Celtic Literature

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 nightTroilus, methinks, mounted the Trojan walls—. . . in such a nightDid Thisbe fearfully o’ertrip the dew—. . . in such a nightStood Dido, with a willow in her hand,Upon the wild sea-banks, and waved her loveTo come again to Carthage.

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

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

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

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

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

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

’Twas mirk, mirk night, and the water brightTroubled 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.

1

See p. 28 of the following essay.  [Starts with “It is not difficult for the other side . . . ”—DP.]

2

See particularly pp. 9, 10, 11, of the following essay.

3

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

4

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.’

5

Dr. O’Conor in his Catalogue of the Stowe MSS. (quoted by O’Curry).

6

O’Curry.

7

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

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

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

8

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

9

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.’