons that the sooner all Breton
specialities disappear from the face of the earth the better.
Accordingly, the Bretons and Alsatians have come to feel themselves a
part of France, and to feel pride in bearing the French name; while
the Welsh and Irish obstinately refuse to amalgamate with us, and
will not admire the Englishman as he admires himself, however much
the Times may scold them and rate them, and assure them there is
nobody on earth so admirable.

And at what a moment does it assure them of this, good heavens!  At a
moment when the ice is breaking up in England, and we are all
beginning at last to see how much real confusion and insufficiency it
covered; when, whatever may be the merits,--and they are great,--of
the Englishman and of his strong sense and sturdy morality, it is
growing more and more evident that, if he is to endure and advance,
he must transform himself, must add something to his strong sense and
sturdy morality, or at least must give to these excellent gifts of
his a new development.  My friend Mr. Goldwin Smith says, in his
eloquent way, that England is the favourite of Heaven.  Far be it
from me to say that England is not the favourite of Heaven; but at
this moment she reminds me more of what the prophet Isaiah calls, 'a
bull in a net.'  She has satisfied herself in all departments with
clap-trap and routine so long, and she is now so astounded at finding
they will not serve her turn any longer!  And this is the moment,
when Englishism pure and simple, which with all its fine qualities
managed always to make itself singularly unattractive, is losing that
imperturbable faith in its untransformed self which at any rate made
it imposing,--this is the moment when our great organ tells the Celts
that everything of theirs not English is 'simply a foolish
interference with the natural progress of civilisation and
prosperity;' and poor Talhaiarn, venturing to remonstrate, is
commanded 'to drop his outlandish title, and to refuse even to talk
Welsh in Wales!'

But let us leave the dead to bury their dead, and let us who are
alive go on unto perfection.  Let the Celtic members of this empire
consider that they too have to transform themselves; and though the
summons to transform themselves he often conveyed harshly and
brutally, and with the cry to root up their wheat as well as their
tares, yet that is no reason why the summons should not be followed
so far as their tares are concerned.  Let them consider that they are
inextricably bound up with us, and that, if the suggestions in the
following pages have any truth, we English, alien and uncongenial to
our Celtic partners as we may have hitherto shown ourselves, have
notwithstanding, beyond perhaps any other nation, a thousand latent
springs of possible sympathy with them.  Let them consider that new
ideas and forces are stirring in England, that day by day these new
ideas and forces gain in power, and that almost every one of them is
the friend of the Celt and not his enemy.  And, whether our Celtic
partners will consider this or no, at any rate let us ourselves, all
of us who are proud of being the ministers of these new ideas, work
incessantly to procure for them a wider and more fruitful
application; and to remove the main ground of the Celt's alienation
from the Englishman, by substituting, in place of that type of
Englishman with whom alone the Celt has too long been familiar, a new
type, more intelligent, more gracious, and more humane.



THE STUDY OF CELTIC LITERATURE



'They went forth to the war, but they always fell.'
OSSIAN

Some time ago I spent some weeks at Llandudno, on the Welsh coast.
The best lodging-houses at Llandudno look eastward, towards
Liverpool; and from that Saxon hive swarms are incessantly issuing,
crossing the bay, and taking possession of the beach and the lodging-
houses.  Guarded by the Great and Little Orme's Head, and alive with
the Saxon invaders from Liverpool, the eastern bay is an attractive
point of interest, and many visitors to Llandudno never contemplate
anything else.  But, putting aside the charm of the Liverpool
steamboats, perhaps the view, on this side, a little dissatisfies one
after a while; the horizon wants mystery, the sea wants beauty, the
coast wants verdure, and has a too bare austereness and aridity.  At
last one turns round and looks westward.  Everything is changed.
Over the mouth of the Conway and its sands is the eternal softness
and mild light of the west; the low line of the mystic Anglesey, and
the precipitous Penmaenmawr, and the great group of Carnedd Llewelyn
and Carnedd David and their brethren fading away, hill behind hill,
in an aerial haze, make the horizon; between the foot of Penmaenmawr
and the bending coast of Anglesey, the sea, a silver stream,
disappears one knows not whither.  On this side, Wales,--Wales, where
the past still lives, where every place has its tradition, every name
its poetry, and where the people, the genuine people, still knows
this past, this tradition, this poetry, and lives with it, and clings
to it; while, alas, the prosperous Saxon on the other side, the
invader from Liverpool and Birkenhead, has long ago forgotten his.
And the promontory where Llandudno stands is the very centre of this
tradition; it is Creuddyn, THE BLOODY CITY, where every stone has its
story; there, opposite its decaying rival, Conway Castle, is Diganwy,
not decaying but long since utterly decayed, some crumbling
foundations on a crag top and nothing more; Diganwy, where Mael-gwyn
shut up Elphin, and where Taliesin came to free him.  Below, in a
fold of the hill, is Llan-rhos, the church of the marsh, where the
same Mael-gwyn, a British prince of real history, a bold and
licentious chief, the original, it is said, of Arthur's Lancelot,
shut himself up in the church to avoid the Yellow Plague, and peeped
out through a hole in the door, and saw the monster and died.  Behind
among the woods, is Gloddaeth, THE PLACE OF FEASTING, where the bards
were entertained; and farther away, up the valley of the Conway
towards Llanrwst, is the Lake of Ceirio-nydd and Taliesin's grave.
Or, again, looking seawards and Anglesey-wards you have Pen-mon,
Seiriol's isle and priory, where Mael-gwyn lies buried; you have the
SANDS OF LAMENTATION and Llys Helig, HEILIG'S MANSION, a mansion
under the waves, a sea-buried palace and realm.  Hac ibat Simois; hic
est Sigeia tellus.

As I walked up and down, looking at the waves as they washed this
Sigeian land which has never had its Homer, and listening with
curiosity to the strange, unfamiliar speech of its old possessors'
obscure descendants,--bathing people, vegetable-sellers, and donkey-
boys, who were all about me, suddenly I heard, through the stream of
unknown Welsh, words, not English, indeed, but still familiar.  They
came from a French nursery-maid, with some children.  Profoundly
ignorant of her relationship, this Gaulish Celt moved among her
British cousins, speaking her polite neo-Latin tongue, and full of
compassionate contempt, probably, for the Welsh barbarians and their
jargon.  What a revolution was here!  How had the star of this
daughter of Gomer waxed, while the star of these Cymry, his sons, had
waned!  What a difference of fortune in the two, since the days when,
speaking the same language, they left their common dwelling-place in
the heart of Asia; since the Cimmerians of the Euxine came in upon
their western kinsmen, the sons of the giant Galates; since the
sisters, Gaul and Britain, cut the mistletoe in their forests, and
saw the coming of Caesar!  Blanc, rouge, rocher champ, eglise,
seigneur,--these words, by which the Gallo-Roman Celt now names
white, and red, and rock, and field, and church, and lord, are no
part of the speech of his true ancestors, they are words he has
learnt; but since he learned them they have had a worldwide success,
and we all teach them to our children, and armies speaking them have
domineered in every city of that Germany by which the British Celt
was broken, and in the train of these armies, Saxon auxiliaries, a
humbled contingent, have been fain to follow; the poor Welshman still
says, in the genuine tongue of his ancestors, {4} gwyn, goch, craig,
maes, llan, arglwydd; but his land is a province, and his history
petty, and his Saxon subduers scout his speech as an obstacle to
civilisation; and the echo of all its kindred in other lands is
growing every day fainter and more feeble; gone in Cornwall, going in
Brittany and the Scotch Highlands, going, too, in Ireland; and there,
above all, the badge of the beaten race, the property of the
vanquished.

But the Celtic genius was just then preparing, in Llandudno, to have
its hour of revival.  Workmen were busy in putting up a large tent-
like wooden building, which attracted the eye of every newcomer, and
which my little boys believed (their wish, no doubt, being father to
their belief,) to be a circus.  It turned out, however, to be no
circus for Castor and Pollux, but a temple for Apollo and the Muses.
It was the place where the Eisteddfod, or Bardic Congress of Wales,
was about to be held; a meeting which has for its object (I quote the
words of its promoters) 'the diffusion of useful knowledge, the
eliciting of native talent, and the cherishing of love of home and
honourable fame by the cultivation of poetry, music, and art.'  My
little boys were disappointed; but I, whose circus days are over, I,
who have a professional interest in poetry, and who, also, hating all
one-sidedness and oppression, wish nothing better than that the
Celtic genius should be able to show itself to the world and to make
its voice heard, was delighted.  I took my ticket, and waited
impatiently for the day of opening.  The day came, an unfortunate
one; storms of wind, clouds of dust, an angry, dirty sea.  The Saxons
who arrived by the Liverpool steamers looked miserable; even the
Welsh who arrived by land,--whether they were discomposed by the bad
morning, or by the monstrous and crushing tax which the London and
North-Western Railway Company levies on all whom it transports across
those four miles of marshy peninsula between Conway and Llandudno,--
did not look happy.  First we went to the Gorsedd, or preliminary
congress for conferring the degree of bard.  The Gorsedd was held in
the open air, at the windy corner of a street, and the morning was
not favourable to open-air solemnities.  The Welsh, too, share, it
seems to me, with their Saxon invaders, an inaptitude for show and
spectacle.  Show and spectacle are better managed by the Latin race
and those whom it has moulded; the Welsh, like us, are a little
awkward and resourceless in the organisation of a festival.  The
presiding genius of the mystic circle, in our hideous nineteenth-
century costume, relieved only by a green scarf, the wind drowning
his voice and the dust powdering his whiskers, looked thoroughly
wretched; so did the aspirants for bardic honours; and I believe,
after about an hour of it, we all of us, as we stood shivering round
the sacred stones, began half to wish for the Druid's sacrificial
knife to end our sufferings.  But the Druid's knife is gone from his
hands; so we sought the shelter of the Eisteddfod building.

The sight inside was not lively.  The president and his supporters
mustered strong on the platform.  On the floor the one or two front
benches were pretty well filled, but their occupants were for the
most part Saxons, who came there from curiosity, not from enthusiasm;
and all the middle and back benches, where should have been the true
enthusiasts,--the Welsh people, were nearly empty.  The president, I
am sure, showed a national spirit which was admirable.  He addressed
us Saxons in our own language, and called us 'the English branch of
the descendants of the ancient Britons.'  We received the compliment
with the impassive dulness which is the characteristic of our nature;
and the lively Celtic nature, which should have made up for the
dulness of ours, was absent.  A lady who sat by me, and who was the
wife, I found, of a distinguished bard on the platform, told me, with
emotion in her look and voice, how dear were these solemnities to the
heart of her people, how deep was the interest which is aroused by
them.  I believe her, but still the whole performance, on that
particular morning, was incurably lifeless.  The recitation of the
prize compositions began:  pieces of verse and prose in the Welsh
language, an essay on punctuality being, if I remember right, one of
them; a poem on the march of Havelock, another.  This went on for
some time.  Then Dr. Vaughan,--the well-known Nonconformist minister,
a Welshman, and a good patriot,--addressed us in English.  His speech
was a powerful one, and he succeeded, I confess, in sending a faint
thrill through our front benches; but it was the old familiar thrill
which we have all of us felt a thousand times in Saxon chapels and
meeting-halls, and had nothing bardic about it.  I stepped out, and
in the street I came across an acquaintance fresh from London and the
parliamentary session.  In a moment the spell of the Celtic genius
was forgotten, the Philistinism of our Saxon nature made itself felt;
and my friend and I walked up and down by the roaring waves, talking
not of ovates and bards, and triads and englyns, but of the sewage
question, and the glories of our local self-government, and the
mysterious perfections of the Metropolitan Board of Works.

I believe it is admitted, even by the admirers of Eisteddfods in
general, that this particular Eisteddfod was not a success.
Llandudno, it is said, was not the right place for it.  Held in
Conway Castle, as a few years ago it was, and its spectators,--an
enthusiastic multitude,--filling the grand old ruin, I can imagine it
a most impressive and interesting sight, even to a stranger labouring
under the terrible disadvantage of being ignorant of the Welsh
language.  But even seen as I saw it at Llandudno, it had the power
to set one thinking.  An Eisteddfod is, no doubt, a kind of Olympic
meeting; and that the common people of Wales should care for such a
thing, shows something Greek in them, something spiritual, something
humane, something (I am afraid one must add) which in the English
common people is not to be found.  This line of reflection has been
followed by the accomplished Bishop of St. David's, and by the
Saturday Review, it is just, it is fruitful, and those who pursued it
merit our best thanks.  But, from peculiar circumstances, the
Llandudno meeting was, as I have said, such as not at all to suggest
ideas of Olympia, and of a multitude touched by the divine flame, and
hanging on the lips of Pindar.  It rather suggested the triumph of
the prosaic, practical Saxon, and the approaching extinction of an
enthusiasm which he derides as factitious, a literature which he
disdains as trash, a language which he detests as a nuisance.

I must say I quite share the opinion of my brother Saxons as to the
practical inconvenience of perpetuating the speaking of Welsh.  It
may cause a moment's distress to one's imagination when one hears
that the last Cornish peasant who spoke the old tongue of Cornwall is
dead; but, no doubt, Cornwall is the better for adopting English, for
becoming more thoroughly one with the rest of the country.  The
fusion of all the inhabitants of these islands into one homogeneous,
English-speaking whole, the breaking down of barriers between us, the
swallowing up of separate provincial nationalities, is a consummation
to which the natural course of things irresistibly tends; it is a
necessity of what is called modern civilisation, and modern
civilisation is a real, legitimate force; the change must come, and
its accomplishment is a mere affair of time.  The sooner the Welsh
language disappears as an instrument of the practical, political,
social life of Wales, the better; the better for England, the better
for Wales itself.  Traders and tourists do excellent service by
pushing the English wedge farther and farther into the heart of the
principality; Ministers of Education, by hammering it harder and
harder into the elementary schools.  Nor, perhaps, can one have much
sympathy with the literary cultivation of Welsh as an instrument of
living literature; and in this respect Eisteddfods encourage, I
think, a fantastic and mischief-working delusion.

For all serious purposes in modern literature (and trifling purposes
in it who would care to encourage?) the language of a Welshman is and
must be English; if an Eisteddfod author has anything to say about
punctuality or about the march of Havelock, he had much better say it
in English; or rather, perhaps, what he has to say on these subjects
may as well be said in Welsh, but the moment he has anything of real
importance to say, anything the world will the least care to hear, he
must speak English.  Dilettanteism might possibly do much harm here,
might mislead and waste and bring to nought a genuine talent.  For
all modern purposes, I repeat, let us all as soon as possible be one
people; let the Welshman speak English, and, if he is an author, let
him write English.

So far, I go along with the stream of my brother Saxons; but here, I
imagine, I part company with them.  They will have nothing to do with
the Welsh language and literature on any terms; they would gladly
make a clean sweep of it from the face of the earth.  I, on certain
terms, wish to make a great deal more of it than is made now; and I
regard the Welsh literature,--or rather, dropping the distinction
between Welsh and Irish, Gaels and Cymris, let me say Celtic
literature,--as an object of very great interest.  My brother Saxons
have, as is well known, a terrible way with them of wanting to
improve everything but themselves off the face of the earth; I have
no such passion for finding nothing but myself everywhere; I like
variety to exist and to show itself to me, and I would not for the
world have the lineaments of the Celtic genius lost.  But I know my
brother Saxons, I know their strength, and I know that the Celtic
genius will make nothing of trying to set up barriers against them in
the world of fact and brute force, of trying to hold its own against
them as a political and social counter-power, as the soul of a
hostile nationality.  To me there is something mournful (and at this
moment, when one sees what is going on in Ireland, how well may one
say so!) in hearing a Welshman or an Irishman make pretensions,--
natural pretensions, I admit, but how hopelessly vain!--to such a
rival self-establishment; there is something mournful in hearing an
Englishman scout them.  Strength! alas, it is not strength, strength
in the material world, which is wanting to us Saxons; we have plenty
of strength for swallowing up and absorbing as much as we choose;
there is nothing to hinder us from effacing the last poor material
remains of that Celtic power which once was everywhere, but has long
since, in the race of civilisation, fallen out of sight.  We may
threaten them with extinction if we will, and may almost say in so
threatening them, like Caesar in threatening with death the tribune
Metellus who closed the treasury doors against him:  'And when I
threaten this, young man, to threaten it is more trouble to me than
to do it.'  It is not in the outward and visible world of material
life, that the Celtic genius of Wales or Ireland can at this day hope
to count for much; it is in the inward world of thought and science.
What it HAS been, what it HAS done, let it ask us to attend to that,
as a matter of science and history; not to what it will be or will
do, as a matter of modern politics.  It cannot count appreciably now
as a material power; but, perhaps, if it can get itself thoroughly
known as an object of science, it may count for a good deal,--far
more than we Saxons, most of us, imagine,--as a spiritual power.

The bent of our time is towards science, towards knowing things as
they are; so the Celt's claims towards having his genius and its
works fairly treated, as objects of scientific investigation, the
Saxon can hardly reject, when these claims are urged simply on their
own merits, and are not mixed up with extraneous pretensions which
jeopardise them.  What the French call the science des origines, the
science of origins,--a science which is at the bottom of all real
knowledge of the actual world, and which is every day growing in
interest and importance--is very incomplete without a thorough
critical account of the Celts, and their genius, language, and
literature.  This science has still great progress to make, but its
progress, made even within the recollection of those of us who are in
middle life, has already affected our common notions about the Celtic
race; and this change, too, shows how science, the knowing things as
they are, may even have salutary practical consequences.  I remember,
when I was young, I was taught to think of Celt as separated by an
impassable gulf from Teuton; {14} my father, in particular, was never
weary of contrasting them; he insisted much oftener on the separation
between us and them than on the separation between us and any other
race in the world; in the same way Lord Lyndhurst, in words long
famous, called the Irish 'aliens in speech, in religion, in blood.'
This naturally created a profound sense of estrangement; it doubled
the estrangement which political and religious differences already
made between us and the Irish:  it seemed to make this estrangement
immense, incurable, fatal.  It begot a strange reluctance, as any one
may see by reading the preface to the great text-book for Welsh
poetry, the Myvyrian Archaeology, published at the beginning of this
century, to further,--nay, allow,--even among quiet, peaceable people
like the Welsh, the publication of the documents of their ancient
literature, the monuments of the Cymric genius; such was the sense of
repulsion, the sense of incompatibilty, of radical antagonism, making
it seem dangerous to us to let such opposites to ourselves have
speech and utterance.  Certainly the Jew,--the Jew of ancient times,
at least,--then seemed a thousand degrees nearer than the Celt to us.
Puritanism had so assimilated Bible ideas and phraseology; names like
Ebenezer, and notions like that of hewing Agag in pieces, came so
natural to us, that the sense of affinity between the Teutonic and
the Hebrew nature was quite strong; a steady, middleclass Anglo-Saxon
much more imagined himself Ehud's cousin than Ossian's.  But
meanwhile, the pregnant and striking ideas of the ethnologists about
the true natural grouping of the human race, the doctrine of a great
Indo-European unity, comprising Hindoos, Persians, Greeks, Latins,
Celts, Teutons, Slavonians, on the one hand, and, on the other hand,
of a Semitic unity and of a Mongolian unity, separated by profound
distinguishing marks from the Indo-European unity and from one
another, was slowly acquiring consistency and popularising itself.
So strong and real could the sense of sympathy or antipathy, grounded
upon real identity or diversity in race, grow in men of culture, that
we read of a genuine Teuton,--Wilhelm von Humboldt--finding, even in
the sphere of religion, that sphere where the might of Semitism has
been so overpowering, the food which most truly suited his spirit in
the productions not of the alien Semitic genius, but of the genius of
Greece or India, the Teutons born kinsfolk of the common Indo-
European family.  'Towards Semitism he felt himself,' we read, 'far
less drawn;' he had the consciousness of a certain antipathy in the
depths of his nature to this, and to its 'absorbing, tyrannous,
terrorist religion,' as to the opener, more flexible Indo-European
genius, this religion appeared.  'The mere workings of the old man in
him!' Semitism will readily reply; and though one can hardly admit
this short and easy method of settling the matter, it must be owned
that Humboldt's is an extreme case of Indo-Europeanism, useful as
letting us see what may be the power of race and primitive
constitution, but not likely, in the spiritual sphere, to have many
companion cases equalling it.  Still, even in this sphere, the
tendency is in Humboldt's direction; the modern spirit tends more and
more to establish a sense of native diversity between our European
bent and the Semitic and to eliminate, even in our religion, certain
elements as purely and excessively Semitic, and therefore, in right,
not combinable with our European nature, not assimilable by it.  This
tendency is now quite visible even among ourselves, and even, as I
have said, within the great sphere of the Semitic genius, the sphere
of religion; and for its justification this tendency appeals to
science, the science of origins; it appeals to this science as
teaching us which way our natural affinities and repulsions lie.  It
appeals to this science, and in part it comes from it; it is, in
considerable part, an indirect practical result from it.

In the sphere of politics, too, there has, in the same way, appeared
an indirect practical result from this science; the sense of
antipathy to the Irish people, of radical estrangement from them, has
visibly abated amongst all the better part of us; the remorse for
past ill-treatment of them, the wish to make amends, to do them
justice, to fairly unite, if possible, in one people with them, has
visibly increased; hardly a book on Ireland is now published, hardly
a debate on Ireland now passes in Parliament, without this appearing.
Fanciful as the notion may at first seem, I am inclined to think that
the march of science,--science insisting that there is no such
original chasm between the Celt and the Saxon as we once popularly
imagined, that they are not truly, what Lord Lyndhurst called them,
ALIENS IN BLOOD from us, that they are our brothers in the great
Indo-European family,--has had a share, an appreciable share, in
producing this changed state of feeling.  No doubt, the release from
alarm and struggle, the sense of firm possession, solid security, and
overwhelming power; no doubt these, allowing and encouraging humane
feelings to spring up in us, have done much; no doubt a state of fear
and danger, Ireland in hostile conflict with us, our union violently
disturbed, might, while it drove back all humane feelings, make also
the old sense of utter estrangement revive.  Nevertheless, so long as
such a malignant revolution of events does not actually come about,
so long the new sense of kinship and kindliness lives, works, and
gathers strength; and the longer it so lives and works, the more it
makes any such malignant revolution improbable.  And this new,
reconciling sense has, I say, its roots in science.

However, on these indirect benefits of science we must not lay too
much stress.  Only this must be allowed; it is clear that there are
now in operation two influences, both favourable to a more attentive
and impartial study of Celtism than it has yet ever received from us.
One is, the strengthening in us of the feeling of Indo-Europeanism;
the other, the strengthening in us of the scientific sense generally.
The first breaks down barriers between us and the Celt, relaxes the
estrangement between us; the second begets the desire to know his
case thoroughly, and to be just to it.  This is a very different
matter from the political and social Celtisation of which certain
enthusiasts dream; but it is not to be despised by any one to whom
the Celtic genius is dear; and it is possible, while the other is
not.


I.


