Celtic Literature

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, Θεός, Dêva, and I know not how much more; and Taviti, the bright and burnt, fire, the place of fire, the hearth, the centre of the family, becomes the family itself, just as our word family, the Latin familia, is from thymelé, the sacred centre of fire.  The hearth comes to mean home.  Then from home it comes to mean the group of homes, the tribe; from the tribe the entire nation; and in this sense of nation or people, the word appears in Gothic, Norse, Celtic, and Persian, as well as in Scythian; the Theuthisks, Deutschen, Tudesques, are the men of one theuth, nation, or people; and of this our name Germans itself is, perhaps, only the Roman translation, meaning the men of one germ or stock.  The Celtic divinity, Teutates, has his name from the Celtic teuta, people; taviti, fire, appearing here in its secondary and derived sense of people, just as it does in its own Scythian language in Targitavus’s second name, Tavit-varus, Teutaros, the protector of the people.  Another Celtic divinity, the Hesus of Lucan, finds his brother in the Gaisos, the sword, symbolising the god of battles of the Teutonic Scythians. 8  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? 9  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. 10  But, at any rate, who that has been brought up to think the Celts utter aliens from us and our culture, can come without a start of sympathy upon such words as heol (sol), or buaist (fuisti)? or upon such a sentence as this, ‘Peris Duw dui funnaun’ (‘God prepared two fountains’)?  Or when Mr. Whitley Stokes, one of the very ablest scholars formed in Zeuss’s school, a born philologist,—he now occupies, alas! a post under the Government of India, instead of a chair of philology at home, and makes one think mournfully of Montesquieu’s saying, that had he been an Englishman he should never have produced his great work, but have caught the contagion of practical life, and devoted himself to what is called ‘rising in the world,’ when Mr. Whitley Stokes, in his edition of Cormac’s Glossary, holds up the Irish word traith, the sea, and makes us remark that, though the names Triton, Amphitrite, and those of corresponding Indian and Zend divinities, point to the meaning sea, yet it is only Irish which actually supplies the vocable, how delightfully that brings Ireland into the Indo-European concert!  What a wholesome buffet it gives to Lord Lyndhurst’s alienation doctrines!

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

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

III

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

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

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

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

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

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

IV

Let me repeat what I have often said of the characteristics which mark the English spirit, the English genius.  This spirit, this genius, judged, to be sure, rather from a friend’s than an enemy’s point of view, yet judged on the whole fairly, is characterised, I have repeatedly said, by energy with honesty.  Take away some of the energy which comes to us, as I believe, in part from Celtic and Roman sources; instead of energy, say rather steadiness; and you have the Germanic genius steadiness with honesty.  It is evident how nearly the two characterisations approach one another; and yet they leave, as we shall see, a great deal of room for difference.  Steadiness with honesty; the danger for a national spirit thus composed is the humdrum, the plain and ugly, the ignoble: in a word, das Gemeine, die Gemeinheit, that curse of Germany, against which Goethe was all his life fighting.  The excellence of a national spirit thus composed is freedom from whim, flightiness, perverseness; patient fidelity to Nature, in a word, science,—leading it at last, though slowly, and not by the most brilliant road, out of the bondage of the humdrum and common, into the better life.  The universal dead-level of plainness and homeliness, the lack of all beauty and distinction in form and feature, the slowness and clumsiness of the language, the eternal beer, sausages, and bad tobacco, the blank commonness everywhere, pressing at last like a weight on the spirits of the traveller in Northern Germany, and making him impatient to be gone, this is the weak side; the industry, the well-doing, the patient steady elaboration of things, the idea of science governing all departments of human activity—this is the strong side; and through this side of her genius, Germany has already obtained excellent results, and is destined, we may depend upon it, however her pedantry, her slowness, her fumbling, her ineffectiveness, her bad government, may at times make us cry out, to an immense development. 11

For dulness, the creeping Saxons,—says an old Irish poem, assigning the characteristics for which different nations are celebrated:—

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

We have seen in what sense, and with what explanation, this characterisation of the German may be allowed to stand; now let us come to the beautiful and amorous Gaedhil.  Or rather, let us find a definition which may suit both branches of the Celtic family, the Cymri as well as the Gael.  It is clear that special circumstances may have developed some one side in the national character of Cymri or Gael, Welshman or Irishman, so that the observer’s notice shall be readily caught by this side, and yet it may be impossible to adopt it as characteristic of the Celtic nature generally.  For instance, in his beautiful essay on the poetry of the Celtic races, M. Renan, with his eyes fixed on the Bretons and the Welsh, is struck with the timidity, the shyness, the delicacy of the Celtic nature, its preference for a retired life, its embarrassment at having to deal with the great world.  He talks of the douce petite race naturellement chrétienne, his race fière et timide, à l’extérieur gauche et embarrassée.  But it is evident that this description, however well it may do for the Cymri, will never do for the Gael, never do for the typical Irishman of Donnybrook fair.  Again, M. Renan’s infinie délicatesse de sentiment qui caractérise la race Celtique, how little that accords with the popular conception of an Irishman who wants to borrow money!  Sentiment is, however, the word which marks where the Celtic races really touch and are one; sentimental, if the Celtic nature is to be characterised by a single term, is the best term to take.  An organisation quick to feel impressions, and feeling them very strongly; a lively personality therefore, keenly sensitive to joy and to sorrow; this is the main point.  If the downs of life too much outnumber the ups, this temperament, just because it is so quickly and nearly conscious of all impressions, may no doubt be seen shy and wounded; it may be seen in wistful regret, it may be seen in passionate, penetrating melancholy; but its essence is to aspire ardently after life, light, and emotion, to be expansive, adventurous, and gay.  Our word gay, it is said, is itself Celtic.  It is not from gaudium, but from the Celtic gair, to laugh; 12 and the impressionable Celt, soon up and soon down, is the more down because it is so his nature to be up to be sociable, hospitable, eloquent, admired, figuring away brilliantly.  He loves bright colours, he easily becomes audacious, overcrowing, full of fanfaronade.  The German, say the physiologists, has the larger volume of intestines (and who that has ever seen a German at a table-d’hôte will not readily believe this?), the Frenchman has the more developed organs of respiration.  That is just the expansive, eager Celtic nature; the head in the air, snuffing and snorting; a proud look and a high stomach, as the Psalmist says, but without any such settled savage temper as the Psalmist seems to impute by those words.  For good and for bad, the Celtic genius is more airy and unsubstantial, goes less near the ground, than the German.  The Celt is often called sensual; but it is not so much the vulgar satisfactions of sense that attract him as emotion and excitement; he is truly, as I began by saying, sentimental.