To know the Celtic case thoroughly, one must know the Celtic people;
and to know them, one must know that by which a people best express
themselves,--their literature.  Few of us have any notion what a mass
of Celtic literature is really yet extant and accessible.  One
constantly finds even very accomplished people, who fancy that the
remains of Welsh and Irish literature are as inconsiderable by their
volume, as, in their opinion, they are by their intrinsic merit; that
these remains consist of a few prose stories, in great part borrowed
from the literature of nations more civilised than the Welsh or Irish
nation, and of some unintelligible poetry.  As to Welsh literature,
they have heard, perhaps, of the Black Book of Caermarthen, or of the
Red Book of Hergest, and they imagine that one or two famous
manuscript books like these contain the whole matter.  They have no
notion that, in real truth, to quote the words of one who is no
friend to the high pretensions of Welsh literature, but their most
formidable impugner, Mr. Nash:- 'The Myvyrian manuscripts alone, now
deposited in the British Museum, amount to 47 volumes of poetry, of
various sizes, containing about 4,700 pieces of poetry, in 16,000
pages, besides about 2,000 englynion or epigrammatic stanzas.  There
are also, in the same collection, 53 volumes of prose, in about
15,300 pages, containing great many curious documents on various
subjects.  Besides these, which were purchased of the widow of the
celebrated Owen Jones, the editor of the Myvyrian Archaeology, there
are a vast number of collections of Welsh manuscripts in London, and
in the libraries of the gentry of the principality.'  The Myvyrian
Archaeology, here spoken of by Mr. Nash, I have already mentioned; he
calls its editor, Owen Jones, celebrated; he is not so celebrated but
that he claims a word, in passing, from a professor of poetry.  He
was a Denbighshire STATESMAN, as we say in the north, born before the
middle of last century, in that vale of Myvyr, which has given its
name to his archaeology.  From his childhood he had that passion for
the old treasures of his Country's literature, which to this day, as
I have said, in the common people of Wales is so remarkable; these
treasures were unprinted, scattered, difficult of access, jealously
guarded.  'More than once,' says Edward Lhuyd, who in his
Archaeologia Britannica, brought out by him in 1707, would gladly
have given them to the world, 'more than once I had a promise from
the owner, and the promise was afterwards retracted at the
instigation of certain persons, pseudo-politicians, as I think,
rather than men of letters.'  So Owen Jones went up, a young man of
nineteen, to London, and got employment in a furrier's shop in Thames
Street; for forty years, with a single object in view, he worked at
his business; and at the end of that time his object was won.  He had
risen in his employment till the business had become his own, and he
was now a man of considerable means; but those means had been sought
by him for one purpose only, the purpose of his life, the dream of
his youth,--the giving permanence and publicity to the treasures of
his national literature.  Gradually he got manuscript after
manuscript transcribed, and at last, in 1801, he jointly with two
friends brought out in three large volumes, printed in double
columns, his Myvyrian Archaeology of Wales.  The book is full of
imperfections, it presented itself to a public which could not judge
of its importance, and it brought upon its author, in his lifetime,
more attack than honour.  He died not long afterwards, and now he
lies buried in Allhallows Church, in London, with his tomb turned
towards the east, away from the green vale of Clwyd and the mountains
of his native Wales; but his book is the great repertory of the
literature of his nation, the comparative study of languages and
literatures gains every day more followers, and no one of these
followers, at home or abroad, touches Welsh literature without paying
homage to the Denbighshire peasant's name; if the bard's glory and
his own are still matter of moment to him,--si quid mentem mortalia
tangunt,--he may be satisfied.

Even the printed stock of early Welsh literature is, therefore,
considerable, and the manuscript stock of it is very great indeed.
Of Irish literature, the stock, printed and manuscript, is truly
vast; the work of cataloguing and describing this has been admirably
performed by another remarkable man, who died only the other day, Mr.
Eugene O'Curry.  Obscure Scaliger of a despised literature, he
deserves some weightier voice to praise him than the voice of an
unlearned bellettristic trifler like me; he belongs to the race of
the giants in literary research and industry,--a race now almost
extinct.  Without a literary education, and impeded too, it appears,
by much trouble of mind and infirmity of body, he has accomplished
such a thorough work of classification and description for the
chaotic mass of Irish literature, that the student has now half his
labour saved, and needs only to use his materials as Eugene O'Curry
hands them to him.  It was as a professor in the Catholic University
in Dublin that O'Curry gave the lectures in which he has done the
student this service; it is touching to find that these lectures, a
splendid tribute of devotion to the Celtic cause, had no hearer more
attentive, more sympathising, than a man, himself, too, the champion
of a cause more interesting than prosperous,--one of those causes
which please noble spirits, but do not please destiny, which have
Cato's adherence, but not Heaven's,--Dr. Newman.  Eugene O'Curry, in
these lectures of his, taking as his standard the quarto page of Dr.
O'Donovan's edition of the Annals of the Four Masters (and this
printed monument of one branch of Irish literature occupies by
itself, let me say in passing, seven large quarto volumes, containing
4,215 pages of closely printed matter), Eugene O'Curry says, that the
great vellum manuscript books belonging to Trinity College, Dublin,
and to the Royal Irish Academy,--books with fascinating titles, the
Book of the Dun Cow, the Book of Leinster, the Book of Ballymote, the
Speckled Book, the Book of Lecain, the Yellow Book of Lecain,--have,
between them, matter enough to fill 11,400 of these pages; the other
vellum manuscripts in the library of Trinity College, Dublin, have
matter enough to fill 8,200 pages more; and the paper manuscripts of
Trinity College, and the Royal Irish Academy together, would fill, he
says, 30,000 such pages more.  The ancient laws of Ireland, the so-
called Brehon laws, which a commission is now publishing, were not as
yet completely transcribed when O'Curry wrote; but what had even then
been transcribed was sufficient, he says, to fill nearly 8,000 of Dr.
O'Donovan's pages.  Here are, at any rate, materials enough with a
vengeance.  These materials fall, of course, into several divisions.
The most literary of these divisions, the Tales, consisting of
Historic Tales and Imaginative Tales, distributes the contents of its
Historic Tales as follows:- Battles, voyages, sieges, tragedies, cow-
spoils, courtships, adventures, land-expeditions, sea-expeditions,
banquets, elopements, loves, lake-irruptions, colonisations, visions.
Of what a treasure-house of resources for the history of Celtic life
and the Celtic genius does that bare list, even by itself, call up
the image!  The Annals of the Four Masters give 'the years of
foundations and destructions of churches and castles, the obituaries
of remarkable persons, the inaugurations of kings, the battles of
chiefs, the contests of clans, the ages of bards, abbots, bishops,
&c.' {25}  Through other divisions of this mass of materials,--the
books of pedigrees and genealogies, the martyrologies and
festologies, such as the Felire of Angus the Culdee, the
topographical tracts, such as the Dinnsenchas,--we touch 'the most
ancient traditions of the Irish, traditions which were committed to
writing at a period when the ancient customs of the people were
unbroken.'  We touch 'the early history of Ireland, civil and
ecclesiastical.'  We get 'the origin and history of the countless
monuments of Ireland, of the ruined church and tower, the sculptured
cross, the holy well, and the commemorative name of almost every
townland and parish in the whole island.'  We get, in short, 'the
most detailed information upon almost every part of ancient Gaelic
life, a vast quantity of valuable details of life and manners.' {26}

And then, besides, to our knowledge of the Celtic genius, Mr. Norris
has brought us from Cornwall, M. de la Villemarque from Brittany,
contributions, insignificant indeed in quantity, if one compares them
with the mass of the Irish materials extant, but far from
insignificant in value.

We want to know what all this mass of documents really tells us about
the Celt.  But the mode of dealing with these documents, and with the
whole question of Celtic antiquity, has hitherto been most
unsatisfactory.  Those who have dealt with them, have gone to work,
in general, either as warm Celt-lovers or as warm Celt-haters, and
not as disinterested students of an important matter of science.  One
party seems to set out with the determination to find everything in
Celtism and its remains; the other, with the determination to find
nothing in them.  A simple seeker for truth has a hard time between
the two.  An illustration or so will make clear what I mean.  First
let us take the Celt-lovers, who, though they engage one's sympathies
more than the Celt-haters, yet, inasmuch as assertion is more
dangerous than denial, show their weaknesses in a more signal way.  A
very learned man, the Rev. Edward Davies, published in the early part
of this century two important books on Celtic antiquity.  The second
of these books, The Mythology and Rites of the British Druids,
contains, with much other interesting matter, the charming story of
Taliesin.  Bryant's book on mythology was then in vogue, and Bryant,
in the fantastical manner so common in those days, found in Greek
mythology what he called an arkite idolatry, pointing to Noah's
deluge and the ark.  Davies, wishing to give dignity to his Celtic
mythology, determines to find the arkite idolatry there too, and the
style in which he proceeds to do this affords a good specimen of the
extravagance which has caused Celtic antiquity to be looked upon with
so much suspicion.  The story of Taliesin begins thus:-

'In former times there was a man of noble descent in Penllyn.  His
name was Tegid Voel, and his paternal estate was in the middle of the
Lake of Tegid, and his wife was called Ceridwen.'

Nothing could well be simpler; but what Davies finds in this simple
opening of Taliesin's story is prodigious:-

'Let us take a brief view of the proprietor of this estate.  Tegid
Voel--BALD SERENITY--presents itself at once to our fancy.  The
painter would find no embarrassment in sketching the portrait of this
sedate venerable personage, whose crown is partly stripped of its
hoary honours.  But of all the gods of antiquity, none could with
propriety sit for this picture excepting Saturn, the acknowledged
representative of Noah, and the husband of Rhea, which was but
another name for Ceres, the genius of the ark.'

And Ceres, the genius of the ark, is of course found in Ceridwen,
'the British Ceres, the arkite goddess who initiates us into the
deepest mysteries of the arkite superstition.'

Now the story of Taliesin, as it proceeds, exhibits Ceridwen as a
sorceress; and a sorceress, like a goddess, belongs to the world of
the supernatural; but, beyond this, the story itself does not suggest
one particle of relationship between Ceridwen and Ceres.  All the
rest comes out of Davies's fancy, and is established by reasoning of
the force of that about 'bald serenity.'

It is not difficult for the other side, the Celt-haters, to get a
triumph over such adversaries as these.  Perhaps I ought to ask
pardon of Mr. Nash, whose Taliesin it is impossible to read without
profit and instruction, for classing him among the Celt-haters; his
determined scepticism about Welsh antiquity seems to me, however, to
betray a preconceived hostility, a bias taken beforehand, as
unmistakable as Mr. Davies's prepossessions.  But Mr. Nash is often
very happy in demolishing, for really the Celt-lovers seem often to
try to lay themselves open, and to invite demolition.  Full of his
notions about an arkite idolatry and a Helio-daemonic worship, Edward
Davies gives this translation of an old Welsh poem, entitled The
Panegyric of Lludd the Great:-

'A song of dark import was composed by the distinguished Ogdoad, who
assembled on the day of the moon, and went in open procession.  On
the day of Mars they allotted wrath to their adversaries; and on the
day of Mercury they enjoyed their full pomp; on the day of Jove they
were delivered from the detested usurpers; on the day of Venus, the
day of the great influx, they swam in the blood of men; {29} on the
day of the Sun there truly assemble five ships and five hundred of
those who make supplication:  O Brithi, O Brithoi!  O son of the
compacted wood, the shock overtakes me; we all attend on Adonai, on
the area of Pwmpai.'

That looks Helio-daemonic enough, undoubtedly; especially when Davies
prints O Brithi, O Brithoi! in Hebrew characters, as being 'vestiges
of sacred hymns in the Phoenician language.'  But then comes Mr.
Nash, and says that the poem is a middle-age composition, with
nothing Helio-daemonic about it; that it is meant to ridicule the
monks; and that O Brithi, O Brithoi! is a mere piece of
unintelligible jargon in mockery of the chants used by the monks at
prayers; and he gives this counter-translation of the poem:-

'They make harsh songs; they note eight numbers.  On Monday they will
be prying about.  On Tuesday they separate, angry with their
adversaries.  On Wednesday they drink, enjoying themselves
ostentatiously.  On Thursday they are in the choir; their poverty is
disagreeable.  Friday is a day of abundance, the men are swimming in
pleasures.  On Sunday, certainly, five legions and five hundreds of
them, they pray, they make exclamations:  O Brithi, O Brithoi!  Like
wood-cuckoos in noise they will be, every one of the idiots banging
on the ground.'

As one reads Mr. Nash's explanation and translation after Edward
Davies's, one feels that a flood of the broad daylight of common-
sense has been suddenly shed over the Panegyric on Lludd the Great,
and one is very grateful to Mr. Nash.

Or, again, when another Celt-lover, Mr. Herbert, has bewildered us
with his fancies, as uncritical as Edward Davies's; with his neo-
Druidism, his Mithriac heresy, his Crist-celi, or man-god of the
mysteries; and above all, his ape of the sanctuary, 'signifying the
mercurial principle, that strange and unexplained disgrace of
paganism,' Mr. Nash comes to our assistance, and is most refreshingly
rational.  To confine ourselves to the ape of the sanctuary only.
Mr. Herbert constructs his monster,--to whom, he says, 'great
sanctity, together with foul crime, deception, and treachery,' is
ascribed,--out of four lines of old Welsh poetry, of which he adopts
the following translation:-

'Without the ape, without the stall of the cow, without the mundane
rampart, the world will become desolate, not requiring the cuckoos to
convene the appointed dance over the green.'

One is not very clear what all this means, but it has, at any rate, a
solemn air about it, which prepares one for the development of its
first-named personage, the ape, into the mystical ape of the
sanctuary.  The cow, too,--says another famous Celt-lover, Dr. Owen,
the learned author of the Welsh Dictionary,--the cow (henfon) is the
cow of transmigration; and this also sounds natural enough.  But Mr.
Nash, who has a keen eye for the piecing which frequently happens in
these old fragments, has observed that just here, where the ape of
the sanctuary and the cow of transmigration make their appearance,
there seems to come a cluster of adages, popular sayings; and he at
once remembers an adage preserved with the word henfon in it, where,
as he justly says, 'the cow of transmigration cannot very well have
place.'  This adage, rendered literally in English, is:  'Whoso owns
the old cow, let him go at her tail;' and the meaning of it, as a
popular saying, is clear and simple enough.  With this clue, Mr. Nash
examines the whole passage, suggests that heb eppa, 'without the
ape,' with which Mr. Herbert begins, in truth belongs to something
going before and is to be translated somewhat differently; and, in
short, that what we really have here is simply these three adages one
after another:  'The first share is the full one.  Politeness is
natural, says the ape.  Without the cow-stall there would be no dung-
heap.'  And one can hardly doubt that Mr. Nash is quite right.

Even friends of the Celt, who are perfectly incapable of
extravagances of this sort, fall too often into a loose mode of
criticism concerning him and the documents of his history, which is
unsatisfactory in itself, and also gives an advantage to his many
enemies.  One of the best and most delightful friends he has ever
had,--M. de la Villemarque,--has seen clearly enough that often the
alleged antiquity of his documents cannot be proved, that it can be
even disproved, and that he must rely on other supports than this to
establish what he wants; yet one finds him saying:  'I open the
collection of Welsh bards from the sixth to the tenth century.
Taliesin, one of the oldest of them,' . . . and so on.  But his
adversaries deny that we have really any such thing as a 'collection
of Welsh bards from the sixth to the tenth century,' or that a
'Taliesin, one of the oldest of them,' exists to be quoted in defence
of any thesis.  Sharon Turner, again, whose Vindication of the
Ancient British Poems was prompted, it seems to me, by a critical
instinct at bottom sound, is weak and uncritical in details like
this:  'The strange poem of Taliesin, called the Spoils of Annwn,
implies the existence (in the sixth century, he means) of
mythological tales about Arthur; and the frequent allusion of the old
Welsh bards to the persons and incidents which we find in the
Mabinogion, are further proofs that there must have been such stories
in circulation amongst the Welsh.'  But the critic has to show,
against his adversaries, that the Spoils of Annwn is a real poem of
the sixth century, with a real sixth-century poet called Taliesin for
its author, before he can use it to prove what Sharon Turner there
wishes to prove; and, in like manner, the high antiquity of persons
and incidents that are found in the manuscripts of the Mabinogion,--
manuscripts written, like the famous Red Book of Hergest, in the
library of Jesus College at Oxford, in the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries,--is not proved by allusions of the old Welsh bards, until
(which is just the question at issue) the pieces containing these
allusions are proved themselves to possess a very high antiquity.  In
the present state of the question as to the early Welsh literature,
this sort of reasoning is inconclusive and bewildering, and merely
carries us round in a circle.  Again, it is worse than inconclusive
reasoning, it shows so uncritical a spirit that it begets grave
mistrust, when Mr. Williams ab Ithel, employed by the Master of the
Rolls to edit the Brut y Tywysogion, the 'Chronicle of the Princes,'
says in his introduction, in many respects so useful and interesting:
'We may add, on the authority of a scrupulously faithful antiquary,
and one that was deeply versed in the traditions of his order--the
late Iolo Morganwg--that King Arthur in his Institutes of the Round
Table introduced the age of the world for events which occurred
before Christ, and the year of Christ's nativity for all subsequent
events.'  Now, putting out of the question Iolo Morganwg's character
as an antiquary, it is obvious that no one, not Grimm himself, can
stand in that way as 'authority' for King Arthur's having thus
regulated chronology by his Institutes of the Round Table, or even
for there ever having been any such institutes at all.  And finally,
greatly as I respect and admire Mr. Eugene O'Curry, unquestionable as
is the sagacity, the moderation, which he in general unites with his
immense learning, I must say that he, too, like his brother Celt-
lovers, sometimes lays himself dangerously open.  For instance, the
Royal Irish Academy possesses in its Museum a relic of the greatest
value, the Domhnach Airgid, a Latin manuscript of the four gospels.
The outer box containing this manuscript is of the fourteenth
century, but the manuscript itself, says O'Curry (and no man is
better able to judge) is certainly of the sixth.  This is all very
well.  'But,' O'Curry then goes on, 'I believe no reasonable doubt
can exist that the Domhnach Airgid was actually sanctified by the
hand of our great Apostle.'  One has a thrill of excitement at
receiving this assurance from such a man as Eugene O'Curry; one
believes that he is really going to make it clear that St. Patrick
did actually sanctify the Domhnach Airgid with his own hands; and one
reads on:-

'As St. Patrick, says an ancient life of St. Mac Carthainn preserved
by Colgan in his Acta Sanctorum Hiberniae, was on his way from the
north, and coming to the place now called Clogher, he was carried
over a stream by his strong man, Bishop Mac Carthainn, who, while
bearing the Saint, groaned aloud, exclaiming:  "Ugh!  Ugh!"

'"Upon my good word," said the Saint, "it was not usual with you to
make that noise."

'"I am now old and infirm," said Bishop Mac Carthainn, "and all my
early companions in mission-work you have settled down in their
respective churches, while I am still on my travels."

'"Found a church then," said the Saint, "that shall not be too near
us" (that is to his own Church of Armagh) "for familiarity, nor too
far from us for intercourse."

'And the Saint then left Bishop Mac Carthainn there, at Clogher, and
bestowed the Domhnach Airgid upon him, which had been given to
Patrick from heaven, when he was on the sea, coming to Erin.'

The legend is full of poetry, full of humour; and one can quite
appreciate, after reading it, the tact which gave St. Patrick such a
prodigious success in organising the primitive church in Ireland; the
new bishop, 'not too near us for familiarity, nor too far from us for
intercourse,' is a masterpiece.  But how can Eugene O'Curry have
imagined that it takes no more than a legend like that, to prove that
the particular manuscript now in the Museum of the Royal Irish
Academy was once in St. Patrick's pocket?

I insist upon extravagances like these, not in order to throw
ridicule upon the Celt-lovers,--on the contrary, I feel a great deal
of sympathy with them,--but rather, to make it clear what an immense
advantage the Celt-haters, the negative side, have in the controversy
about Celtic antiquity; how much a clear-headed sceptic, like Mr.
Nash, may utterly demolish, and, in demolishing, give himself the
appearance of having won an entire victory.  But an entire victory he
has, as I will next proceed to show, by no means won.


II.


I said that a sceptic like Mr. Nash, by demolishing the rubbish of
the Celtic antiquaries, might often give himself the appearance of
having won a complete victory, but that a complete victory he had, in
truth, by no means won.  He has cleared much rubbish away, but this
is no such very difficult feat, and requires mainly common-sense; to
be sure, Welsh archaeologists are apt to lose their common-sense, but
at moments when they are in possession of it they can do the
indispensable, negative part of criticism, not, indeed, so briskly or
cleverly as Mr. Nash, but still well enough.  Edward Davies, for
instance, has quite clearly seen that the alleged remains of old
Welsh literature are not to be taken for genuine just as they stand:
'Some petty and mendicant minstrel, who only chaunted it as an old
song, has tacked on' (he says of a poem he is discussing) 'these
lines, in a style and measure totally different from the preceding
verses:  "May the Trinity grant us mercy in the day of judgment:  a
liberal donation, good gentlemen!"'  There, fifty years before Mr.
Nash, is a clearance like one of Mr. Nash's.  But the difficult feat
in this matter is the feat of construction; to determine when one has
cleared away all that is to be cleared away, what is the significance
of that which is left; and here, I confess, I think Mr. Nash and his
fellow-sceptics, who say that next to nothing is left, and that the
significance of whatever is left is next to nothing, dissatisfy the
genuine critic even more than Edward Davies and his brother
enthusiasts, who have a sense that something primitive, august, and
interesting is there, though they fail to extract it, dissatisfy him.
There is a very edifying story told by O'Curry of the effect produced
on Moore, the poet, who had undertaken to write the history of
Ireland (a task for which he was quite unfit), by the contemplation
of an old Irish manuscript.  Moore had, without knowing anything
about them, spoken slightingly of the value to the historian of
Ireland of the materials afforded by such manuscripts; but, says
O'Curry:-

'In the year 1839, during one of his last visits to the land of his
birth, he, in company with his old and attached friend Dr. Petrie,
favoured me with an unexpected visit at the Royal Irish Academy.  I
was at that period employed on the Ordnance Survey of Ireland, and at
the time of his visit happened to have before me on my desk the Books
of Ballymote and Lecain, The Speckled Book, The Annals of the Four
Masters, and many other ancient books, for historical research and
reference.  I had never before seen Moore, and after a brief
introduction and explanation of the nature of my occupation by Dr.
Petrie, and seeing the formidable array of so many dark and time-worn
volumes by which I was surrounded, he looked a little disconcerted,
but after a while plucked up courage to open the Book of Ballymote
and ask what it was.  Dr. Petrie and myself then entered into a short
explanation of the history and character of the books then present as
well as of ancient Gaedhelic documents in general.  Moore listened
with great attention, alternately scanning the books and myself, and
then asked me, in a serious tone, if I understood them, and how I had
learned to do so.  Having satisfied him upon these points, he turned
to Dr. Petrie and said:- "Petrie, these huge tomes could not have
been written by fools or for any foolish purpose.  I never knew
anything about them before, and I had no right to have undertaken the
History of Ireland."'

And from that day Moore, it is said, lost all heart for going on with
his History of Ireland, and it was only the importunity of the
publishers which induced him to bring out the remaining volume.

COULD NOT HAVE BEEN WRITTEN BY FOOLS OR FOR ANY FOOLISH PURPOSE.
That is, I am convinced, a true presentiment to have in one's mind
when one looks at Irish documents like the Book of Ballymote, or
Welsh documents like the Red Book of Hergest.  In some respects, at
any rate, these documents are what they claim to be, they hold what
they pretend to hold, they touch that primitive world of which they
profess to be the voice.  The true critic is he who can detect this
precious and genuine part in them, and employ it for the elucidation
of the Celt's genius and history, and for any other fruitful purposes
to which it can be applied.  Merely to point out the mixture of what
is late and spurious in them, is to touch but the fringes of the
matter.  In reliance upon the discovery of this mixture of what is
late and spurious in them, to pooh-pooh them altogether, to treat
them as a heap of rubbish, a mass of middle-age forgeries, is to fall
into the greatest possible error.  Granted that all the manuscripts
of Welsh poetry (to take that branch of Celtic literature which has
had, in Mr. Nash, the ablest disparager), granted that all such
manuscripts that we possess are, with the most insignificant
exception, not older than the twelfth century; granted that the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries were a time of great poetical
activity in Wales, a time when the mediaeval literature flourished
there, as it flourished in England, France, and other countries;
granted that a great deal of what Welsh enthusiasts have attributed
to their great traditional poets of the sixth century belongs to this
later epoch,--what then?  Does that get rid of the great traditional
poets,--the Cynveirdd or old bards, Aneurin, Taliesin, Llywarch Hen,
and their compeers,--does that get rid of the great poetical
tradition of the sixth century altogether, does it merge the whole
literary antiquity of Wales in her mediaeval literary antiquity, or,
at least, reduce all other than this to insignificance?  Mr. Nash
says it does; all his efforts are directed to show how much of the so
called sixth-century pieces may be resolved into mediaeval, twelfth-
century work; his grand thesis is that there is nothing primitive and
pre-Christian in the extant Welsh literature, no traces of the
Druidism and Paganism every one associates with Celtic antiquity; all
this, he says, was extinguished by Paulinus in AD. 59, and never
resuscitated.  'At the time the Mabinogion and the Taliesin ballads
were composed, no tradition or popular recollection of the Druids or
the Druidical mythology existed in Wales.  The Welsh bards knew of no
older mystery, nor of any mystic creed, unknown to the rest of the
Christian world.'  And Mr. Nash complains that 'the old opinion that
the Welsh poems contain notices of Druid or Pagan superstitions of a
remote origin' should still find promulgators; what we find in them
is only, he says, what was circulating in Wales in the twelfth
century, and one great mistake in these investigations has been the
supposing that the Welsh of the twelfth, or even of the sixth
century, were wiser as well as more Pagan than their neighbours.'

Why, what a wonderful thing is this!  We have, in the first place,
the most weighty and explicit testimony,--Strabo's, Caesar's,
Lucan's,--that this race once possessed a special, profound,
spiritual discipline, that they were, to use Mr. Nash's words, 'wiser
than their neighbours.'  Lucan's words are singularly clear and
strong, and serve well to stand as a landmark in this controversy, in
which one is sometimes embarrassed by hearing authorities quoted on
this side or that, when one does not feel sure precisely what they
say, how much or how little; Lucan, addressing those hitherto under
the pressure of Rome, but now left by the Roman civil war to their
own devices, says:-

'Ye too, ye bards, who by your praises perpetuate the memory of the
fallen brave, without hindrance poured forth your strains.  And ye,
ye Druids, now that the sword was removed, began once more your
barbaric rites and weird solemnities.  To you only is given knowledge
or ignorance (whichever it be) of the gods and the powers of heaven;
your dwelling is in the lone heart of the forest.  From you we learn,
that the bourne of man's ghost is not the senseless grave, not the
pale realm of the monarch below; in another world his spirit survives
still;--death, if your lore be true, is but the passage to enduring
life.'

There is the testimony of an educated Roman, fifty years after
Christ, to the Celtic race being then 'wiser than their neighbours;'
testimony all the more remarkable because civilised nations, though
very prone to ascribe to barbarous people an ideal purity and
simplicity of life and manners, are by no means naturally inclined to
ascribe to them high attainment in intellectual and spiritual things.
And now, along with this testimony of Lucan's, one has to carry in
mind Caesar's remark, that the Druids, partly from a religious
scruple, partly from a desire to discipline the memory of their
pupils, committed nothing to writing.  Well, then come the crushing
defeat of the Celtic race in Britain and the Roman conquest; but the
Celtic race subsisted here still, and any one can see that, while the
race subsisted, the traditions of a discipline such as that of which
Lucan has drawn the picture were not likely to be so very speedily
'extinguished.'  The withdrawal of the Romans, the recovered
independence of the native race here, the Saxon invasion, the
struggle with the Saxons, were just the ground for one of those
bursts of energetic national life and self-consciousness which find a
voice in a burst of poets and poetry.  Accordingly, to this time, to
the sixth century, the universal Welsh tradition attaches the great
group of British poets, Taliesin and his fellows.  In the twelfth
century there began for Wales, along with another burst of national
life, another burst of poetry; and this burst LITERARY in the
stricter sense of the word,--a burst which left, for the first time,
written records.  It wrote the records of its predecessors, as well
as of itself, and therefore Mr. Nash wants to make it the real author
of the whole poetry, one may say, of the sixth century, as well as
its own.  No doubt one cannot produce the texts of the poetry of the
sixth century; no doubt we have this only as the twelfth and
succeeding centuries wrote it down; no doubt they mixed and changed
it a great deal in writing it down.  But, since a continuous stream
of testimony shows the enduring existence and influence among the
kindred Celts of Wales and Brittany, from the sixth century to the
twelfth, of an old national literature, it seems certain that much of
this must be traceable in the documents of the twelfth century, and
the interesting thing is to trace it.  It cannot be denied that there
is such a continuous stream of testimony; there is Gildas in the
sixth century, Nennius in the eighth, the laws of Howel in the tenth;
in the eleventh, twenty or thirty years before the new literary epoch
began, we hear of Rhys ap Tudor having 'brought with him from
Brittany the system of the Round Table, which at home had become
quite forgotten, and he restored it as it is, with regard to
minstrels and bards, as it had been at Caerleon-upon-Usk, under the
Emperor Arthur, in the time of the sovereignty of the race of the
Cymry over the island of Britain and its adjacent islands.'  Mr.
Nash's own comment on this is:  'We here see the introduction of the
Arthurian romance from Brittany, preceding by nearly one generation
the revival of music and poetry in North Wales;' and yet he does not
seem to perceive what a testimony is here to the reality, fulness,
and subsistence of that primitive literature about which he is so
sceptical.  Then in the twelfth century testimony to this primitive
literature absolutely abounds; one can quote none better than that of
Giraldus de Barri, or Giraldus Cambrensis, as he is usually called.
Giraldus is an excellent authority, who knew well what he was writing
about, and he speaks of the Welsh bards and rhapsodists of his time
as having in their possession 'ancient and authentic books' in the
Welsh language.  The apparatus of technical terms of poetry, again,
and the elaborate poetical organisation which we find, both in Wales
and Ireland, existing from the very commencement of the mediaeval
literary period in each, and to which no other mediaeval literature,
so far as I know, shows at its first beginnings anything similar,
indicates surely, in these Celtic peoples, the clear and persistent
tradition of an older poetical period of great development, and
almost irresistibly connects itself in one's mind with the elaborate
Druidic discipline which Caesar mentions.

But perhaps the best way to get a full sense of the storied
antiquity, forming as it were the background to those mediaeval
documents which in Mr. Nash's eyes pretty much begin and end with
themselves, is to take, almost at random, a passage from such a tale
as Kilhwch and Olwen, in the Mabinogion,--that charming collection,
for which we owe such a debt of gratitude to Lady Charlotte Guest (to
call her still by the name she bore when she made her happy entry
into the world of letters), and which she so unkindly suffers to
remain out of print.  Almost every page of this tale points to
traditions and personages of the most remote antiquity, and is
instinct with the very breath of the primitive world.  Search is made
for Mabon, the son of Modron, who was taken when three nights old
from between his mother and the wall.  The seekers go first to the
Ousel of Cilgwri; the Ousel had lived long enough to peck a smith's
anvil down to the size of a nut, but he had never heard of Mabon.
'But there is a race of animals who were formed before me, and I will
be your guide to them.'  So the Ousel guides them to the Stag of
Redynvre.  The Stag has seen an oak sapling, in the wood where he
lived, grow up to be an oak with a hundred branches, and then slowly
decay down to a withered stump, yet he had never heard of Mabon.
'But I will be your guide to the place where there is an animal which
was formed before I was;' and he guides them to the Owl of Cwm
Cawlwyd.  'When first I came hither,' says the Owl, 'the wide valley
you see was a wooded glen.  And a race of men came and rooted it up.
And there grew a second wood; and this wood is the third.  My wings,
are they not withered stumps?'  Yet the Owl, in spite of his great
age, had never heard of Mabon; but he offered to be guide 'to where
is the oldest animal in the world, and the one that has travelled
most, the Eagle of Gwern Abwy.'  The Eagle was so old, that a rock,
from the top of which he pecked at the stars every evening, was now
not so much as a span high.  He knew nothing of Mabon; but there was
a monster Salmon, into whom he once struck his claws in Llyn Llyw,
who might, perhaps, tell them something of him.  And at last the
Salmon of Llyn Llyw told them of Mabon.  'With every tide I go along
the river upwards, until I come near to the walls of Gloucester, and
there have I found such wrong as I never found elsewhere.'  And the
Salmon took Arthur's messengers on his shoulders up to the wall of
the prison in Gloucester, and they delivered Mabon.

Nothing could better give that sense of primitive and pre-mediaeval
antiquity which to the observer with any tact for these things is, I
think, clearly perceptible in these remains, at whatever time they
may have been written; or better serve to check too absolute an
acceptance of Mr. Nash's doctrine,--in some respects very salutary,--
'that the common assumption of such remains of the date of the sixth
century, has been made upon very unsatisfactory grounds.'  It is
true, it has; it is true, too, that, as he goes on to say, 'writers
who claim for productions actually existing only in manuscripts of
the twelfth, an origin in the sixth century, are called upon to
demonstrate the links of evidence, either internal or external, which
bridge over this great intervening period of at least five hundred
years.'  Then Mr. Nash continues:  'This external evidence is
altogether wanting.'  Not altogether, as we have seen; that assertion
is a little too strong.  But I am content to let it pass, because it
is true, that without internal evidence in this matter the external
evidence would be of no moment.  But when Mr. Nash continues further:
'And the internal evidence even of the so-called historic poems
themselves, is, in some instances at least, opposed to their claims
to an origin in the sixth century,' and leaves the matter there, and
finishes his chapter, I say that is an unsatisfactory turn to give to
the matter, and a lame and impotent conclusion to his chapter;
because the one interesting, fruitful question here is, not in what
instances the internal evidence opposes the claims of these poems to
a sixth-century origin, but in what instances it supports them, and
what these sixth-century remains, thus established, signify.

So again with the question as to the mythological import of these
poems.  Mr. Nash seems to me to have dealt with this, too, rather in
the spirit of a sturdy enemy of the Celts and their pretensions,--
often enough chimerical,--than in the spirit of a disinterested man
of science.  'We find in the oldest compositions in the Welsh
language no traces,' he says, 'of the Druids, or of a pagan
mythology.'  He will not hear of there being, for instance, in these
compositions, traces of the doctrine of the transmigration of souls,
attributed to the Druids in such clear words by Caesar.  He is very
severe upon a German scholar, long and favourably known in this
country, who has already furnished several contributions to our
knowledge of the Celtic race, and of whose labours the main fruit
has, I believe, not yet been given us,--Mr. Meyer.  He is very severe
upon Mr. Meyer, for finding in one of the poems ascribed to Taliesin,
'a sacrificial hymn addressed to the god Pryd, in his character of
god of the Sun.'  It is not for me to pronounce for or against this
notion of Mr. Meyer's.  I have not the knowledge which is needed in
order to make one's suffrage in these matters of any value; speaking
merely as one of the unlearned public, I will confess that allegory
seems to me to play, in Mr. Meyer's theories, a somewhat excessive
part; Arthur and his Twelve (?) Knights of the Round Table signifying
solely the year with its twelve months; Percival and the Miller
signifying solely steel and the grindstone; Stonehenge and the
Gododin put to purely calendarial purposes; the Nibelungen, the
Mahabharata, and the Iliad, finally following the fate of the
Gododin; all this appears to me, I will confess, a little prematurely
grasped, a little unsubstantial.  But that any one who knows the set
of modern mythological science towards astronomical and solar myths,
a set which has already justified itself in many respects so
victoriously, and which is so irresistible that one can hardly now
look up at the sun without having the sensations of a moth;--that any
one who knows this, should find in the Welsh remains no traces of
mythology, is quite astounding.  Why, the heroes and heroines of the
old Cymric world are all in the sky as well as in Welsh story; Arthur
is the Great Bear, his harp is the constellation Lyra; Cassiopeia's
chair is Llys Don, Don's Court; the daughter of Don was Arianrod, and
the Northern Crown is Caer Arianrod; Gwydion was Don's son, and the
Milky Way is Caer Gwydion.  With Gwydion is Math, the son of
Mathonwy, the 'man of illusion and phantasy;' and the moment one goes
below the surface,--almost before one goes below the surface,--all is
illusion and phantasy, double-meaning, and far-reaching mythological
import, in the world which all these personages inhabit.  What are
the three hundred ravens of Owen, and the nine sorceresses of
Peredur, and the dogs of Annwn the Welsh Hades, and the birds of
Rhiannon, whose song was so sweet that warriors remained spell-bound
for eighty years together listening to them?  What is the Avanc, the
water-monster, of whom every lake-side in Wales, and her proverbial
speech, and her music, to this day preserve the tradition?  What is
Gwyn the son of Nudd, king of fairie, the ruler of the Tylwyth Teg,
or family of beauty, who till the day of doom fights on every first
day of May,--the great feast of the sun among the Celtic peoples,--
with Gwythyr, for the fair Cordelia, the daughter of Lear?  What is
the wonderful mare of Teirnyon, which on the night of every first of
May foaled, and no one ever knew what became of the colt?  Who is the
mystic Arawn, the king of Annwn, who changed semblance for a year
with Pwyll, prince of Dyved, and reigned in his place?  These are no
mediaeval personages; they belong to an older, pagan, mythological
world.  The very first thing that strikes one, in reading the
Mabinogion, is how evidently the mediaeval story-teller is pillaging
an antiquity of which he does not fully possess the secret; he is
like a peasant building his hut on the site of Halicarnassus or
Ephesus; he builds, but what he builds is full of materials of which
he knows not the history, or knows by a glimmering tradition merely;-
-stones 'not of this building,' but of an older architecture,
greater, cunninger, more majestical.  In the mediaeval stories of no
Latin or Teutonic people does this strike one as in those of the
Welsh.  Kilhwch, in the story, already quoted, of Kilhwch and Olwen,
asks help at the hand of Arthur's warriors; a list of these warriors
is given, which fills I know not how many pages of Lady Charlotte
Guest's book; this list is a perfect treasure-house of mysterious
ruins:-

'Teithi Hen, the son of Gwynham--(his domains were swallowed up by
the sea, and he himself hardly escaped, and he came to Arthur, and
his knife had this peculiarity, that from the time that he came there
no haft would ever remain upon it, and owing to this a sickness came
over him, and he pined away during the remainder of his life, and of
this he died).

'Drem, the son of Dremidyd--(when the gnat arose in the morning with
the sun, Drem could see it from Gelli Wic in Cornwall, as far off as
Pen Blathaon in North Britain).

'Kynyr Keinvarvawc--(when he was told he had a son born, he said to
his wife:  Damsel, if thy son be mine, his heart will be always cold,
and there will be no warmth in his hands).'

How evident, again, is the slightness of the narrator's hold upon the
Twrch-Trwyth and his strange story!  How manifest the mixture of
known and unknown, shadowy and clear, of different layers and orders
of tradition jumbled together, in the story of Bran the Blessed, a
story whose personages touch a comparatively late and historic time.
Bran invades Ireland, to avenge one of 'the three unhappy blows of
this island,' the daily striking of Branwen by her husband Matholwch,
King of Ireland.  Bran is mortally wounded by a poisoned dart, and
only seven men of Britain, 'the Island of the Mighty,' escape, among
them Taliesin:-

'And Bran commanded them that they should cut off his head.  And take
you my head, said he, and bear it even unto the White Mount in
London, and bury it there with the face towards France.  And a long
time will you be upon the road.  In Harlech you will be feasting
seven years, the birds of Rhiannon singing unto you the while.  And
all that time the head will be to you as pleasant company as it ever
was when on my body.  And at Gwales in Penvro you will be fourscore
years, and you may remain there, and the head with you uncorrupted,
until you open the door that looks towards Aber Henvelen and towards
Cornwall.  And after you have opened that door, there you may no
longer tarry; set forth then to London to bury the head, and go
straight forward.

'So they cut off his head, and those seven went forward therewith.
And Branwen was the eighth with them, and they came to land at Aber
Alaw in Anglesey, and they sate down to rest.  And Branwen looked
towards Ireland and towards the Island of the Mighty, to see if she
could descry them.  "Alas," said she, "woe is me that I was ever
born; two islands have been destroyed because of me."  Then she
uttered a loud groan, and there broke her heart.  And they made her a
four-sided grave, and buried her upon the banks of the Alaw.

'Then they went to Harlech, and sate down to feast and to drink
there; and there came three birds and began singing, and all the
songs they had ever heard were harsh compared thereto; and at this
feast they continued seven years.  Then they went to Gwales in
Penvro, and there they found a fair and regal spot overlooking the
ocean, and a spacious hall was therein.  And they went into the hall,
and two of its doors were open, but the third door was closed, that
which looked towards Cornwall.  "See yonder," said Manawyddan, "is
the door that we may not open."  And that night they regaled
themselves and were joyful.  And there they remained fourscore years,
nor did they think they had ever spent a time more joyous and
mirthful.  And they were not more weary than when first they came,
neither did they, any of them, know the time they had been there.
And it was as pleasant to them having the head with them as if Bran
had been with them himself.

'But one day said Heilyn, the son of Gwyn:  "Evil betide me if I do
not open the door to know if that is true which is said concerning
it."  So he opened the door and looked towards Cornwall and Aber
Henvelen.  And when they had looked, they were as conscious of all
the evils they had ever sustained, and of all the friends and
companions they had lost, and of all the misery that had befallen
them, as if all had happened in that very spot; and especially of the
fate of their lord.  And because of their perturbation they could not
rest, but journeyed forth with the head towards London.  And they
buried the head in the White Mount.'

Arthur afterwards, in his pride and self-confidence, disinterred the
head, and this was one of 'the three unhappy disclosures of the
island of Britain.'

There is evidently mixed here, with the newer legend, a detritus, as
the geologists would say, of something far older; and the secret of
Wales and its genius is not truly reached until this detritus,
instead of being called recent because it is found in contact with
what is recent, is disengaged, and is made to tell its own story.

But when we show him things of this kind in the Welsh remains, Mr.
Nash has an answer for us.  'Oh,' he says, 'all this is merely a
machinery of necromancers and magic, such as has probably been
possessed by all people in all ages, more or less abundantly.  How
similar are the creations of the human mind in times and places the
most remote!  We see in this similarity only an evidence of the
existence of a common stock of ideas, variously developed according
to the formative pressure of external circumstances.  The materials
of these tales are not peculiar to the Welsh.'  And then Mr. Nash
points out, with much learning and ingenuity, how certain incidents
of these tales have their counterparts in Irish, in Scandinavian, in
Oriental romance.  He says, fairly enough, that the assertions of
Taliesin, in the famous Hanes Taliesin, or History of Taliesin, that
he was present with Noah in the Ark, at the Tower of Babel, and with
Alexander of Macedon, 'we may ascribe to the poetic fancy of the
Christian priest of the thirteenth century, who brought this romance
into its present form.  We may compare these statements of the
universal presence of the wonder-working magician with those of the
gleeman who recites the Anglo-Saxon metrical tale called the
Traveller's Song.'  No doubt, lands the most distant can be shown to
have a common property in many marvellous stories.  This is one of
the most interesting discoveries of modern science; but modern
science is equally interested in knowing how the genius of each
people has differentiated, so to speak, this common property of
theirs; in tracking out, in each case, that special 'variety of
development,' which, to use Mr. Nash's own words, 'the formative
pressure of external circumstances' has occasioned; and not the
formative pressure from without only, but also the formative pressure
from within.  It is this which he who deals with the Welsh remains in
a philosophic spirit wants to know.  Where is the force, for
scientific purposes, of telling us that certain incidents by which
Welsh poetry has been supposed to indicate a surviving tradition of
the doctrine of transmigration, are found in Irish poetry also, when
Irish poetry has, like Welsh, its roots in that Celtism which is said
to have held this doctrine of transmigration so strongly?  Where is
even the great force, for scientific purposes, of proving, if it were
possible to prove, that the extant remains of Welsh poetry contain
not one plain declaration of Druidical, Pagan, pre-Christian
doctrine, if one has in the extant remains of Breton poetry such
texts as this from the prophecy of Gwenchlan:  'Three times must we
all die, before we come to our final repose'? or as the cry of the
eagles, in the same poem, of fierce thirst for Christian blood, a cry
in which the poet evidently gives vent to his own hatred? since the
solidarity, to use that convenient French word, of Breton and Welsh
poetry is so complete, that the ideas of the one may be almost
certainly assumed not to have been wanting to those of the other.
The question is, when Taliesin says, in the Battle of the Trees:  'I
have been in many shapes before I attained a congenial form.  I have
been a narrow blade of a sword, I have been a drop in the air, I have
been a shining star, I have been a word in a book, I have been a book
in the beginning, I have been a light in a lantern a year and a half,
I have been a bridge for passing over three-score rivers; I have
journeyed as an eagle, I have been a boat on the sea, I have been a
director in battle, I have been a sword in the hand, I have been a
shield in fight, I have been the string of a harp, I have been
enchanted for a year in the foam of water.  There is nothing in which
I have not been,'--the question is, have these 'statements of the
universal presence of the wonder-working magician' nothing which
distinguishes them from 'similar creations of the human mind in times
and places the most remote;' have they not an inwardness, a severity
of form, a solemnity of tone, which indicates the still reverberating
echo of a profound doctrine and discipline, such as was Druidism?
Suppose we compare Taliesin, as Mr. Nash invites us, with the gleeman
of the Anglo-Saxon Traveller's Song.  Take the specimen of this song
which Mr. Nash himself quotes:  'I have been with the Israelites and
with the Essyringi, with the Hebrews and with the Indians and with
the Egyptians; I have been with the Medes and with the Persians and
with the Myrgings.'  It is very well to parallel with this extract
Taliesin's:  'I carried the banner before Alexander; I was in Canaan
when Absalom was slain; I was on the horse's crupper of Elias and
Enoch; I was on the high cross of the merciful son of God; I was the
chief overseer at the building of the tower of Nimrod; I was with my
King in the manger of the ass; I supported Moses through the waters
of Jordan; I have been in the buttery in the land of the Trinity; it
is not known what is the nature of its meat and its fish.'  It is
very well to say that these assertions 'we may fairly ascribe to the
poetic fancy of a Christian priest of the thirteenth century.'
Certainly we may; the last of Taliesin's assertions more especially;
though one must remark at the same time that the Welshman shows much
more fire and imagination than the Anglo-Saxon.  But Taliesin adds,
after his:  'I was in Canaan when Absalom was slain,' 'I WAS IN THE
HALL OF DON BEFORE GWYDION WAS BORN;' he adds, after:  'I was chief
overseer at the building of the tower of Nimrod,' 'I HAVE BEEN THREE
TIMES RESIDENT IN THE CASTLE OF ARIANROD;' he adds, after:  'I was at
the cross with Mary Magdalene,' 'I OBTAINED MY INSPIRATION FROM THE
CAULDRON OF CERIDWEN.'  And finally, after the mediaeval touch of the
visit to the buttery in the land of the Trinity, he goes off at
score:  'I have been instructed in the whole system of the universe;
I shall be till the day of judgment on the face of the earth.  I have
been in an uneasy chair above Caer Sidin, and the whirling round
without motion between three elements.  Is it not the wonder of the
world that cannot be discovered?'  And so he ends the poem.  But here
is the Celtic, the essential part of the poem:  it is here that the
'formative pressure' has been really in operation; and here surely is
paganism and mythology enough, which the Christian priest of the
thirteenth century can have had nothing to do with.  It is
unscientific, no doubt, to interpret this part as Edward Davies and
Mr. Herbert do; but it is unscientific also to get rid of it as Mr.
Nash does.  Wales and the Welsh genius are not to be known without
this part; and the true critic is he who can best disengage its real
significance.

I say, then, what we want is to KNOW the Celt and his genius; not to
exalt him or to abase him, but to know him.  And for this a
disinterested, positive, and constructive criticism is needed.
Neither his friends nor his enemies have yet given us much of this.
His friends have given us materials for criticism, and for these we
ought to be grateful; his enemies have given us negative criticism,
and for this, too, up to a certain point, we may be grateful; but the
criticism we really want neither of them has yet given us.

Philology, however, that science which in our time has had so many
successes, has not been abandoned by her good fortune in touching the
Celt; philology has brought, almost for the first time in their
lives, the Celt and sound criticism together.  The Celtic grammar of
Zeuss, whose death is so grievous a loss to science, offers a
splendid specimen of that patient, disinterested way of treating
objects of knowledge, which is the best and most attractive
characteristic of Germany.  Zeuss proceeds neither as a Celt-lover
nor as a Celt-hater; not the slightest trace of a wish to glorify
Teutonism or to abase Celtism, appears in his book.  The only desire
apparent there, is the desire to know his object, the language of the
Celtic peoples, as it really is.  In this he stands as a model to
Celtic students; and it has been given to him, as a reward for his
sound method, to establish certain points which are henceforth
cardinal points, landmarks, in all the discussion of Celtic matters,
and which no one had so established before.  People talked at random
of Celtic writings of this or that age; Zeuss has definitely fixed
the age of what we actually have of these writings.  To take the
Cymric group of languages:  our earliest Cornish document is a
vocabulary of the thirteenth century; our earliest Breton document is
a short description of an estate in a deed of the ninth century; our
earliest Welsh documents are Welsh glosses of the eighth century to
Eutychus, the grammarian, and Ovid's Art of Love, and the verses
found by Edward Lhuyd in the Juvencus manuscript at Cambridge.  The
mention of this Juvencus fragment, by-the-by, suggests the difference
there is between an interested and a disinterested critical habit.
Mr. Nash deals with this fragment; but, in spite of all his great
acuteness and learning, because he has a bias, because he does not
bring to these matters the disinterested spirit they need, he is
capable of getting rid, quite unwarrantably, of a particular word in
the fragment which does not suit him; his dealing with the verses is
an advocate's dealing, not a critic's.  Of this sort of thing Zeuss
is incapable.

The test which Zeuss used for establishing the age of these documents
is a scientific test, the test of orthography and of declensional and
syntactical forms.  These matters are far out of my province, but
what is clear, sound, and simple, has a natural attraction for us
all, and one feels a pleasure in repeating it.  It is the grand sign
of age, Zeuss says, in Welsh and Irish words, when what the
grammarians call the 'destitutio tenuium' has not yet taken place;
when the sharp consonants have not yet been changed into flat, P or t
into B or D; when, for instance, map, a son, has not yet become mab;
coet a wood, coed; ocet, a harrow, oged.  This is a clear, scientific
test to apply, and a test of which the accuracy can be verified; I do
not say that Zeuss was the first person who knew this test or applied
it, but I say that he is the first person who in dealing with Celtic
matters has invariably proceeded by means of this and similar
scientific tests; the first person, therefore, the body of whose work
has a scientific, stable character; and so he stands as a model to
all Celtic inquirers.

His influence has already been most happy; and as I have enlarged on
a certain failure in criticism of Eugene O'Curry's,--whose business,
after all, was the description and classification of materials rather
than criticism,--let me show, by another example from Eugene O'Curry,
this good influence of Zeuss upon Celtic studies.  Eugene O'Curry
wants to establish that compositions of an older date than the
twelfth century existed in Ireland in the twelfth century, and thus
he proceeds.  He takes one of the great extant Irish manuscripts, the
Leabhar na h'Uidhre; or, Book of the Dun Cow.  The compiler of this
book was, he says, a certain Maelmuiri, a member of the religious
house of Cluainmacnois.  This he establishes from a passage in the
manuscript itself:  'This is a trial of his pen here, by Maelmuiri,
son of the son of Conn na m'Bocht.'  The date of Maelmuiri he
establishes from a passage in the Annals of the Four Masters, under
the year 1106:  'Maelmuiri, son of the son of Conn na m'Bocht, was
killed in the middle of the great stone church of Cluainmacnois, by a
party of robbers.'  Thus he gets the date of the Book of the Dun Cow.
This book contains an elegy on the death of St. Columb.  Now, even
before 1106, the language of this elegy was so old as to require a
gloss to make it intelligible, for it is accompanied by a gloss
written between the lines.  This gloss quotes, for the explanation of
obsolete words, a number of more ancient compositions; and these
compositions, therefore, must, at the beginning of the twelfth
century, have been still in existence.  Nothing can be sounder; every
step is proved, and fairly proved, as one goes along.  O'Curry thus
affords a good specimen of the sane mode of proceeding so much wanted
in Celtic researches, and so little practised by Edward Davies and
his brethren; and to found this sane method, Zeuss, by the example he
sets in his own department of philology, has mainly contributed.

Science's reconciling power, too, on which I have already touched,
philology, in her Celtic researches, again and again illustrates.
Races and languages have been absurdly joined, and unity has been
often rashly assumed at stages where one was far, very far, from
having yet really reached unity.  Science has and will long have to
be a divider and a separatist, breaking arbitrary and fanciful
connections, and dissipating dreams of a premature and impossible
unity.  Still, science,--true science,--recognises in the bottom of
her soul a law of ultimate fusion, of conciliation.  To reach this,
but to reach it legitimately, she tends.  She draws, for instance,
towards the same idea which fills her elder and diviner sister,
poetry,--the idea of the substantial unity of man; though she draws
towards it by roads of her own.  But continually she is showing us
affinity where we imagined there was isolation.  What school-boy of
us has not rummaged his Greek dictionary in vain for a satisfactory
account of that old name for the Peloponnese, the Apian Land? and
within the limits of Greek itself there is none.  But the Scythian
name for earth 'apia,' watery, water-issued, meaning first isle and
then land--this name, which we find in 'avia,' ScandinAVIA, and in
'ey' for AldernEY, not only explains the Apian Land of Sophocles for
us, but points the way to a whole world of relationships of which we
knew nothing.  The Scythians themselves again,--obscure, far-
separated Mongolian people as they used to appear to us,--when we
find that they are essentially Teutonic and Indo-European, their very
name the same word as the common Latin word 'scutum,' the SHIELDED
people, what a surprise they give us!  And then, before we have
recovered from this surprise we learn that the name of their father
and god, Targitavus, carries us I know not how much further into
familiar company.  This divinity, Shining with the targe, the Greek
Hercules, the Sun, contains in the second half of his name, tavus,
'shining,' a wonderful cement to hold times and nations together.
Tavus, 'shining,' from 'tava'--in Sanscrit, as well as Scythian, 'to
burn' or 'shine,'--is Divus, dies, Zeus, e??, Deva, and I know not
how much more; and Taviti, the bright and burnt, fire, the place of
fire, the hearth, the centre of the family, becomes the family
itself, just as our word family, the Latin familia, is from thymele,
the sacred centre of fire.  The hearth comes to mean home.  Then from
home it comes to mean the group of homes, the tribe; from the tribe
the entire nation; and in this sense of nation or people, the word
appears in Gothic, Norse, Celtic, and Persian, as well as in
Scythian; the Theuthisks, Deutschen, Tudesques, are the men of one
theuth, nation, or people; and of this our name Germans itself is,
perhaps, only the Roman translation, meaning the men of one germ or
stock.  The Celtic divinity, Teutates, has his name from the Celtic
teuta, people; taviti, fire, appearing here in its secondary and
derived sense of PEOPLE, just as it does in its own Scythian language
in Targitavus's second name, Tavit-varus, Teutaros, the protector of
the people.  Another Celtic divinity, the Hesus of Lucan, finds his
brother in the Gaisos, the sword, symbolising the god of battles of
the Teutonic Scythians. {66}  And after philology has thus related to
each other the Celt and the Teuton, she takes another branch of the
Indo-European family, the Sclaves, and shows us them as having the
same name with the German Suevi, the SOLAR people; the common ground
here, too, being that grand point of union, the sun, fire.  So, also,
we find Mr. Meyer, whose Celtic studies I just now mentioned, harping
again and again on the connection even in Europe, if you go back far
enough, between Celt and German.  So, after all we have heard, and
truly heard, of the diversity between all things Semitic and all
things Indo-European, there is now an Italian philologist at work
upon the relationship between Sanscrit and Hebrew.

Both in small and great things, philology, dealing with Celtic
matters, has exemplified this tending of science towards unity.  Who
has not been puzzled by the relation of the Scots with Ireland--that
vetus et major Scotia, as Colgan calls it?  Who does not feel what
pleasure Zeuss brings us when he suggests that Gael, the name for the
Irish Celt, and Scot, are at bottom the same word, both having their
origin in a word meaning wind, and both signifying the violent stormy
people? {68}  Who does not feel his mind agreeably cleared about our
friends the Fenians, when he learns that the root of their name, fen,
'white,' appears in the hero Fingal; in Gwynned, the Welsh name for
North Wales in the Roman Venedotia; in Vannes in Brittany; in Venice?
The very name of Ireland, some say, comes from the famous Sanscrit
word Arya, the land of the Aryans, or noble men; although the weight
of opinion seems to be in favour of connecting it rather with another
Sanscrit word, avara, occidental, the western land or isle of the
west. {69}  But, at any rate, who that has been brought up to think
the Celts utter aliens from us and our culture, can come without a
start of sympathy upon such words as heol (sol), or buaist (fuisti)?
or upon such a sentence as this, 'Peris Duw dui funnaun' ('God
prepared two fountains')?  Or when Mr. Whitley Stokes, one of the
very ablest scholars formed in Zeuss's school, a born philologist,--
he now occupies, alas! a post under the Government of India, instead
of a chair of philology at home, and makes one think mournfully of
Montesquieu's saying, that had he been an Englishman he should never
have produced his great work, but have caught the contagion of
practical life, and devoted himself to what is called 'rising in the
world,' when Mr. Whitley Stokes, in his edition of Cormac's Glossary,
holds up the Irish word traith, the sea, and makes us remark that,
though the names Triton, Amphitrite, and those of corresponding
Indian and Zend divinities, point to the meaning sea, yet it is only
Irish which actually supplies the vocable, how delightfully that
brings Ireland into the Indo-European concert!  What a wholesome
buffet it gives to Lord Lyndhurst's alienation doctrines!

To go a little further.  Of the two great Celtic divisions of
language, the Gaelic and the Cymric, the Gaelic, say the
philologists, is more related to the younger, more synthetic, group
of languages, Sanscrit, Greek, Zend, Latin and Teutonic; the Cymric
to the older, more analytic Turanian group.  Of the more synthetic
Aryan group, again, Zend and Teutonic are, in their turn, looser and
more analytic than Sanscrit and Greek, more in sympathy with the
Turanian group and with Celtic.  What possibilities of affinity and
influence are here hinted at; what lines of inquiry, worth exploring,
at any rate, suggest themselves to one's mind.  By the forms of its
language a nation expresses its very self.  Our language is the
loosest, the most analytic, of all European languages.  And we, then,
what are we? what is England?  I will not answer, A vast obscure
Cymric basis with a vast visible Teutonic superstructure; but I will
say that that answer sometimes suggests itself, at any rate,--
sometimes knocks at our mind's door for admission; and we begin to
cast about and see whether it is to be let in.

But the forms of its language are not our only key to a people; what
it says in its language, its literature, is the great key, and we
must get back to literature.  The literature of the Celtic peoples
has not yet had its Zeuss, and greatly it wants him.  We need a Zeuss
to apply to Celtic literature, to all its vexed questions of dates,
authenticity, and significance, the criticism, the sane method, the
disinterested endeavour to get at the real facts, which Zeuss has
shown in dealing with Celtic language.  Science is good in itself,
and therefore Celtic literature,--the Celt-haters having failed to
prove it a bubble,--Celtic literature is interesting, merely as an
object of knowledge.  But it reinforces and redoubles our interest in
Celtic literature if we find that here, too, science exercises the
reconciling, the uniting influence of which I have said so much; if
we find here, more than anywhere else, traces of kinship, and the
most essential sort of kinship, spiritual kinship, between us and the
Celt, of which we had never dreamed.  I settle nothing, and can
settle nothing; I have not the special knowledge needed for that.  I
have no pretension to do more than to try and awaken interest; to
seize on hints, to point out indications, which, to any one with a
feeling for literature, suggest themselves; to stimulate other
inquirers.  I must surely be without the bias which has so often
rendered Welsh and Irish students extravagant; why, my very name
expresses that peculiar Semitico-Saxon mixture which makes the
typical Englishman; I can have no ends to serve in finding in Celtic
literature more than is there.  What IS there, is for me the only
question.


III.


We have seen how philology carries us towards ideas of affinity of
race which are new to us.  But it is evident that this affinity, even
if proved, can be no very potent affair, unless it goes beyond the
stage at which we have hitherto observed it.  Affinity between races
still, so to speak, in their mother's womb, counts for something,
indeed, but cannot count for very much.  So long as Celt and Teuton
are in their embryo rudimentary state, or, at least, no such great
while out of their cradle, still engaged in their wanderings, changes
of place and struggle for development, so long as they have not yet
crystallised into solid nations, they may touch and mix in passing,
and yet very little come of it.  It is when the embryo has grown and
solidified into a distinct nation, into the Gaul or German of
history, when it has finally acquired the characters which make the
Gaul of history what he is, the German of history what he is, that
contact and mixture are important, and may leave a long train of
effects; for Celt and Teuton by this time have their formed, marked,
national, ineffaceable qualities to oppose or to communicate.  The
contact of the German of the Continent with the Celt was in the pre-
historic times, and the definite German type, as we know it, was
fixed later, and from the time when it became fixed was not
influenced by the Celtic type.  But here in our country, in historic
times, long after the Celtic embryo had crystallised into the Celt
proper, long after the Germanic embryo had crystallised into the
German proper, there was an important contact between the two
peoples; the Saxons invaded the Britons and settled themselves in the
Britons' country.  Well, then, here was a contact which one might
expect would leave its traces; if the Saxons got the upper hand, as
we all know they did, and made our country be England and us be
English, there must yet, one would think, be some trace of the Saxon
having met the Briton; there must be some Celtic vein or other
running through us.  Many people say there is nothing at all of the
kind, absolutely nothing; the Saturday Review treats these matters of
ethnology with great power and learning, and the Saturday Review says
we are 'a nation into which a Norman element, like a much smaller
Celtic element, was so completely absorbed that it is vain to seek
after Norman or Celtic elements in any modern Englishman.'  And the
other day at Zurich I read a long essay on English literature by one
of the professors there, in which the writer observed, as a
remarkable thing, that while other countries conquered by the
Germans,--France, for instance, and Italy,--had ousted all German
influence from their genius and literature, there were two countries,
not originally Germanic, but conquered by the Germans, England and
German Switzerland, of which the genius and the literature were
purely and unmixedly German; and this he laid down as a position
which nobody would dream of challenging.

I say it is strange that this should be so, and we in particular have
reason for inquiring whether it really is so; because though, as I
have said, even as a matter of science the Celt has a claim to be
known, and we have an interest in knowing him, yet this interest is
wonderfully enhanced if we find him to have actually a part in us.
The question is to be tried by external and by internal evidence; the
language and the physical type of our race afford certain data for
trying it, and other data are afforded by our literature, genius, and
spiritual production generally.  Data of this second kind belong to
the province of the literary critic; data of the first kind to the
province of the philologist and of the physiologist.

The province of the philologist and of the physiologist is not mine;
but this whole question as to the mixture of Celt with Saxon in us
has been so little explored, people have been so prone to settle it
off-hand according to their prepossessions, that even on the
philological and physiological side of it I must say a few words in
passing.  Surely it must strike with surprise any one who thinks of
it, to find that without any immense inpouring of a whole people,
that by mere expeditions of invaders having to come over the sea, and
in no greater numbers than the Saxons, so far as we can make out,
actually came, the old occupants of this island, the Celtic Britons,
should have been completely annihilated, or even so completely
absorbed that it is vain to seek after Celtic elements in the
existing English race.  Of deliberate wholesale extermination of the
Celtic race, all of them who could not fly to Wales or Scotland, we
hear nothing; and without some such extermination one would suppose
that a great mass of them must have remained in the country, their
lot the obscure and, so to speak, underground lot of a subject race,
but yet insensibly getting mixed with their conquerors, and their
blood entering into the composition of a new people, in which the
stock of the conquerors counts for most, but the stock of the
conquered, too, counts for something.  How little the triumph of the
conqueror's laws, manners, and language, proves the extinction of the
old race, we may see by looking at France; Gaul was Latinised in
language, manners, and laws, and yet her people remained essentially
Celtic.  The Germanisation of Britain went far deeper than the
Latinisation of France, and not only laws, manners, and language, but
the main current of the blood became Germanic; but how, without some
process of radica extirpation, of which, as I say, there is no
evidence, can there have failed to subsist in Britain, as in Gaul, a
Celtic current too?  The indications of this in our language have
never yet been thoroughly searched out; the Celtic names of places
prove nothing, of course, as to the point here in question; they come
from the pre-historic times, the times before the nations, Germanic
or Celtic, had crystallised, and they are everywhere, as the
impetuous Celt was formerly everywhere,--in the Alps, the Apennines,
the Cevennes, the Rhine, the Po, as well as in the Thames, the
Humber, Cumberland, London.  But it is said that the words of Celtic
origin for things having to do with every-day peaceful life,--the
life of a settled nation,--words like basket (to take an instance
which all the world knows) form a much larger body in our language
than is commonly supposed; it is said that a number of our raciest,
most idiomatic, popular words--for example, bam, kick, whop, twaddle,
fudge, hitch, muggy,--are Celtic.  These assertions require to be
carefully examined, and it by no means follows that because an
English word is found in Celtic, therefore we get it from thence; but
they have not yet had the attention which, as illustrating through
language this matter of the subsistence and intermingling in our
nation of a Celtic part, they merit.

Nor have the physiological data which illustrate this matter had much
more attention from us in England.  But in France, a physician, half
English by blood though a Frenchman by home and language, Monsieur W.
F. Edwards, brother to Monsieur Milne-Edwards, the well-known
zoologist, published in 1839 a letter to Monsieur Amedee Thierry with
this title:  Des Caracteres Physiologiques des Races Humaines
consideres dans leurs Rapports avec l'Histoire.  The letter attracted
great attention on the Continent; it fills not much more than a
hundred pages, and they are a hundred pages which well deserve
reading and re-reading.  Monsieur Thierry in his Histoire des Gaulois
had divided the population of Gaul into certain groups, and the
object of Monsieur Edwards was to try this division by physiology.
Groups of men have, he says, their physical type which distinguishes
them, as well as their language; the traces of this physical type
endure as the traces of language endure, and physiology is enabled to
verify history by them.  Accordingly, he determines the physical type
of each of the two great Celtic families, the Gaels and the Cymris,
who are said to have been distributed in a certain order through
Gaul, and then he tracks these types in the population of France at
the present day, and so verifies the alleged original order of
distribution.  In doing this, he makes excursions into neighbouring
countries where the Gaels and the Cymris have been, and he declares
that in England he finds abundant traces of the physical type which
he has established as the Cymric, still subsisting in our population,
and having descended from the old British possessors of our soil
before the Saxon conquest.  But if we are to believe the current
English opinion, says Monsieur Edwards, the stock of these old
British possessors is clean gone.  On this opinion he makes the
following comment:-

'In the territory occupied by the Saxons, the Britons were no longer
an independent nation, nor even a people with any civil existence at
all.  For history, therefore, they were dead, above all for history
as it was then written; but they had not perished; they still lived
on, and undoubtedly in such numbers as the remains of a great nation,
in spite of its disasters, might still be expected to keep.  That the
Britons were destroyed or expelled from England, properly so called,
is, as I have said, a popular opinion in that country.  It is founded
on the exaggeration of the writers of history; but in these very
writers, when we come to look closely at what they say, we find the
confession that the remains of this people were reduced to a state of
strict servitude.  Attached to the soil, they will have shared in
that emancipation which during the course of the middle ages
gradually restored to political life the mass of the population in
the countries of Western Europe; recovering by slow degrees their
rights without resuming their name, and rising gradually with the
rise of industry, they will have got spread through all ranks of
society.  The gradualness of this movement, and the obscurity which
enwrapped its beginnings, allowed the contempt of the conqueror and
the shame of the conquered to become fixed feelings; and so it turns
out, that an Englishman who now thinks himself sprung from the Saxons
or the Normans, is often in reality the descendant of the Britons.'

So physiology, as well as language, incomplete though the application
of their tests to this matter has hitherto been, may lead us to
hesitate before accepting the round assertion that it is vain to
search for Celtic elements in any modern Englishman.  But it is not
only by the tests of physiology and language that we can try this
matter.  As there are for physiology physical marks, such as the
square heads of the German, the round head of the Gael, the oval head
of the Cymri, which determine the type of a people, so for criticism
there are spiritual marks which determine the type, and make us speak
of the Greek genius, the Teutonic genius, the Celtic genius, and so
on.  Here is another test at our service; and this test, too, has
never yet been thoroughly employed.  Foreign critics have indeed
occasionally hazarded the idea that in English poetry there is a
Celtic element traceable; and Mr. Morley, in his very readable as
well as very useful book on the English writers before Chaucer, has a
sentence which struck my attention when I read it, because it
expresses an opinion which I, too, have long held.  Mr. Morley says:
--'The main current of English literature cannot be disconnected from
the lively Celtic wit in which it has one of its sources.  The Celts
do not form an utterly distinct part of our mixed population.  But
for early, frequent, and various contact with the race that in its
half-barbarous days invented Ossian's dialogues with St. Patrick, and
that quickened afterwards the Northmen's blood in France, Germanic
England would not have produced a Shakspeare.'  But there Mr. Morley
leaves the matter.  He indicates this Celtic element and influence,
but he does not show us,--it did not come within the scope of his
work to show us,--how this influence has declared itself.  Unlike the
physiological test, or the linguistic test, this literary, spiritual
test is one which I may perhaps be allowed to try my hand at
applying.  I say that there is a Celtic element in the English
nature, as well as a Germanic element, and that this element
manifests itself in our spirit and literature.  But before I try to
point out how it manifests itself, it may be as well to get a clear
notion of what we mean by a Celtic element, a Germanic element; what
characters, that is, determine for us the Celtic genius, the Germanic
genius, as we commonly conceive the two.


IV.


Let me repeat what I have often said of the characteristics which
mark the English spirit, the English genius.  This spirit, this
genius, judged, to be sure, rather from a friend's than an enemy's
point of view, yet judged on the whole fairly, is characterised, I
have repeatedly said, by ENERGY WITH HONESTY.  Take away some of the
energy which comes to us, as I believe, in part from Celtic and Roman
sources; instead of energy, say rather STEADINESS; and you have the
Germanic genius STEADINESS WITH HONESTY.  It is evident how nearly
the two characterisations approach one another; and yet they leave,
as we shall see, a great deal of room for difference.  Steadiness
with honesty; the danger for a national spirit thus composed is the
humdrum, the plain and ugly, the ignoble:  in a word, das Gemeine,
die Gemeinheit, that curse of Germany, against which Goethe was all
his life fighting.  The excellence of a national spirit thus composed
is freedom from whim, flightiness, perverseness; patient fidelity to
Nature, in a word, SCIENCE,--leading it at last, though slowly, and
not by the most brilliant road, out of the bondage of the humdrum and
common, into the better life.  The universal dead-level of plainness
and homeliness, the lack of all beauty and distinction in form and
feature, the slowness and clumsiness of the language, the eternal
beer, sausages, and bad tobacco, the blank commonness everywhere,
pressing at last like a weight on the spirits of the traveller in
Northern Germany, and making him impatient to be gone, this is the
weak side; the industry, the well-doing, the patient steady
elaboration of things, the idea of science governing all departments
of human activity--this is the strong side; and through this side of
her genius, Germany has already obtained excellent results, and is
destined, we may depend upon it, however her pedantry, her slowness,
her fumbling, her ineffectiveness, her bad government, may at times
make us cry out, to an immense development. {82}

FOR DULNESS, THE CREEPING SAXONS,--says an old Irish poem, assigning
the characteristics for which different nations are celebrated:-


For acuteness and valour, the Greeks,
For excessive pride, the Romans,
For dulness, the creeping Saxons;
For beauty and amorousness, the Gaedhils.


We have seen in what sense, and with what explanation, this
characterisation of the German may be allowed to stand; now let us
come to the beautiful and amorous Gaedhil.  Or rather, let us find a
definition which may suit both branches of the Celtic family, the
Cymri as well as the Gael.  It is clear that special circumstances
may have developed some one side in the national character of Cymri
or Gael, Welshman or Irishman, so that the observer's notice shall be
readily caught by this side, and yet it may be impossible to adopt it
as characteristic of the Celtic nature generally.  For instance, in
his beautiful essay on the poetry of the Celtic races, M. Renan, with
his eyes fixed on the Bretons and the Welsh, is struck with the
timidity, the shyness, the delicacy of the Celtic nature, its
preference for a retired life, its embarrassment at having to deal
with the great world.  He talks of the douce petite race
naturellement chretienne, his race fiere et timide, a l'exterieur
gauche et embarrassee.  But it is evident that this description,
however well it may do for the Cymri, will never do for the Gael,
never do for the typical Irishman of Donnybrook fair.  Again, M.
Renan's infinie delicatesse de sentiment qui caracterise la race
Celtique, how little that accords with the popular conception of an
Irishman who wants to borrow money!  SENTIMENT is, however, the word
which marks where the Celtic races really touch and are one;
sentimental, if the Celtic nature is to be characterised by a single
term, is the best term to take.  An organisation quick to feel
impressions, and feeling them very strongly; a lively personality
therefore, keenly sensitive to joy and to sorrow; this is the main
point.  If the downs of life too much outnumber the ups, this
temperament, just because it is so quickly and nearly conscious of
all impressions, may no doubt be seen shy and wounded; it may be seen
in wistful regret, it may be seen in passionate, penetrating
melancholy; but its essence is to aspire ardently after life, light,
and emotion, to be expansive, adventurous, and gay.  Our word GAY, it
is said, is itself Celtic.  It is not from gaudium, but from the
Celtic gair, to laugh; {84} and the impressionable Celt, soon up and
soon down, is the more down because it is so his nature to be up to
be sociable, hospitable, eloquent, admired, figuring away
brilliantly.  He loves bright colours, he easily becomes audacious,
overcrowing, full of fanfaronade.  The German, say the physiologists,
has the larger volume of intestines (and who that has ever seen a
German at a table-d'hote will not readily believe this?), the
Frenchman has the more developed organs of respiration.  That is just
the expansive, eager Celtic nature; the head in the air, snuffing and
snorting; A PROUD LOOK AND A HIGH STOMACH, as the Psalmist says, but
without any such settled savage temper as the Psalmist seems to
impute by those words.  For good and for bad, the Celtic genius is
more airy and unsubstantial, goes less near the ground, than the
German.  The Celt is often called sensual; but it is not so much the
vulgar satisfactions of sense that attract him as emotion and
excitement; he is truly, as I began by saying, sentimental.

Sentimental,--ALWAYS READY TO REACT AGAINST THE DESPOTISM OF FACT;
that is the description a great friend {85} of the Celt gives of him;
and it is not a bad description of the sentimental temperament; it
lets us into the secret of its dangers and of its habitual want of
success.  Balance, measure, and patience, these are the eternal
conditions, even supposing the happiest temperament to start with, of
high success; and balance, measure, and patience are just what the
Celt has never had.  Even in the world of spiritual creation, he has
never, in spite of his admirable gifts of quick perception and warm
emotion, succeeded perfectly, because he never has had steadiness,
patience, sanity enough to comply with the conditions under which
alone can expression be perfectly given to the finest perceptions and
emotions.  The Greek has the same perceptive, emotional temperament
as the Celt; but he adds to this temperament the sense of MEASURE;
hence his admirable success in the plastic arts, in which the Celtic
genius, with its chafing against the despotism of fact, its perpetual
straining after mere emotion, has accomplished nothing.  In the
comparatively petty art of ornamentation, in rings, brooches,
crosiers, relic-cases, and so on, he has done just enough to show his
delicacy of taste, his happy temperament; but the grand difficulties
of painting and sculpture, the prolonged dealings of spirit with
matter, he has never had patience for.  Take the more spiritual arts
of music and poetry.  All that emotion alone can do in music the Celt
has done; the very soul of emotion breathes in the Scotch and Irish
airs; but with all this power of musical feeling, what has the Celt,
so eager for emotion that he has not patience for science, effected
in music, to be compared with what the less emotional German,
steadily developing his musical feeling with the science of a
Sebastian Bach or a Beethoven, has effected?  In poetry, again,
poetry which the Celt has so passionately, so nobly loved; poetry
where emotion counts for so much, but where reason, too, reason,
measure, sanity, also count for so much,--the Celt has shown genius,
indeed, splendid genius; but even here his faults have clung to him,
and hindered him from producing great works, such as other nations
with a genius for poetry,--the Greeks, say, or the Italians,--have
produced.  The Celt has not produced great poetical works, he has
only produced poetry with an air of greatness investing it all, and
sometimes giving, moreover, to short pieces, or to passages, lines,
and snatches of long pieces, singular beauty and power.  And yet he
loved poetry so much that he grudged no pains to it; but the true
art, the architectonice which shapes great works, such as the
Agamemnon or the Divine Comedy, comes only after a steady, deep-
searching survey, a firm conception of the facts of human life, which
the Celt has not patience for.  So he runs off into technic, where he
employs the utmost elaboration, and attains astonishing skill; but in
the contents of his poetry you have only so much interpretation of
the world as the first dash of a quick, strong perception, and then
sentiment, infinite sentiment, can bring you.  Here, too, his want of
sanity and steadfastness has kept the Celt back from the highest
success.

If his rebellion against fact has thus lamed the Celt even in
spiritual work, how much more must it have lamed him in the world of
business and politics!  The skilful and resolute appliance of means
to ends which is needed both to make progress in material
civilisation, and also to form powerful states, is just what the Celt
has least turn for.  He is sensual, as I have said, or at least
sensuous; loves bright colours, company, and pleasure; and here he is
like the Greek and Latin races; but compare the talent the Greek and
Latin (or Latinised) races have shown for gratifying their senses,
for procuring an outward life, rich, luxurious, splendid, with the
Celt's failure to reach any material civilisation sound and
satisfying, and not out at elbows, poor, slovenly, and half-
barbarous.  The sensuousness of the Greek made Sybaris and Corinth,
the sensuousness of the Latin made Rome and Baiae, the sensuousness
of the Latinised Frenchman makes Paris; the sensuousness of the Celt
proper has made Ireland.  Even in his ideal heroic times, his gay and
sensuous nature cannot carry him, in the appliances of his favourite
life of sociability and pleasure, beyond the gross and creeping Saxon
whom he despises; the regent Breas, we are told in the Battle of
Moytura of the Fomorians, became unpopular because 'the knives of his
people were not greased at his table, nor did their breath smell of
ale at the banquet.'  In its grossness and barbarousness is not that
Saxon, as Saxon as it can be? just what the Latinised Norman,
sensuous and sociable like the Celt, but with the talent to make this
bent of his serve to a practical embellishment of his mode of living,
found so disgusting in the Saxon.

And as in material civilisation he has been ineffectual, so has the
Celt been ineffectual in politics.  This colossal, impetuous,
adventurous wanderer, the Titan of the early world, who in primitive
times fills so large a place on earth's scene, dwindles and dwindles
as history goes on, and at last is shrunk to what we now see him.
For ages and ages the world has been constantly slipping, ever more
and more out of the Celt's grasp.  'They went forth to the war,'
Ossian says most truly, 'BUT THEY ALWAYS FELL.'

And yet, if one sets about constituting an ideal genius, what a great
deal of the Celt does one find oneself drawn to put into it!  Of an
ideal genius one does not want the elements, any of them, to be in a
state of weakness; on the contrary, one wants all of them to be in
the highest state of power; but with a law of measure, of harmony,
presiding over the whole.  So the sensibility of the Celt, if
everything else were not sacrificed to it, is a beautiful and
admirable force.  For sensibility, the power of quick and strong
perception and emotion, is one of the very prime constituents of
genius, perhaps its most positive constituent; it is to the soul what
good senses are to the body, the grand natural condition of
successful activity.  Sensibility gives genius its materials; one
cannot have too much of it, if one can but keep its master and not be
its slave.  Do not let us wish that the Celt had had less
sensibility, but that he had been more master of it.  Even as it is,
if his sensibility has been a source of weakness to him, it has been
a source of power too, and a source of happiness.  Some people have
found in the Celtic nature and its sensibility the main root out of
which chivalry and romance and the glorification of a feminine ideal
spring; this is a great question, with which I cannot deal here.  Let
me notice in passing, however, that there is, in truth, a Celtic air
about the extravagance of chivalry, its reaction against the
despotism of fact, its straining human nature further than it will
stand.  But putting all this question of chivalry and its origin on
one side, no doubt the sensibility of the Celtic nature, its nervous
exaltation, have something feminine in them, and the Celt is thus
peculiarly disposed to feel the spell of the feminine idiosyncrasy;
he has an affinity to it; he is not far from its secret.  Again, his
sensibility gives him a peculiarly near and intimate feeling of
nature and the life of nature; here, too, he seems in a special way
attracted by the secret before him, the secret of natural beauty and
natural magic, and to be close to it, to half-divine it.  In the
productions of the Celtic genius, nothing, perhaps, is so interesting
as the evidences of this power:  I shall have occasion to give
specimens of them by-and-by.  The same sensibility made the Celts
full of reverence and enthusiasm for genius, learning, and the things
of the mind; TO BE A BARD, FREED A MAN,--that is a characteristic
stroke of this generous and ennobling ardour of theirs, which no race
has ever shown more strongly.  Even the extravagance and exaggeration
of the sentimental Celtic nature has often something romantic and
attractive about it, something which has a sort of smack of
misdirected good.  The Celt, undisciplinable, anarchical, and
turbulent by nature, but out of affection and admiration giving
himself body and soul to some leader, that is not a promising
political temperament, it is just the opposite of the Anglo-Saxon
temperament, disciplinable and steadily obedient within certain
limits, but retaining an inalienable part of freedom and self-
dependence; but it is a temperament for which one has a kind of
sympathy notwithstanding.  And very often, for the gay defiant
reaction against fact of the lively Celtic nature one has more than
sympathy; one feels, in spite of the extravagance, in spite of good
sense disapproving, magnetised and exhilarated by it.  The Gauls had
a rule inflicting a fine on every warrior who, when he appeared on
parade, was found to stick out too much in front,--to be corpulent,
in short.  Such a rule is surely the maddest article of war ever
framed, and to people to whom nature has assigned a large volume of
intestines, must appear, no doubt, horrible; but yet has it not an
audacious, sparkling, immaterial manner with it, which lifts one out
of routine, and sets one's spirits in a glow?

All tendencies of human nature are in themselves vital and
profitable; when they are blamed, they are only to be blamed
relatively, not absolutely.  This holds true of the Saxon's phlegm as
well as of the Celt's sentiment.  Out of the steady humdrum habit of
the creeping Saxon, as the Celt calls him,--out of his way of going
near the ground,--has come, no doubt, Philistinism, that plant of
essentially Germanic growth, flourishing with its genuine marks only
in the German fatherland, Great Britain and her colonies, and the
United States of America; but what a soul of goodness there is in
Philistinism itself! and this soul of goodness I, who am often
supposed to be Philistinism's mortal enemy merely because I do not
wish it to have things all its own way, cherish as much as anybody.
This steady-going habit leads at last, as I have said, up to science,
up to the comprehension and interpretation of the world.  With us in
Great Britain, it is true, it does not seem to lead so far as that;
it is in Germany, where the habit is more unmixed, that it can lead
to science.  Here with us it seems at a certain point to meet with a
conflicting force, which checks it and prevents its pushing on to
science; but before reaching this point what conquests has it not
won! and all the more, perhaps, for stopping short at this point, for
spending its exertions within a bounded field, the field of plain
sense, of direct practical utility.  How it has augmented the
comforts and conveniences of life for us!  Doors that open, windows
that shut, locks that turn, razors that shave, coats that wear,
watches that go, and a thousand more such good things, are the
invention of the Philistines.

Here, then, if commingling there is in our race, are two very unlike
elements to commingle; the steady-going Saxon temperament and the
sentimental Celtic temperament.  But before we go on to try and
verify, in our life and literature, the alleged fact of this
commingling, we have yet another element to take into account, the
Norman element.  The critic in the Saturday Review, whom I have
already quoted, says that in looking for traces of Normanism in our
national genius, as in looking for traces of Celtism in it, we do but
lose our labour; he says, indeed, that there went to the original
making of our nation a very great deal more of a Norman element than
of a Celtic element, but he asserts that both elements have now so
completely disappeared, that it is vain to look for any trace of
either of them in the modern Englishman.  But this sort of assertion
I do not like to admit without trying it a little.  I want,
therefore, to get some plain notion of the Norman habit and genius,
as I have sought to get some plain notion of the Saxon and Celtic.
Some people will say that the Normans are Teutonic, and that
therefore the distinguishing characters of the German genius must be
those of their genius also; but the matter cannot be settled in this
speedy fashion.  No doubt the basis of the Norman race is Teutonic;
but the governing point in the history of the Norman race,--so far,
at least, as we English have to do with it,--is not its Teutonic
origin, but its Latin civilisation.  The French people have, as I
have already remarked, an undoubtedly Celtic basis, yet so decisive
in its effect upon a nation's habit and character can be the contact
with a stronger civilisation, that Gaul, without changing the basis
of her blood, became, for all practical intents and purposes, a Latin
country, France and not Ireland, through the Roman conquest.
Latinism conquered Celtism in her, as it also conquered the Germanism
imported by the Frankish and other invasions; Celtism is, however, I
need not say, everywhere manifest still in the French nation; even
Germanism is distinctly traceable in it, as any one who attentively
compares the French with other Latin races will see.  No one can look
carefully at the French troops in Rome, amongst the Italian
population, and not perceive this trace of Germanism; I do not mean
in the Alsatian soldiers only, but in the soldiers of genuine France.
But the governing character of France, as a power in the world, is
Latin; such was the force of Greek and Roman civilisation upon a race
whose whole mass remained Celtic, and where the Celtic language still
lingered on, they say, among the common people, for some five or six
centuries after the Roman conquest.  But the Normans in Neustria lost
their old Teutonic language in a wonderfully short time; when they
conquered England they were already Latinised; with them were a
number of Frenchmen by race, men from Anjou and Poitou, so they
brought into England more non-Teutonic blood, besides what they had
themselves got by intermarriage, than is commonly supposed; the great
point, however, is, that by civilisation this vigorous race, when it
took possession of England, was Latin.

These Normans, who in Neustria had lost their old Teutonic tongue so
rapidly, kept in England their new Latin tongue for some three
centuries.  It was Edward the Third's reign before English came to be
used in law-pleadings and spoken at court.  Why this difference?
Both in Neustria and in England the Normans were a handful; but in
Neustria, as Teutons, they were in contact with a more advanced
civilisation than their own; in England, as Latins, with a less
advanced.  The Latinised Normans in England had the sense for fact,
which the Celts had not; and the love of strenuousness, clearness,
and rapidity, the high Latin spirit, which the Saxons had not.  They
hated the slowness and dulness of the creeping Saxon; it offended
their clear, strenuous talent for affairs, as it offended the Celt's
quick and delicate perception.  The Normans had the Roman talent for
affairs, the Roman decisiveness in emergencies.  They have been
called prosaic, but this is not a right word for them; they were
neither sentimental, nor, strictly speaking, poetical.  They had more
sense for rhetoric than for poetry, like the Romans; but, like the
Romans, they had too high a spirit not to like a noble intellectual
stimulus of some kind, and thus they were carried out of the region
of the merely prosaic.  Their foible,--the bad excess of their
characterising quality of strenuousness,--was not a prosaic flatness,
it was hardness and insolence.

I have been obliged to fetch a very wide circuit, but at last I have
got what I went to seek.  I have got a rough, but, I hope, clear
notion of these three forces, the Germanic genius, the Celtic genius,
the Norman genius.  The Germanic genius has steadiness as its main
basis, with commonness and humdrum for its defect, fidelity to nature
for its excellence.  The Celtic genius, sentiment as its main basis,
with love of beauty, charm, and spirituality for its excellence,
ineffectualness and self-will for its defect.  The Norman genius,
talent for affairs as its main basis, with strenuousness and clear
rapidity for its excellence, hardness and insolence for its defect.
And now to try and trace these in the composite English genius.


V.


To begin with what is more external.  If we are so wholly Anglo-Saxon
and Germanic as people say, how comes it that the habits and gait of
the German language are so exceedingly unlike ours?  Why while the
Times talks in this fashion:  'At noon a long line of carriages
extended from Pall Mall to the Peers' entrance of the Palace of
Westminster,' does the Cologne Gazette talk in this other fashion:
'Nachdem die Vorbereitungen zu dem auf dem GurzenichSaale zu Ebren
der Abgeordneten Statt finden sollenden Bankette bereits vollstandig
getroffen worden waren, fand heute vormittag auf polizeiliche
Anordnung die Schliessung sammtlicher Zugange zum Gurzenich Statt'?
{97}  Surely the mental habit of people who express their thoughts in
so very different a manner, the one rapid, the other slow, the one
plain, the other embarrassed, the one trailing, the other striding,
cannot be essentially the same.  The English language, strange
compound as it is, with its want of inflections, and with all the
difficulties which this want of inflections brings upon it, has yet
made itself capable of being, in good hands, a business-instrument as
ready, direct, and clear, as French or Latin.  Again:  perhaps no
nation, after the Greeks and Romans, has so clearly felt in what true
rhetoric, rhetoric of the best kind, consists, and reached so high a
pitch of excellence in this, as the English.  Our sense for rhetoric
has in some ways done harm to us in our cultivation of literature,
harm to us, still more, in our cultivation of science; but in the
true sphere of rhetoric, in public speaking, this sense has given us
orators whom I do think we may, without fear of being contradicted
and accused of blind national vanity, assert to have inherited the
great Greek and Roman oratorical tradition more than the orators of
any other country.  Strafford, Bolingbroke, the two Pitts, Fox,--to
cite no other names,--I imagine few will dispute that these call up
the notion of an oratory, in kind, in extent, in power, coming nearer
than any other body of modern oratory to the oratory of Greece and
Rome.  And the affinity of spirit in our best public life and
greatest public men to those of Rome, has often struck observers,
foreign as well as English.  Now, not only have the Germans shown no
eminent aptitude for rhetoric such as the English have shown,--that
was not to be expected, since our public life has done so much to
develop an aptitude of this kind, and the public life of the Germans
has done so little,--but they seem in a singular degree devoid of any
aptitude at all for rhetoric.  Take a speech from the throne in
Prussia, and compare it with a speech from the throne in England.
Assuredly it is not in speeches from the throne that English rhetoric
or any rhetoric shows its best side;--they are often cavilled at,
often justly cavilled at;--no wonder, for this form of composition is
beset with very trying difficulties.  But what is to be remarked is
this;--a speech from the throne falls essentially within the sphere
of rhetoric, it is one's sense of rhetoric which has to fix its tone
and style, so as to keep a certain note always sounding in it; in an
English speech from the throne, whatever its faults, this rhetorical
note is always struck and kept to; in a Prussian speech from the
throne, never.  An English speech from the throne is rhetoric; a
Prussian speech is half talk,--heavy talk,--and half effusion.  This
is one instance, it may be said; true, but in one instance of this
kind the presence or the absence of an aptitude for rhetoric is
decisively shown.  Well, then, why am I not to say that we English
get our rhetorical sense from the Norman element in us,--our turn for
this strenuous, direct, high-spirited talent of oratory, from the
influence of the strenuous, direct, high-spirited Normans?  Modes of
life, institutions, government, and other such causes, are
sufficient, I shall be told, to account for English oratory.  Modes
of life, institutions, government, climate, and so forth,--let me say
it once for all,--will further or hinder the development of an
aptitude, but they will not by themselves create the aptitude or
explain it.  On the other hand, a people's habit and complexion of
nature go far to determine its modes of life, institutions, and
government, and even to prescribe the limits within which the
influences of climate shall tell upon it.

However, it is not my intention, in these remarks, to lay it down for
certain that this or that part of our powers, shortcomings, and
behaviour, is due to a Celtic, German, or Norman element in us.  To
establish this I should need much wider limits, and a knowledge, too,
far beyond what I possess; all I purpose is to point out certain
correspondences, not yet, perhaps, sufficiently observed and attended
to, which seem to lead towards certain conclusions.  The following up
the inquiry till full proof is reached,--or perhaps, full disproof,--
is what I want to suggest to more competent persons.  Premising this,
I now go on to a second matter, somewhat more delicate and inward
than that with which I began.  Every one knows how well the Greek and
Latin races, with their direct sense for the visible, palpable world,
have succeeded in the plastic arts.  The sheer German races, too,
with their honest love of fact, and their steady pursuit of it,--
their fidelity to nature, in short,--have attained a high degree of
success in these arts; few people will deny that Albert Durer and
Rubens, for example, are to be called masters in painting, and in the
high kind of painting.  The Celtic races, on the other hand, have
shown a singular inaptitude for the plastic arts; the abstract,
severe character of the Druidical religion, its dealing with the eye
of the mind rather than the eye of the body, its having no elaborate
temples and beautiful idols, all point this way from the first; its
sentiment cannot satisfy itself, cannot even find a resting-place for
itself, in colour and form; it presses on to the impalpable, the
ideal.  The forest of trees and the forest of rocks, not hewn timber
and carved stones, suit its aspirations for something not to be
bounded or expressed.  With this tendency, the Celtic races have, as
I remarked before, been necessarily almost impotent in the higher
branches of the plastic arts.  Ireland, that has produced so many
powerful spirits, has produced no great sculptors or painters.  Cross
into England.  The inaptitude for the plastic art strikingly
diminishes, as soon as the German, not the Celtic element,
preponderates in the race.  And yet in England, too, in the English
race, there is something which seems to prevent our reaching real
mastership in the plastic arts, as the more unmixed German races have
reached it.  Reynolds and Turner are painters of genius, who can
doubt it? but take a European jury, the only competent jury in these
cases, and see if you can get a verdict giving them the rank of
masters, as this rank is given to Raphael and Correggio, or to Albert
Durer and Rubens.  And observe in what points our English pair
succeed, and in what they fall short.  They fall short in
architectonice, in the highest power of composition, by which
painting accomplishes the very uttermost which it is given to
painting to accomplish; the highest sort of composition, the highest
application of the art of painting, they either do not attempt, or
they fail in it.  Their defect, therefore, is on the side of art, of
plastic art.  And they succeed in magic, in beauty, in grace, in
expressing almost the inexpressible:  here is the charm of Reynolds's
children and Turner's seas; the impulse to express the inexpressible
carries Turner so far, that at last it carries him away, and even
long before he is quite carried away, even in works that are justly
extolled, one can see the stamp-mark, as the French say, of insanity.
The excellence, therefore, the success, is on the side of spirit.
Does not this look as if a Celtic stream met the main German current
in us, and gave it a somewhat different course from that which it
takes naturally?  We have Germanism enough in us, enough patient love
for fact and matter, to be led to attempt the plastic arts, and we
make much more way in them than the pure Celtic races make; but at a
certain point our Celtism comes in, with its love of emotion,
sentiment, the inexpressible, and gives our best painters a bias.
And the point at which it comes in is just that critical point where
the flowering of art into its perfection commences; we have plenty of
painters who never reach this point at all, but remain always mere
journeymen, in bondage to matter; but those who do reach it, instead
of going on to the true consummation of the masters in painting, are
a little overbalanced by soul and feeling, work too directly for
these, and so do not get out of their art all that may be got out of
it.

The same modification of our Germanism by another force which seems
Celtic, is visible in our religion.  Here, too, we may trace a
gradation between Celt, Englishman, and German, the difference which
distinguishes Englishman from German appearing attributable to a
Celtic element in us.  Germany is the land of exegesis, England is
the land of Puritanism.  The religion of Wales is more emotional and
sentimental than English Puritanism; Romanism has indeed given way to
Calvinism among the Welsh,--the one superstition has supplanted the
other,--but the Celtic sentiment which made the Welsh such devout
Catholics, remains, and gives unction to their Methodism; theirs is
not the controversial, rationalistic, intellectual side of
Protestantism, but the devout, emotional, religious side.  Among the
Germans, Protestantism has been carried on into rationalism and
science.  The English hold a middle place between the Germans and the
Welsh; their religion has the exterior forms and apparatus of a
rationalism, so far their Germanic nature carries them; but long
before they get to science, their feeling, their Celtic element
catches them, and turns their religion all towards piety and unction.
So English Protestantism has the outside appearance of an
intellectual system, and the inside reality of an emotional system:
this gives it its tenacity and force, for what is held with the
ardent attachment of feeling is believed to have at the same time the
scientific proof of reason.  The English Puritan, therefore (and
Puritanism is the characteristic form of English Protestantism),
stands between the German Protestant and the Celtic Methodist; his
real affinity indeed, at present, being rather with his Welsh
kinsman, if kinsman he may be called, than with his German.

Sometimes one is left in doubt from whence the check and limit to
Germanism in us proceeds, whether from a Celtic source or from a
Norman source.  Of the true steady-going German nature the bane is,
as I remarked, flat commonness; there seems no end to its capacity
for platitude; it has neither the quick perception of the Celt to
save it from platitude, nor the strenuousness of the Norman; it is
only raised gradually out of it by science, but it jogs through
almost interminable platitudes first.  The English nature is not
raised to science, but something in us, whether Celtic or Norman,
seems to set a bound to our advance in platitude, to make us either
shy of platitude, or impatient of it.  I open an English reading-book
for children, and I find these two characteristic stories in it, one
of them of English growth, the other of German.  Take the English
story first:-

'A little boy accompanied his elder sister while she busied herself
with the labours of the farm, asking questions at every step, and
learning the lessons of life without being aware of it.

'"Why, dear Jane," he said, "do you scatter good grain on the ground;
would it not be better to make good bread of it than to throw it to
the greedy chickens?"

'"In time," replied Jane, "the chickens will grow big, and each of
them will fetch money at the market.  One must think on the end to be
attained without counting trouble, and learn to wait."

'Perceiving a colt, which looked eagerly at him, the little boy cried
out:  "Jane, why is the colt not in the fields with the labourers
helping to draw the carts?"

'"The colt is young," replied Jane, "and he must lie idle till he
gets the necessary strength; one must not sacrifice the future to the
present."'

The reader will say that is most mean and trivial stuff, the vulgar
English nature in full force; just such food as the Philistine would
naturally provide for his young.  He will say he can see the boy fed
upon it growing up to be like his father, to be all for business, to
despise culture, to go through his dull days, and to die without
having ever lived.  That may be so; but now take the German story
(one of Krummacher's), and see the difference:-

'There lived at the court of King Herod a rich man who was the king's
chamberlain.  He clothed himself in purple and fine linen, and fared
like the king himself.

'Once a friend of his youth, whom he had not seen for many years,
came from a distant land to pay him a visit.  Then the chamberlain
invited all his friends and made a feast in honour of the stranger.

'The tables were covered with choice food placed on dishes of gold
and silver, and the finest wines of all kinds.  The rich man sat at
the head of the table, glad to do the honours to his friend who was
seated at his right hand.  So they ate and drank, and were merry.

'Then the stranger said to the chamberlain of King Herod:  "Riches
and splendour like thine are nowhere to be found in my country."  And
he praised his greatness, and called him happy above all men on
earth.

'Well, the rich man took an apple from a golden vessel.  The apple
was large, and red, and pleasant to the eye.  Then said be:  "Behold,
this apple hath rested on gold, and its form is very beautiful."  And
he presented it to the stranger, the friend of his youth.  The
stranger cut the apple in two; and behold, in the middle of it there
was a worm!

'Then the stranger looked at the chamberlain; and the chamberlain
bent his eyes on the ground and sighed.'

There it ends.  Now I say, one sees there an abyss of platitude open,
and the German nature swimming calmly about in it, which seems in
some way or other to have its entry screened off for the English
nature.  The English story leads with a direct issue into practical
life:  a narrow and dry practical life, certainly, but yet enough to
supply a plain motive for the story; the German story leads simply
nowhere except into bathos.  Shall we say that the Norman talent for
affairs saves us here, or the Celtic perceptive instinct? one of them
it must be, surely.  The Norman turn seems most germane to the matter
here immediately in hand; on the other hand, the Celtic turn, or some
degree of it, some degree of its quick perceptive instinct, seems
necessary to account for the full difference between the German
nature and ours.  Even in Germans of genius or talent the want of
quick light tact, of instinctive perception of the impropriety or
impossibility of certain things, is singularly remarkable.  Herr
Gervinus's prodigious discovery about Handel being an Englishman and
Shakspeare a German, the incredible mare's-nest Goethe finds in
looking for the origin of Byron's Manfred,--these are things from
which no deliberate care or reflection can save a man; only an
instinct can save him from them, an instinct that they are absurd;
who can imagine Charles Lamb making Herr Gervinus's blunder, or
Shakspeare making Goethe's? but from the sheer German nature this
intuitive tact seems something so alien, that even genius fails to
give it.  And yet just what constitutes special power and genius in a
man seems often to be his blending with the basis of his national
temperament, some additional gift or grace not proper to that
temperament; Shakspeare's greatness is thus in his blending an
openness and flexibility of spirit, not English, with the English
basis; Addison's, in his blending a moderation and delicacy, not
English, with the English basis; Burke's in his blending a largeness
of view and richness of thought, not English, with the English basis.
In Germany itself, in the same way, the greatness of their great
Frederic lies in his blending a rapidity and clearness, not German,
with the German basis; the greatness of Goethe in his blending a love
of form, nobility, and dignity,--the grand style,--with the German
basis.  But the quick, sure, instinctive perception of the
incongruous and absurd not even genius seems to give in Germany; at
least, I can think of only one German of genius, Lessing (for Heine
was a Jew, and the Jewish temperament is quite another thing from the
German), who shows it in an eminent degree.

If we attend closely to the terms by which foreigners seek to hit off
the impression which we and the Germans make upon them, we shall
detect in these terms a difference which makes, I think, in favour of
the notion I am propounding.  Nations in hitting off one another's
characters are apt, we all know, to seize the unflattering side
rather than the flattering; the mass of mankind always do this, and
indeed they really see what is novel, and not their own, in a
disfiguring light.  Thus we ourselves, for instance, popularly say
'the phlegmatic Dutchman' rather than 'the sensible Dutchman,' or
'the grimacing Frenchman' rather than 'the polite Frenchman.'
Therefore neither we nor the Germans should exactly accept the
description strangers give of us, but it is enough for my purpose
that strangers, in characterising us with a certain shade of
difference, do at any rate make it clear that there appears this
shade of difference, though the character itself, which they give us
both, may be a caricature rather than a faithful picture of us.  Now
it is to be noticed that those sharp observers, the French,--who have
a double turn for sharp observation, for they have both the quick
perception of the Celt and the Latin's gift for coming plump upon the
fact,--it is to be noticed, I say, that the French put a curious
distinction in their popular, depreciating, we will hope inadequate,
way of hitting off us and the Germans.  While they talk of the
'betise allemande,' they talk of the 'gaucherie anglaise;' while they
talk of the 'Allemand balourd,' they talk of the 'Anglais empetre;'
while they call the German 'niais,' they call the Englishman
'melancolique.'  The difference between the epithets balourd and
empetre exactly gives the difference in character I wish to seize;
balourd means heavy and dull, empetre means hampered and embarrassed.
This points to a certain mixture and strife of elements in the
Englishman; to the clashing of a Celtic quickness of perception with
a Germanic instinct for going steadily along close to the ground.
The Celt, as we have seen, has not at all, in spite of his quick
perception, the Latin talent for dealing with the fact, dexterously
managing it and making himself master of it; Latin or Latinised
people have felt contempt for him on this account, have treated him
as a poor creature, just as the German, who arrives at fact in a
different way from the Latins, but who arrives at it, has treated
him.  The couplet of Chrestien of Troyes about the Welsh:-


. . . Gallois sont tous, par nature,
Plus fous que betes en pasture -


is well known, and expresses the genuine verdict of the Latin mind on
the Celts.  But the perceptive instinct of the Celt feels and
anticipates, though he has that in him which cuts him off from
command of the world of fact; he sees what is wanting to him well
enough; his mere eye is not less sharp, nay, it is sharper, than the
Latin's.  He is a quick genius, checkmated for want of strenuousness
or else patience.  The German has not the Latin's sharp precise
glance on the world of fact, and dexterous behaviour in it; he
fumbles with it much and long, but his honesty and patience give him
the rule of it in the long run,--a surer rule, some of us think, than
the Latin gets; still, his behaviour in it is not quick and
dexterous.  The Englishman, in so far as he is German,--and he is
mainly German,--proceeds in the steady-going German fashion; if he
were all German he would proceed thus for ever without self-
consciousness or embarrassment; but, in so far as he is Celtic, he
has snatches of quick instinct which often make him feel he is
fumbling, show him visions of an easier, more dexterous behaviour,
disconcert him and fill him with misgiving.  No people, therefore,
are so shy, so self-conscious, so embarrassed as the English, because
two natures are mixed in them, and natures which pull them such
different ways.  The Germanic part, indeed, triumphs in us, we are a
Germanic people; but not so wholly as to exclude hauntings of
Celtism, which clash with our Germanism, producing, as I believe, our
HUMOUR, neither German nor Celtic, and so affect us that we strike
people as odd and singular, not to be referred to any known type, and
like nothing but ourselves.  'Nearly every Englishman,' says an
excellent and by no means unfriendly observer, George Sand, 'nearly
every Englishman, however good-looking he may be, has always
something singular about him which easily comes to seem comic;--a
sort of typical awkwardness (gaucherie typique) in his looks or
appearance, which hardly ever wears out.'  I say this strangeness is
accounted for by the English nature being mixed as we have seen,
while the Latin nature is all of a piece, and so is the German
nature, and the Celtic nature.

It is impossible to go very fast when the matter with which one has
to deal, besides being new and little explored, is also by its nature
so subtle, eluding one's grasp unless one handles it with all
possible delicacy and care.  It is in our poetry that the Celtic part
in us has left its trace clearest, and in our poetry I must follow it
before I have done.


VI.


If I were asked where English poetry got these three things, its turn
for style, its turn for melancholy, and its turn for natural magic,
for catching and rendering the charm of nature in a wonderfully near
and vivid way,--I should answer, with some doubt, that it got much of
its turn for style from a Celtic source; with less doubt, that it got
much of its melancholy from a Celtic source; with no doubt at all,
that from a Celtic source it got nearly all its natural magic.

Any German with penetration and tact in matters of literary criticism
will own that the principal deficiency of German poetry is in style;
that for style, in the highest sense, it shows but little feeling.
Take the eminent masters of style, the poets who best give the idea
of what the peculiar power which lies in style is, Pindar, Virgil,
Dante, Milton.  An example of the peculiar effect which these poets
produce, you can hardly give from German poetry.  Examples enough you
can give from German poetry of the effect produced by genius,
thought, and feeling expressing themselves in clear language, simple
language, passionate language, eloquent language, with harmony and
melody; but not of the peculiar effect exercised by eminent power of
style.  Every reader of Dante can at once call to mind what the
peculiar effect I mean is; I spoke of it in my lectures on
translating Homer, and there I took an example of it from Dante, who
perhaps manifests it more eminently than any other poet.  But from
Milton, too, one may take examples of it abundantly; compare this
from Milton:-


. . . nor sometimes forget
Those other two equal with me in fate,
So were I equall'd with them in renown,
Blind Thamyris and blind Maeonides -


with this from Goethe:-


Es bildet ein Talent sich in der Stille,
Sich ein Character in dem Strom der Welt.


Nothing can be better in its way than the style in which Goethe there
presents his thought, but it is the style of prose as much as of
poetry; it is lucid, harmonious, earnest, eloquent, but it has not
received that peculiar kneading, heightening, and re-casting which is
observable in the style of the passage from Milton,--a style which
seems to have for its cause a certain pressure of emotion, and an
ever-surging, yet bridled, excitement in the poet, giving a special
intensity to his way of delivering himself.  In poetical races and
epochs this turn for style is peculiarly observable; and perhaps it
is only on condition of having this somewhat heightened and difficult
manner, so different from the plain manner of prose, that poetry gets
the privilege of being loosed, at its best moments, into that
perfectly simple, limpid style, which is the supreme style of all,
but the simplicity of which is still not the simplicity of prose.
The simplicity of Menander's style is the simplicity of prose, and is
the same kind of simplicity as that which Goethe's style, in the
passage I have quoted, exhibits; but Menander does not belong to a
great poetical moment, he comes too late for it; it is the simple
passages in poets like Pindar or Dante which are perfect, being
masterpieces of POETICAL simplicity.  One may say the same of the
simple passages in Shakspeare; they are perfect, their simplicity
being a POETICAL simplicity.  They are the golden, easeful, crowning
moments of a manner which is always pitched in another key from that
of prose; a manner changed and heightened; the Elizabethan style,
regnant in most of our dramatic poetry to this day, is mainly the
continuation of this manner of Shakspeare's.  It was a manner much
more turbid and strewn with blemishes than the manner of Pindar,
Dante, or Milton; often it was detestable; but it owed its existence
to Shakspeare's instinctive impulse towards STYLE in poetry, to his
native sense of the necessity for it; and without the basis of style
everywhere, faulty though it may in some places be, we should not
have had the beauty of expression, unsurpassable for effectiveness
and charm, which is reached in Shakspeare's best passages.  The turn
for style is perceptible all through English poetry, proving, to my
mind, the genuine poetical gift of the race; this turn imparts to our
poetry a stamp of high distinction, and sometimes it doubles the
force of a poet not by nature of the very highest order, such as
Gray, and raises him to a rank beyond what his natural richness and
power seem to promise.  Goethe, with his fine critical perception,
saw clearly enough both the power of style in itself, and the lack of
style in the literature of his own country; and perhaps if we regard
him solely as a German, not as a European, his great work was that he
laboured all his life to impart style into German literature, and
firmly to establish it there.  Hence the immense importance to him of
the world of classical art, and of the productions of Greek or Latin
genius, where style so eminently manifests its power.  Had he found
in the German genius and literature an element of style existing by
nature and ready to his hand, half his work, one may say, would have
been saved him, and he might have done much more in poetry.  But as
it was, he had to try and create out of his own powers, a style for
German poetry, as well as to provide contents for this style to
carry; and thus his labour as a poet was doubled.

It is to be observed that power of style, in the sense in which I am
here speaking of style, is something quite different from the power
of idiomatic, simple, nervous, racy expression, such as the
expression of healthy, robust natures so often is, such as Luther's
was in a striking degree.  Style, in my sense of the word, is a
peculiar re-casting and heightening, under a certain condition of
spiritual excitement, of what a man has to say, in such a manner as
to add dignity and distinction to it; and dignity and distinction are
not terms which suit many acts or words of Luther.  Deeply touched
with the Gemeinheit which is the bane of his nation, as he is at the
same time a grand example of the honesty which is his nation's
excellence, he can seldom even show himself brave, resolute and
truthful, without showing a strong dash of coarseness and commonness
all the while; the right definition of Luther, as of our own Bunyan,
is that he is a Philistine of genius.  So Luther's sincere idiomatic
German,--such language is this:  'Hilf lieber Gott, wie manchen
Jammer habe ich gesehen, dass der gemeine Mann doch so gar nichts
weiss von der christlichen Lehre!'--no more proves a power of style
in German literature, than Cobbett's sinewy idiomatic English proves
it in English literature.  Power of style, properly so-called, as
manifested in masters of style like Dante or Milton in poetry,
Cicero, Bossuet or Bolingbroke in prose, is something quite
different, and has, as I have said, for its characteristic effect,
this:  to add dignity and distinction.

Style, then, the Germans are singularly without, and it is strange
that the power of style should show itself so strongly as it does in
the Icelandic poetry, if the Scandinavians are such genuine Teutons
as is commonly supposed.  Fauriel used to talk of the Scandinavian
Teutons and the German Teutons, as if they were two divisions of the
same people, and the common notion about them, no doubt, is very much
this.  Since the war in Schleswig-Holstein, however, all one's German
friends are exceedingly anxious to insist on the difference of nature
between themselves and the Scandinavians; when one expresses surprise
that the German sense of nationality should be so deeply affronted by
the rule over Germans, not of Latins or Celts, but of brother Teutons
or next door to it, a German will give you I know not how long a
catalogue of the radical points of unlikeness, in genius and
disposition, between himself and a Dane.  This emboldens me to remark
that there is a fire, a sense of style, a distinction, in Icelandic
poetry, which German poetry has not.  Icelandic poetry, too, shows a
powerful and developed technic; and I wish to throw out, for
examination by those who are competent to sift the matter, the
suggestion that this power of style and development of technic in the
Norse poetry seems to point towards an early Celtic influence or
intermixture.  It is curious that Zeuss, in his grammar, quotes a
text which gives countenance to this notion; as late as the ninth
century, he says, there were Irish Celts in Iceland; and the text he
quotes to show this, is as follows: --'In 870 A.D., when the
Norwegians came to Iceland, there were Christians there, who
departed, and left behind them Irish books, bells, and other things;
from whence it may be inferred that these Christians were Irish.'  I
speak, and ought to speak, with the utmost diffidence on all these
questions of ethnology; but I must say that when I read this text in
Zeuss, I caught eagerly at the clue it seemed to offer; for I had
been hearing the Nibelungen read and commented on in German schools
(German schools have the good habit of reading and commenting on
German poetry, as we read and comment on Homer and Virgil, but do NOT
read and comment on Chaucer and Shakspeare), and it struck me how the
fatal humdrum and want of style of the Germans had marred their way
of telling this magnificent tradition of the Nibelungen, and taken
half its grandeur and power out of it; while in the Icelandic poems
which deal with this tradition, its grandeur and power are much more
fully visible, and everywhere in the poetry of the Edda there is a
force of style and a distinction as unlike as possible to the want of
both in the German Nibelungen. {120}  At the same time the
Scandinavians have a realism, as it is called, in their genius, which
abundantly proves their relationship with the Germans; any one whom
Mr. Dasent's delightful books have made acquainted with the prose
tales of the Norsemen, will be struck with the stamp of a Teutonic
nature in them; but the Norse poetry seems to have something which
from Teutonic sources alone it could not have derived; which the
Germans have not, and which the Celts have.

This something is STYLE, and the Celts certainly have it in a
wonderful measure.  Style is the most striking quality of their
poetry.  Celtic poetry seems to make up to itself for being unable to
master the world and give an adequate interpretation of it, by
throwing all its force into style, by bending language at any rate to
its will, and expressing the ideas it has with unsurpassable
intensity, elevation, and effect.  It has all through it a sort of
intoxication of style,--a Pindarism, to use a word formed from the
name of the poet, on whom, above all other poets, the power of style
seems to have exercised an inspiring and intoxicating effect; and not
in its great poets only, in Taliesin, or Llywarch Hen, or Ossian,
does the Celtic genius show this Pindarism, but in all its
productions:-


The grave of March is this, and this the grave of Gwythyr;
Here is the grave of Gwgawn Gleddyfreidd;
But unknown is the grave of Arthur.


That comes from the Welsh Memorials of the Graves of the Warriors,
and if we compare it with the familiar memorial inscriptions of an
English churchyard (for we English have so much Germanism in us that
our productions offer abundant examples of German want of style as
well as of its opposite):-


Afflictions sore long time I bore,
Physicians were in vain,
Till God did please Death should me seize
And ease me of my pain -


if, I say, we compare the Welsh memorial lines with the English,
which in their Gemeinheit of style are truly Germanic, we shall get a
clear sense of what that Celtic talent for style I have been speaking
of is.

Or take this epitaph of an Irish Celt, Angus the Culdee, whose
Felire, or festology, I have already mentioned; a festology in which,
at the end of the eighth or beginning of the ninth century, he
collected from 'the countless hosts of the illuminated books of Erin'
(to use his own words) the festivals of the Irish saints, his poem
having a stanza for every day in the year.  The epitaph on Angus, who
died at Cluain Eidhnech, in Queen's County, runs thus:-


Angus in the assembly of Heaven,
Here are his tomb and his bed;
It is from hence he went to death,
In the Friday, to holy Heaven.

It was in Cluain Eidhnech he was rear'd;
It was in Cluain Eidhnech he was buried;
In Cluain Eidhnech, of many crosses,
He first read his psalms.


That is by no eminent hand; and yet a Greek epitaph could not show a
finer perception of what constitutes propriety and felicity of style
in compositions of this nature.  Take the well-known Welsh prophecy
about the fate of the Britons:-


Their Lord they will praise,
Their speech they will keep,
Their land they will lose,
Except wild Wales.


To however late an epoch that prophecy belongs, what a feeling for
style, at any rate, it manifests!  And the same thing may be said of
the famous Welsh triads.  We may put aside all the vexed questions as
to their greater or less antiquity, and still what important witness
they bear to the genius for literary style of the people who produced
them!

Now we English undoubtedly exhibit very often the want of sense for
style of our German kinsmen.  The churchyard lines I just now quoted
afford an instance of it:  but the whole branch of our literature,--
and a very popular branch it is, our hymnology,--to which those lines
are to be referred, is one continued instance of it.  Our German
kinsmen and we are the great people for hymns.  The Germans are very
proud of their hymns, and we are very proud of ours; but it is hard
to say which of the two, the German hymn-book or ours, has least
poetical worth in itself, or does least to prove genuine poetical
power in the people producing it.  I have not a word to say against
Sir Roundell Palmer's choice and arrangement of materials for his
Book of Praise; I am content to put them on a level (and that is
giving them the highest possible rank) with Mr. Palgrave's choice and
arrangement of materials for his Golden Treasury; but yet no sound
critic can doubt that, so far as poetry is concerned, while the
Golden Treasury is a monument of a nation's strength, the Book of
Praise is a monument of a nation's weakness.  Only the German race,
with its want of quick instinctive tact, of delicate, sure
perception, could have invented the hymn as the Germans and we have
it; and our non-German turn for style,--style, of which the very
essence is a certain happy fineness and truth of poetical
perception,--could not but desert us when our German nature carried
us into a kind of composition which can please only when the
perception is somewhat blunt.  Scarcely any one of us ever judges our
hymns fairly, because works of this kind have two sides,--their side
for religion and their side for poetry.  Everything which has helped
a man in his religious life, everything which associates itself in
his mind with the growth of that life, is beautiful and venerable to
him; in this way, productions of little or no poetical value, like
the German hymns and ours, may come to be regarded as very precious.
Their worth in this sense, as means by which we have been edified, I
do not for a moment hold cheap; but there is an edification proper to
all our stages of development, the highest as well as the lowest, and
it is for man to press on towards the highest stages of his
development, with the certainty that for those stages, too, means of
edification will not be found wanting.  Now certainly it is a higher
state of development when our fineness of perception is keen than
when it is blunt.  And if,--whereas the Semitic genius placed its
highest spiritual life in the religious sentiment, and made that the
basis of its poetry,--the Indo-European genius places its highest
spiritual life in the imaginative reason, and makes that the basis of
its poetry, we are none the better for wanting the perception to
discern a natural law, which is, after all, like every natural law,
irresistible; we are none the better for trying to make ourselves
Semitic, when Nature has made us Indo-European, and to shift the
basis of our poetry.  We may mean well; all manner of good may happen
to us on the road we go; but we are not on our real right road, the
road we must in the end follow.

That is why, when our hymns betray a false tendency by losing a power
which accompanies the poetical work of our race on our other more
suitable lines, the indication thus given is of great value and
instructiveness for us.  One of our main gifts for poetry deserts us
in our hymns, and so gives us a hint as to the one true basis for the
spiritual work of an Indo-European people, which the Germans, who
have not this particular gift of ours, do not and cannot get in this
way, though they may get it in others.  It is worth noticing that the
masterpieces of the spiritual work of Indo-Europeans, taking the pure
religious sentiment, and not the imaginative reason, for their basis,
are works like the Imitation, the Dies Irae, the Stabat Mater--works
clothing themselves in the middle-age Latin, the genuine native voice
of no Indo-European nation.  The perfection of their kind, but that
kind not perfectly legitimate, they take a language not perfectly
legitimate; as if to show, that when mankind's Semitic age is once
passed, the age which produced the great incomparable monuments of
the pure religious sentiment, the books of Job and Isaiah, the
Psalms,--works truly to be called inspired, because the same divine
power which worked in those who produced them works no longer,--as if
to show us, that, after this primitive age, we Indo-Europeans must
feel these works without attempting to re-make them; and that our
poetry, if it tries to make itself simply the organ of the religious
sentiment, leaves the true course, and must conceal this by not
speaking a living language.  The moment it speaks a living language,
and still makes itself the organ of the religious sentiment only, as
in the German and English hymns, it betrays weakness;--the weakness
of all false tendency.

But if by attending to the Germanism in us English and to its works,
one has come to doubt whether we, too, are not thorough Germans by
genius and with the German deadness to style, one has only to repeat
to oneself a line of Milton,--a poet intoxicated with the passion for
style as much as Taliesin or Pindar,--to see that we have another
side to our genius beside the German one.  Whence do we get it?  The
Normans may have brought in among us the Latin sense for rhetoric and
style,--for, indeed, this sense goes naturally with a high spirit and
a strenuousness like theirs,--but the sense for style which English
poetry shows is something finer than we could well have got from a
people so positive and so little poetical as the Normans; and it
seems to me we may much more plausibly derive it from a root of the
poetical Celtic nature in us.

Its chord of penetrating passion and melancholy, again, its Titanism
as we see it in Byron,--what other European poetry possesses that
like the English, and where do we get it from?  The Celts, with their
vehement reaction against the despotism of fact, with their sensuous
nature, their manifold striving, their adverse destiny, their immense
calamities, the Celts are the prime authors of this vein of piercing
regret and passion,--of this Titanism in poetry.  A famous book,
Macpherson's Ossian, carried in the last century this vein like a
flood of lava through Europe.  I am not going to criticise
Macpherson's Ossian here.  Make the part of what is forged, modern,
tawdry, spurious, in the book, as large as you please; strip
Scotland, if you like, of every feather of borrowed plumes which on
the strength of Macpherson's Ossian she may have stolen from that
vetus et major Scotia, the true home of the Ossianic poetry, Ireland;
I make no objection.  But there will still be left in the book a
residue with the very soul of the Celtic genius in it, and which has
the proud distinction of having brought this soul of the Celtic
genius into contact with the genius of the nations of modern Europe,
and enriched all our poetry by it.  Woody Morven, and echoing Sora,
and Selma with its silent halls!--we all owe them a debt of
gratitude, and when we are unjust enough to forget it, may the Muse
forget us!  Choose any one of the better passages in Macpherson's
Ossian and you can see even at this time of day what an apparition of
newness and power such a strain must have been to the eighteenth
century:-

'I have seen the walls of Balclutha, but they were desolate.  The fox
looked out from the windows, the rank grass of the wall waved round
her head.  Raise the song of mourning, O bards, over the land of
strangers.  They have but fallen before us, for one day we must fall.
Why dost thou build the hall, son of the winged days?  Thou lookest
from thy towers to-day; yet a few years, and the blast of the desert
comes; it howls in thy empty court, and whistles round thy half-worn
shield.  Let the blast of the desert come! we shall be renowned in
our day.'

All Europe felt the power of that melancholy; but what I wish to
point out is, that no nation of Europe so caught in its poetry the
passionate penetrating accent of the Celtic genius, its strain of
Titanism, as the English.  Goethe, like Napoleon, felt the spell of
Ossian very powerfully, and he quotes a long passage from him in his
Werther.  But what is there Celtic, turbulent, and Titanic about the
German Werther, that amiable, cultivated, and melancholy young man,
having for his sorrow and suicide the perfectly definite motive that
Lotte cannot be his?  Faust, again, has nothing unaccountable,
defiant and Titanic in him; his knowledge does not bring him the
satisfaction he expected from it, and meanwhile he finds himself poor
and growing old, and baulked of the palpable enjoyment of life; and
here is the motive for Faust's discontent.  In the most energetic and
impetuous of Goethe's creations,--his Prometheus,--it is not Celtic
self-will and passion, it is rather the Germanic sense of justice and
reason, which revolts against the despotism of Zeus.  The German
Sehnsucht itself is a wistful, soft, tearful longing, rather than a
struggling, fierce, passionate one.  But the Celtic melancholy is
struggling, fierce, passionate; to catch its note, listen to Llywarch
Hen in old age, addressing his crutch:-


O my crutch! is it not autumn, when the fern is red, the water. flag
yellow?  Have I not hated that which I love?

O my crutch! is it not winter-time now, when men talk together after
that they have drunken?  Is not the side of my bed left desolate?

O my crutch! is it not spring, when the cuckoo passes through the
air, when the foam sparkles on the sea?  The young maidens no longer
love me.

O my crutch! is it not the first day of May?  The furrows, are they
not shining; the young corn, is it not springing?  Ah! the sight of
thy handle makes me wroth.

O my crutch! stand straight, thou wilt support me the better; it is
very long since I was Llywarch.

Behold old age, which makes sport of me, from the hair of my head to
my teeth, to my eyes, which women loved.

The four things I have all my life most hated fall upon me together,-
-coughing and old age, sickness and sorrow.

I am old, I am alone, shapeliness and warmth are gone from me; the
couch of honour shall be no more mine:  I am miserable, I am bent on
my crutch.

How evil was the lot allotted to Llywarch, the night when he was
brought forth! sorrows without end, and no deliverance from his
burden.


There is the Titanism of the Celt, his passionate, turbulent,
indomitable reaction against the despotism of fact; and of whom does
it remind us so much as of Byron?


The fire which on my bosom preys
Is lone as some volcanic isle;
No torch is kindled at its blaze;
   A funeral pile!


Or, again:-


Count o'er the joys thine hours have seen,
Count o'er thy days from anguish free,
And know, whatever thou hast been,
'Tis something better not to be.


One has only to let one's memory begin to fetch passages from Byron
striking the same note as that passage from Llywarch Hen, and she
will not soon stop.  And all Byron's heroes, not so much in collision
with outward things, as breaking on some rock of revolt and misery in
the depths of their own nature; Manfred, self-consumed, fighting
blindly and passionately with I know not what, having nothing of the
consistent development and intelligible motive of Faust,--Manfred,
Lara, Cain, what are they but Titanic?  Where in European poetry are
we to find this Celtic passion of revolt so warm-breathing, puissant,
and sincere; except perhaps in the creation of a yet greater poet
than Byron, but an English poet, too, like Byron,--in the Satan of
Milton?


. . . What though the field be lost?
All is not lost; the unconquerable will,
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield,
And what is else not to be overcome.


There, surely, speaks a genius to whose composition the Celtic fibre
was not wholly a stranger!

And as, after noting the Celtic Pindarism or power of style present
in our poetry, we noted the German flatness coming in in our hymns,
and found here a proof of our compositeness of nature; so, after
noting the Celtic Titanism or power of rebellious passion in our
poetry, we may also note the Germanic patience and reasonableness in
it, and get in this way a second proof how mixed a spirit we have.
After Llywarch Hen's:-


How evil was the lot allotted to Llywarch, the night when he was
brought forth -


after Byron's:-


Count o'er the joys thine hours have seen -


take this of Southey's, in answer to the question whether he would
like to have his youth over again:-


Do I regret the past?
Would I live o'er again
The morning hours of life?
Nay, William, nay, not so!
Praise be to God who made me what I am,
Other I would not be.


There we have the other side of our being; the Germanic goodness,
docility, and fidelity to nature, in place of the Celtic Titanism.

The Celt's quick feeling for what is noble and distinguished gave his
poetry style; his indomitable personality gave it pride and passion;
his sensibility and nervous exaltation gave it a better gift still,
the gift of rendering with wonderful felicity the magical charm of
nature.  The forest solitude, the bubbling spring, the wild flowers,
are everywhere in romance.  They have a mysterious life and grace
there; they are nature's own children, and utter her secret in a way
which makes them something quite different from the woods, waters,
and plants of Greek and Latin poetry.  Now of this delicate magic,
Celtic romance is so pre-eminent a mistress, that it seems impossible
to believe the power did not come into romance from the Celts. {133}
Magic is just the word for it,--the magic of nature; not merely the
beauty of nature,--that the Greeks and Latins had; not merely an
honest smack of the soil, a faithful realism,--that the Germans had;
but the intimate life of nature, her weird power and her fairy charm.
As the Saxon names of places, with the pleasant wholesome smack of
the soil in them,--Weathersfield, Thaxted, Shalford,--are to the
Celtic names of places, with their penetrating, lofty beauty,--
Velindra, Tyntagel, Caernarvon,--so is the homely realism of German
and Norse nature to the fairy-like loveliness of Celtic nature.
Gwydion wants a wife for his pupil:  'Well,' says Math, 'we will
seek, I and thou, by charms and illusions, to form a wife for him out
of flowers.  So they took the blossoms of the oak, and the blossoms
of the broom, and the blossoms of the meadow-sweet, and produced from
them a maiden, the fairest and most graceful that man ever saw.  And
they baptized her, and gave her the name of Flower-Aspect.'  Celtic
romance is full of exquisite touches like that, showing the delicacy
of the Celt's feeling in these matters, and how deeply nature lets
him come into her secrets.  The quick dropping of blood is called
'faster than the fall of the dewdrop from the blade of reed-grass
upon the earth, when the dew of June is at the heaviest.'  And thus
is Olwen described:  'More yellow was her hair than the flower of the
broom, and her skin was whiter than the foam of the wave, and fairer
were her hands and her fingers than the blossoms of the wood-anemony
amidst the spray of the meadow fountains.'  For loveliness it would
be hard to beat that; and for magical clearness and nearness take the
following:-

'And in the evening Peredur entered a valley, and at the head of the
valley he came to a hermit's cell, and the hermit welcomed him
gladly, and there he spent the night.  And in the morning he arose,
and when he went forth, behold, a shower of snow had fallen the night
before, and a hawk had killed a wild-fowl in front of the cell.  And
the noise of the horse scared the hawk away, and a raven alighted
upon the bird.  And Peredur stood and compared the blackness of the
raven, and the whiteness of the snow, and the redness of the blood,
to the hair of the lady whom best he loved, which was blacker than
the raven, and to her skin, which was whiter than the snow, and to
her two cheeks, which were redder than the blood upon the snow
appeared to be.'

And this, which is perhaps less striking, is not less beautiful:-

'And early in the day Geraint and Enid left the wood, and they came
to an open country, with meadows on one hand and mowers mowing the
meadows.  And there was a river before them, and the horses bent down
and drank the water.  And they went up out of the river by a steep
bank, and there they met a slender stripling with a satchel about his
neck; and he had a small blue pitcher in his hand, and a bowl on the
mouth of the pitcher.'

And here the landscape, up to this point so Greek in its clear
beauty, is suddenly magicalised by the romance touch:-

'And they saw a tall tree by the side of the river, one-half of which
was in flames from the root to the top, and the other half was green
and in full leaf.'

Magic is the word to insist upon,--a magically vivid and near
interpretation of nature; since it is this which constitutes the
special charm and power of the effect I am calling attention to, and
it is for this that the Celt's sensibility gives him a peculiar
aptitude.  But the matter needs rather fine handling, and it is easy
to make mistakes here in our criticism.  In the first place, Europe
tends constantly to become more and more one community, and we tend
to become Europeans instead of merely Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans,
Italians; so whatever aptitude or felicity one people imparts into
spiritual work, gets imitated by the others, and thus tends to become
the common property of all.  Therefore anything so beautiful and
attractive as the natural magic I am speaking of, is sure, now-a-
days, if it appears in the productions of the Celts, or of the
English, or of the French, to appear in the productions of the
Germans also, or in the productions of the Italians; but there will
be a stamp of perfectness and inimitableness about it in the
literatures where it is native, which it will not have in the
literatures where it is not native.  Novalis or Ruckert, for
instance, have their eye fixed on nature, and have undoubtedly a
feeling for natural magic; a rough-and-ready critic easily credits
them and the Germans with the Celtic fineness of tact, the Celtic
nearness to nature and her secret; but the question is whether the
strokes in the German's picture of nature {136} have ever the
indefinable delicacy, charm, and perfection of the Celt's touch in
the pieces I just now quoted, or of Shakspeare's touch in his
daffodil, Wordsworth's in his cuckoo, Keats's in his Autumn,
Obermann's in his mountain birch-tree, or his Easter-daisy among the
Swiss farms.  To decide where the gift for natural magic originally
lies, whether it is properly Celtic or Germanic, we must decide this
question.

In the second place, there are many ways of handling nature, and we
are here only concerned with one of them; but a rough-and-ready
critic imagines that it is all the same so long as nature is handled
at all, and fails to draw the needful distinction between modes of
handling her.  But these modes are many; I will mention four of them
now:  there is the conventional way of handling nature, there is the
faithful way of handling nature, there is the Greek way of handling
nature, there is the magical way of handling nature.  In all these
three last the eye is on the object, but with a difference; in the
faithful way of handling nature, the eye is on the object, and that
is all you can say; in the Greek, the eye is on the object, but
lightness and brightness are added; in the magical, the eye is on the
object, but charm and magic are added.  In the conventional way of
handling nature, the eye is not on the object; what that means we all
know, we have only to think of our eighteenth-century poetry:-


As when the moon, refulgent lamp of night -


to call up any number of instances.  Latin poetry supplies plenty of
instances too; if we put this from Propertius's Hylas:-


. . . manus heroum . . .
Mollia composita litora fronde togit -


side by side with the line of Theocritus by which it was suggested:-


[Greek verse] -


we get at the same moment a good specimen both of the conventional
and of the Greek way of handling nature.  But from our own poetry we
may get specimens of the Greek way of handling nature, as well as of
the conventional:  for instance, Keats's:-


What little town by river or seashore,
Or mountain-built with quiet citadel,
Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn?


is Greek, as Greek as a thing from Homer or Theocritus; it is
composed with the eye on the object, a radiancy and light clearness
being added.  German poetry abounds in specimens of the faithful way
of handling nature; an excellent example is to be found in the
stanzas called Zueignung, prefixed to Goethe's poems; the morning
walk, the mist, the dew, the sun, are as faithful as they can be,
they are given with the eye on the object, but there the merit of the
work, as a handling of nature, stops; neither Greek radiance nor
Celtic magic is added; the power of these is not what gives the poem
in question its merit, but a power of quite another kind, a power of
moral and spiritual emotion.  But the power of Greek radiance Goethe
could give to his handling of nature, and nobly too, as any one who
will read his Wanderer,--the poem in which a wanderer falls in with a
peasant woman and her child by their hut, built out of the ruins of a
temple near Cuma,--may see.  Only the power of natural magic Goethe
does not, I think, give; whereas Keats passes at will from the Greek
power to that power which is, as I say, Celtic; from his:-


What little town, by river or seashore -


to his:-


White hawthorn and the pastoral eglantine,
Fast-fading violets cover'd up in leaves -


or his:-


. . . magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in fairy lands forlorn -


in which the very same note is struck as in those extracts which I
quoted from Celtic romance, and struck with authentic and
unmistakeable power.

Shakspeare, in handling nature, touches this Celtic note so
exquisitely, that perhaps one is inclined to be always looking for
the Celtic note in him, and not to recognise his Greek note when it
comes.  But if one attends well to the difference between the two
notes, and bears in mind, to guide one, such things as Virgil's
'moss-grown springs and grass softer than sleep:' -


Muscosi fontes et somno mollior herba -


as his charming flower-gatherer, who -


Pallentes violas et summa papavera carpens
Narcissum et florem jungit bene olentis anethi -


as his quinces and chestnuts:-


. . . cana legam tenera lanugine mala
Castaneasque nuces . . .


then, I think, we shall be disposed to say that in Shakspeare's -


I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine -


it is mainly a Greek note which is struck.  Then, again in his:-


. . . look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold!


we are at the very point of transition from the Greek note to the
Celtic; there is the Greek clearness and brightness, with the Celtic
aerialness and magic coming in.  Then we have the sheer, inimitable
Celtic note in passages like this:-


Met we on hill, in dale, forest or mead,
By paved fountain or by rushy brook,
Or in the beached margent of the sea -


or this, the last I will quote:-


The moon shines bright.  In such a night as this,
When the sweet wind did gently kiss the trees,
And they did make no noise, in such a night
Troilus, methinks, mounted the Trojan walls -

. . . in such a night
Did Thisbe fearfully o'ertrip the dew -

. . . in such a night
Stood Dido, with a willow in her hand,
Upon the wild sea-banks, and waved her love
To come again to Carthage.


And those last lines of all are so drenched and intoxicated with the
fairy-dew of that natural magic which is our theme, that I cannot do
better then end with them.

And now, with the pieces of evidence in our hand, let us go to those
who say it is vain to look for Celtic elements in any Englishman, and
let us ask them, first, if they seize what we mean by the power of
natural magic in Celtic poetry; secondly, if English poetry does not
eminently exhibit this power; and, thirdly, where they suppose
English poetry got it from?


I perceive that I shall be accused of having rather the air, in what
I have said, of denying this and that gift to the Germans, and of
establishing our difference from them a little ungraciously and at
their expense.  The truth is, few people have any real care to
analyse closely in their criticism; they merely employ criticism as a
means for heaping all praise on what they like, and all blame on what
they dislike.  Those of us (and they are many) who owe a great debt
of gratitude to the German spirit and to German literature, do not
like to be told of any powers being lacking there; we are like the
young ladies who think the hero of their novel is only half a hero
unless he has all perfections united in him.  But nature does not
work, either in heroes or races, according to the young ladies'
notion.  We all are what we are, the hero and the great nation are
what they are, by our limitations as well as by our powers, by
lacking something as well as by possessing something.  It is not
always gain to possess this or that gift, or loss to lack this or
that gift.  Our great, our only first-rate body of contemporary
poetry is the German; the grand business of modern poetry,--a moral
interpretation, from an independent point of view, of man and the
world,--it is only German poetry, Goethe's poetry, that has, since
the Greeks, made much way with.  Campbell's power of style, and the
natural magic of Keats and Wordsworth, and Byron's Titanic
personality, may be wanting to this poetry; but see what it has
accomplished without them!  How much more than Campbell with his
power of style, and Keats and Wordsworth with their natural magic,
and Byron with his Titanic personality!  Why, for the immense serious
task it had to perform, the steadiness of German poetry, its going
near the ground, its patient fidelity to nature, its using great
plainness of speech, poetical drawbacks in one point of view, were
safeguards and helps in another.  The plainness and earnestness of
the two lines I have already quoted from Goethe:-


Es bildet ein Talent sich in der Stille,
Sich ein Character in dem Strom der Welt -


compared with the play and power of Shakspeare's style or Dante's,
suggest at once the difference between Goethe's task and theirs, and
the fitness of the faithful laborious German spirit for its own task.
Dante's task was to set forth the lesson of the world from the point
of view of mediaeval Catholicism; the basis of spiritual life was
given, Dante had not to make this anew.  Shakspeare's task was to set
forth the spectacle of the world when man's spirit re-awoke to the
possession of the world at the Renaissance.  The spectacle of human
life, left to bear its own significance and tell its own story, but
shown in all its fulness, variety, and power, is at that moment the
great matter; but, if we are to press deeper, the basis of spiritual
life is still at that time the traditional religion, reformed or
unreformed, of Christendom, and Shakspeare has not to supply a new
basis.  But when Goethe came, Europe had lost her basis of spiritual
life; she had to find it again; Goethe's task was,--the inevitable
task for the modern poet henceforth is,--as it was for the Greek poet
in the days of Pericles, not to preach a sublime sermon on a given
text like Dante, not to exhibit all the kingdoms of human life and
the glory of them like Shakspeare, but to interpret human life
afresh, and to supply a new spiritual basis to it.  This is not only
a work for style, eloquence, charm, poetry; it is a work for science;
and the scientific, serious German spirit, not carried away by this
and that intoxication of ear, and eye, and self-will, has peculiar
aptitudes for it.

We, on the other hand, do not necessarily gain by the commixture of
elements in us; we have seen how the clashing of natures in us
hampers and embarrasses our behaviour; we might very likely be more
attractive, we might very likely be more successful, if we were all
of a piece.  Our want of sureness of taste, our eccentricity, come in
great measure, no doubt, from our not being all of a piece, from our
having no fixed, fatal, spiritual centre of gravity.  The Rue de
Rivoli is one thing, and Nuremberg is another, and Stonehenge is
another; but we have a turn for all three, and lump them all up
together.  Mr. Tom Taylor's translations from Breton poetry offer a
good example of this mixing; he has a genuine feeling for these
Celtic matters, and often, as in the Evil Tribute of Nomenoe, or in
Lord Nann and the Fairy, he is, both in movement and expression, true
and appropriate; but he has a sort of Teutonism and Latinism in him
too, and so he cannot forbear mixing with his Celtic strain such
disparates as:-


'Twas mirk, mirk night, and the water bright
Troubled and drumlie flowed -


which is evidently Lowland-Scotchy; or as:-


Foregad, but thou'rt an artful hand!


which is English-stagey; or as:-


To Gradlon's daughter, bright of blee,
Her lover he whispered tenderly -
BETHINK THEE, SWEET DAHUT! THE KEY!


which is Anacreontic in the manner of Tom Moore.  Yes, it is not a
sheer advantage to have several strings to one's bow! if we had been
all German, we might have had the science of Germany; if we had been
all Celtic, we might have been popular and agreeable; if we had been
all Latinised, we might have governed Ireland as the French govern
Alsace, without getting ourselves detested.  But now we have
Germanism enough to make us Philistines, and Normanism enough to make
us imperious, and Celtism enough to make us self-conscious and
awkward; but German fidelity to Nature, and Latin precision and clear
reason, and Celtic quick-wittedness and spirituality, we fall short
of.  Nay, perhaps, if we are doomed to perish (Heaven avert the
omen!), we shall perish by our Celtism, by our self-will and want of
patience with ideas, our inability to see the way the world is going;
and yet those very Celts, by our affinity with whom we are perishing,
will be hating and upbraiding us all the time.

This is a somewhat unpleasant view to take of the matter; but if it
is true, its being unpleasant does not make it any less true, and we
are always the better for seeing the truth.  What we here see is not
the whole truth, however.  So long as this mixed constitution of our
nature possesses us, we pay it tribute and serve it; so soon as we
possess it, it pays us tribute and serves us.  So long as we are
blindly and ignorantly rolled about by the forces of our nature,
their contradiction baffles us and lames us; so soon as we have
clearly discerned what they are, and begun to apply to them a law of
measure, control, and guidance, they may be made to work for our good
and to carry us forward.  Then we may have the good of our German
part, the good of our Latin part, the good of our Celtic part; and
instead of one part clashing with the other, we may bring it in to
continue and perfect the other, when the other has given us all the
good it can yield, and by being pressed further, could only give us
its faulty excess.  Then we may use the German faithfulness to Nature
to give us science, and to free us from insolence and self-will; we
may use the Celtic quickness of perception to give us delicacy, and
to free us from hardness and Philistinism; we may use the Latin
decisiveness to give us strenuous clear method, and to free us from
fumbling and idling.  Already, in their untrained state, these
elements give signs, in our life and literature, of their being
present in us, and a kind of prophecy of what they could do for us if
they were properly observed, trained, and applied.  But this they
have not yet been; we ride one force of our nature to death; we will
be nothing but Anglo-Saxons in the Old World or in the New; and when
our race has built Bold Street, Liverpool, and pronounced it very
good, it hurries across the Atlantic, and builds Nashville, and
Jacksonville, and Milledgeville, and thinks it is fulfilling the
designs of Providence in an incomparable manner.  But true Anglo-
Saxons, simply and sincerely rooted in the German nature, we are not
and cannot be; all we have accomplished by our onesidedness is to
blur and confuse the natural basis in ourselves altogether, and to
become something eccentric, unattractive, and inharmonious.

A man of exquisite intelligence and charming character, the late Mr.
Cobden, used to fancy that a better acquaintance with the United
States was the grand panacea for us; and once in a speech he bewailed
the inattention of our seats of learning to them, and seemed to think
that if our ingenuous youth at Oxford were taught a little less about
Ilissus, and a little more about Chicago, we should all be the better
for it.  Chicago has its claims upon us, no doubt; but it is evident
that from the point of view to which I have been leading, a
stimulation of our Anglo-Saxonism, such as is intended by Mr.
Cobden's proposal, does not appear the thing most needful for us;
seeing our American brothers themselves have rather, like us, to try
and moderate the flame of Anglo-Saxonism in their own breasts, than
to ask us to clap the bellows to it in ours.  So I am inclined to
beseech Oxford, instead of expiating her over-addiction to the
Ilissus by lectures on Chicago, to give us an expounder for a still
more remote-looking object than the Ilissus,--the Celtic languages
and literature.  And yet why should I call it remote? if, as I have
been labouring to show, in the spiritual frame of us English
ourselves, a Celtic fibre, little as we may have ever thought of
tracing it, lives and works.  ALIENS IN SPEECH, IN RELIGION, IN
BLOOD! said Lord Lyndhurst; the philologists have set him right about
the speech, the physiologists about the blood; and perhaps, taking
religion in the wide but true sense of our whole spiritual activity,
those who have followed what I have been saying here will think that
the Celt is not so wholly alien to us in religion.  But, at any rate,
let us consider that of the shrunken and diminished remains of this
great primitive race, all, with one insignificant exception, belongs
to the English empire; only Brittany is not ours; we have Ireland,
the Scotch Highlands, Wales, the Isle of Man, Cornwall.  They are a
part of ourselves, we are deeply interested in knowing them, they are
deeply interested in being known by us; and yet in the great and rich
universities of this great and rich country there is no chair of
Celtic, there is no study or teaching of Celtic matters; those who
want them must go abroad for them.  It is neither right nor
reasonable that this should be so.  Ireland has had in the last half
century a band of Celtic students,--a band with which death, alas!
has of late been busy,--from whence Oxford or Cambridge might have
taken an admirable professor of Celtic; and with the authority of a
university chair, a great Celtic scholar, on a subject little known,
and where all would have readily deferred to him, might have by this
time doubled our facilities for knowing the Celt, by procuring for
this country Celtic documents which were inaccessible here, and
preventing the dispersion of others which were accessible.  It is not
much that the English Government does for science or literature; but
if Eugene O'Curry, from a chair of Celtic at Oxford, had appealed to
the Government to get him copies or the originals of the Celtic
treasures in the Burgundian Library at Brussels, or in the library of
St. Isidore's College at Rome, even the English Government could not
well have refused him.  The invaluable Irish manuscripts in the Stowe
Library the late Sir Robert Peel proposed, in 1849, to buy for the
British Museum; Lord Macaulay, one of the trustees of the Museum,
declared, with the confident shallowness which makes him so admired
by public speakers and leading-article writers, and so intolerable to
all searchers for truth, that he saw nothing in the whole collection
worth purchasing for the Museum, except the correspondence of Lord
Melville on the American war.  That is to say, this correspondence of
Lord Melville's was the only thing in the collection about which Lord
Macaulay himself knew or cared.  Perhaps an Oxford or Cambridge
professor of Celtic might have been allowed to make his voice heard,
on a matter of Celtic manuscripts, even against Lord Macaulay.  The
manuscripts were bought by Lord Ashburnham, who keeps them shut up,
and will let no one consult them (at least up to the date when
O'Curry published his Lectures he did so), 'for fear an actual
acquaintance with their contents should decrease their value as
matter of curiosity at some future transfer or sale.'  Who knows?
Perhaps an Oxford professor of Celtic might have touched the flinty
heart of Lord Ashburnham.

At this moment, when the narrow Philistinism which has long had
things its own way in England, is showing its natural fruits, and we
are beginning to feel ashamed, and uneasy, and alarmed at it; now,
when we are becoming aware that we have sacrificed to Philistinism
culture, and insight, and dignity, and acceptance, and weight among
the nations, and hold on events that deeply concern us, and control
of the future, and yet that it cannot even give us the fool's
paradise it promised us, but is apt to break down, and to leave us
with Mr. Roebuck's and Mr. Lowe's laudations of our matchless
happiness, and the largest circulation in the world assured to the
Daily Telegraph, for our only comfort; at such a moment it needs some
moderation not to be attacking Philistinism by storm, but to mine it
through such gradual means as the slow approaches of culture, and the
introduction of chairs of Celtic.  But the hard unintelligence, which
is just now our bane, cannot be conquered by storm; it must be
suppled and reduced by culture, by a growth in the variety, fulness,
and sweetness of our spiritual life; and this end can only be reached
by studying things that are outside of ourselves, and by studying
them disinterestedly.  Let us reunite ourselves with our better mind
and with the world through science; and let it be one of our angelic
revenges on the Philistines, who among their other sins are the
guilty authors of Fenianism, to found at Oxford a chair of Celtic,
and to send, through the gentle ministration of science, a message of
peace to Ireland.



Footnotes:-

{0a}  See p. 28 of the following essay.  [Starts with "It is not
difficult for the other side . . . "--DP.]

{0b}  See particularly pp. 9, 10, 11, of the following essay.

{4}  Lord Strangford remarks on this passage:- 'Your Gomer and your
Cimmerians are of course only lay figures, to be accepted in the
rhetorical and subjective sense.  As such I accept them, but I enter
a protest against the "genuine tongue of his ancestors."  Modern
Celtic tongues are to the old Celtic heard by Julius Caesar, broadly
speaking, what the modern Romanic tongues are to Caesar's own Latin.
Welsh, in fact, is a detritus; a language in the category of modern
French, or, to speak less roughly and with a closer approximation, of
old Provencal, not in the category of Lithuanian, much less in the
category of Basque.  By true inductive research, based on an accurate
comparison of such forms of Celtic speech, oral and recorded, as we
now possess, modern philology has, in so far as was possible,
succeeded in restoring certain forms of the parent speech, and in so
doing has achieved not the least striking of its many triumphs; for
those very forms thus restored have since been verified past all
cavil by their actual discovery in the old Gaulish inscriptions
recently come to light.  The phonesis of Welsh as it stands is
modern, not primitive its grammar,--the verbs excepted,--is
constructed out of the fragments of its earlier forms, and its
vocabulary is strongly Romanised, two out of the six words here given
being Latin of the Empire.  Rightly understood, this enhances the
value of modern Celtic instead of depreciating it, because it serves
to rectify it.  To me it is a wonder that Welsh should have retained
so much of its integrity under the iron pressure of four hundred
years of Roman dominion.  Modern Welsh tenacity and cohesive power
under English pressure is nothing compared with what that must have
been.'

{14}  Here again let me have the pleasure of quoting Lord
Strangford:- 'When the Celtic tongues were first taken in hand at the
dawn of comparative philological inquiry, the tendency was, for all
practical results, to separate them from the Indo-European aggregate,
rather than to unite them with it.  The great gulf once fixed between
them was narrowed on the surface, but it was greatly and indefinitely
deepened.  Their vocabulary and some of their grammar were seen at
once to be perfectly Indo-European, but they had no case-endings to
their nouns, none at all in Welsh, none that could be understood in
Gaelic; their phonesis seemed primeval and inexplicable, and nothing
could be made out of their pronouns which could not be equally made
out of many wholly un-Aryan languages.  They were therefore co-
ordinated, not with each single Aryan tongue, but with the general
complex of Aryan tongues, and were conceived to be anterior to them
and apart from them, as it were the strayed vanguard of European
colonisation or conquest from the East.  The reason of this
misconception was, that their records lay wholly uninvestigated as
far as all historical study of the language was concerned, and that
nobody troubled himself about the relative age and the development of
forms, so that the philologists were fain to take them as they were
put into their hands by uncritical or perverse native commentators
and writers, whose grammars and dictionaries teemed with blunders and
downright forgeries.  One thing, and one thing alone, led to the
truth:  the sheer drudgery of thirteen long years spent by Zeuss in
the patient investigation of the most ancient Celtic records, in
their actual condition, line by line and letter by letter.  Then for
the first time the foundation of Celtic research was laid; but the
great philologist did not live to see the superstructure which never
could have been raised but for him.  Prichard was first to indicate
the right path, and Bopp, in his monograph of 1839, displayed his
incomparable and masterly sagacity as usual, but for want of any
trustworthy record of Celtic words and forms to work upon, the truth
remained concealed or obscured until the publication of the Gramatica
Celtica.  Dr. Arnold, a man of the past generation, who made more use
of the then uncertain and unfixed doctrines of comparative philology
in his historical writings than is done by the present generation in
the fullest noonday light of the Vergleichende Grammatik, was thus
justified in his view by the philology of the period, to which he
merely gave an enlarged historical expression.  The prime fallacy
then as now, however, was that of antedating the distinction between
Gaelic and Cymric Celts.'

{25}  Dr. O'Conor in his Catalogue of the Stowe MSS. (quoted by
O'Curry).

{26}  O'Curry.

{29}  Here, where Saturday should come, something is wanting in the
manuscript.

{66}  See Les Scythes, les Ancetres des Peuples Germaniques et
Slaves, par F. G. Bergmann, professeur a la faculte des Lettres de
Strasbourg:  Colmar, 1858.  But Professor Bergmann's etymologies are
often, says Lord Strangford, 'false lights, held by an uncertain
hand.'  And Lord Strangford continues: --'The Apian land certainly
meant the watery land, Meer-Umschlungon, among the pre-Hellenic
Greeks, just as the same land is called Morea by the modern post-
Hellenic or Romaic Greeks from more, the name for the sea in the
Slavonic vernacular of its inhabitants during the heart of the middle
ages.  But it is only connected by a remote and secondary affinity,
if connected at all, with the avia of Scandinavia, assuming that to
be the true German word for water, which, if it had come down to us
in Gothic, would have been avi, genitive aujos, and not a mere
Latinised termination.  Scythian is surely a negative rather than a
positive term, much like our Indian, or the Turanian of modern
ethnologists, used to comprehend nomads and barbarians of all sorts
and races north and east of the Black and Caspian seas.  It is unsafe
to connect their name with anything as yet; it is quite as likely
that it refers to the bow and arrow as to the shield, and is
connected with our word to shoot, sceotan, skiutan, Lithuanian szau-
ti.  Some of the Scythian peoples may have been Anarian, Allophylic,
Mongolian; some were demonstrably Aryan, and not only that, but
Iranian as well, as is best shown in a memoir read before the Berlin
Academy this last year; the evidence having been first indicated in
the rough by Schaffarik the Slavonic antiquary.  Coins, glosses,
proper names, and inscriptions prove it.  Targitaos (not -tavus) and
the rest is guess-work or wrong.  Herodotus's [Greek] for the goddess
Vesta is not connected with the root div whence Devas, Deus, &c., but
the root tap, in Latin tep (of tepere, tepefacere), Slavonic tepl,
topl (for tep or top), in modern Persian tab.  Thymele refers to the
hearth as the place of smoke ([Greek], thus, fumus), but familia
denotes household from famulus for fagmulus, the root fag being
equated with the Sansk. bhaj, servira.  Lucan's Hesus or Esus may
fairly be compared with the Welsh Hu Gadarn by legitimate process,
but no letter-change can justify his connection with Gaisos, the
spear, not the sword, Virgil's gaesum, A. S. gar, our verb to gore,
retained in its outer form in gar-fish.  For Theuthisks lege
Thiudisks, from thiuda, populus; in old high German Diutisk, Diotisk,
popularis, vulgaris, the country vernacular as distinguished from the
cultivated Latin; hence the word Dutch, Deutsch.  With our ancestors
theod stood for nation generally and getheode for any speech.  Our
diet in the political sense is the same word, but borrowed from our
German cousins, not inherited from our fathers.  The modern Celtic
form is the Irish tuath, in ancient Celtic it must have been teuta,
touta, of which we actually have the adjective toutius in the Gaulish
inscription of Nismes.  In Oscan we have it as turta, tuta, its
adjective being handed down in Livy's meddix tuticus, the mayor or
chief magistrate of the tuta.  In the Umbrian inscriptions it is
tota.  In Lithuanian tauta, the country opposed to the town, and in
old Prussian tauta, the country generally, en Prusiskan tautan, im
Land zu Preussen.'

{68}  Lord Strangford observes here: --'The original forms of Gael
should be mentioned--Gaedil, Goidil:  in modern Gaelic orthography
Gaoidheal where the dh is not realised in pronunciation.  There is
nothing impossible in the connection of the root of this with that of
Scot, IF the s of the latter be merely prosthetic.  But the whole
thing is in nubibus, and given as a guess only.'

{69}  'The name of Erin,' says Lord Strangford, 'is treated at length
in a masterly note by Whitley Stokes in the 1st series of Max
Muller's lectures (4th ed.) p. 255, where its earliest TANGIBLE form
is shown to have been Iverio.  Pictet's connection with Arya is quite
baseless.'

{82}  It is to be remembered that the above was written before the
recent war between Prussia and Austria.

{84}  The etymology is Monsieur Henri Martin's, but Lord Strangford
says--'Whatever gai may be, it is assuredly not Celtic.  Is there any
authority for this word gair, to laugh, or rather "laughter," beyond
O'Reilly?  O'Reilly is no authority at all except in so far as tested
and passed by the new school.  It is hard to give up gavisus.  But
Diez, chief authority in Romanic matters, is content to accept
Muratori's reference to an old High-German gahi, modern jahe, sharp,
quick, sudden, brisk, and so to the sense of lively, animated, high
in spirits.'

{85}  Monsieur Henri Martin, whose chapters on the Celts, in his
Histoire de France, are full of information and interest.

{97}  The above is really a sentence taken from the Cologne Gazette.
Lord Strangford's comment here is as follows: --'Modern Germanism, in
a general estimate of Germanism, should not be taken, absolutely and
necessarily, as the constant, whereof we are the variant.  The Low-
Dutch of Holland, anyhow, are indisputably as genuine Dutch as the
High-Dutch of Germany Proper.  But do they write sentences like this
one--informe, ingens, cui lumen ademptum?  If not, the question must
be asked, not how we have come to deviate, but how the Germans have
come to deviate.  Our modern English prose in plain matters is often
all just the same as the prose of King Alfred and the Chronicle.
Ohthere's North Sea Voyage and Wulfstan's Baltic Voyage is the sort
of thing which is sent in every day, one may say, to the Geographical
or Ethnological Society, in the whole style and turn of phrase and
thought.'

The mass of a stock must supply our data for judging the stock.  But
see, moreover, what I have said at p. 100.

{120}  Lord Strangford's note on this is: --'The Irish monks whose
bells and books were found in Iceland could not have contributed
anything to the old Norse spirit, for they had perished before the
first Norseman had set foot on the island.  The form of the old Norse
poetry known to us as Icelandic, from the accident of its
preservation in that island alone, is surely Pan-Teutonic from old
times; the ar and method of its strictly literary cultivation must
have been much influenced by the contemporary Old-English national
poetry, with which the Norsemen were in constant contact; and its
larger, freer, and wilder spirit must have been owing to their freer
and wilder life, to say nothing of their roused and warring paganism.
They could never have known any Celts save when living in embryo with
other Teutons.'

Very likely Lord Strangford is right, but the proposition with which
he begins is at variance with what the text quoted by Zeuss alleges.

{133}  Rhyme,--the most striking characteristic of our modern poetry
as distinguished from that of the ancients, and a main source, to our
poetry, of its magic and charm, of what we call its romantic
element,--rhyme itself, all the weight of evidence tends to show,
comes into our poetry from the Celts.

{136}  Take the following attempt to render the natural magic
supposed to pervade Tieck's poetry: --'In diesen Dichtungen herrscht
eine geheimnissvolle Innigkeit, ein sonderbares Einverstandniss mit
der Natur, besonders mit der Pflanzen--und Steinreich.  Der Leser
fuhlt sich da wie in einem verzauberten Walde; er hort die
unterirdischen Quellen melodisch rauschen; wildfremde Wunderblumen
schauen ihn an mit ihren bunten schnsuchtigen Augen; unsichtbare
Lippen kussen seine Wangen mit neckender Zartlichkeit; hohe Pilze,
wie goldne Glocken, wachsen klingend empor am Fusse der Baume;' and
so on.  Now that stroke of the hohe Pilze, the great funguses, would
have been impossible to the tact and delicacy of a born lover of
nature like the Celt, and could only have come from a German who has
hineinstudirt himself into natural magic.  It is a crying false note,
which carries us at once out of the world of nature-magic and the
breath of the woods, into the world of theatre-magic and the smell of
gas and orange-peel.




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