Celtic Literature

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

. . . Gallois sont tous, par nature,Plus fous que bêtes en pâsture—

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

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

VI

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

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

. . . nor sometimes forgetThose other two equal with me in fate,So were I equall’d with them in renown,Blind Thamyris and blind Mæonides—

with this from Goethe:—

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

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

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

Style, then, the Germans are singularly without, and it is strange that the power of style should show itself so strongly as it does in the Icelandic poetry, if the Scandinavians are such genuine Teutons as is commonly supposed.  Fauriel used to talk of the Scandinavian Teutons and the German Teutons, as if they were two divisions of the same people, and the common notion about them, no doubt, is very much this.  Since the war in Schleswig-Holstein, however, all one’s German friends are exceedingly anxious to insist on the difference of nature between themselves and the Scandinavians; when one expresses surprise that the German sense of nationality should be so deeply affronted by the rule over Germans, not of Latins or Celts, but of brother Teutons or next door to it, a German will give you I know not how long a catalogue of the radical points of unlikeness, in genius and disposition, between himself and a Dane.  This emboldens me to remark that there is a fire, a sense of style, a distinction, in Icelandic poetry, which German poetry has not.  Icelandic poetry, too, shows a powerful and developed technic; and I wish to throw out, for examination by those who are competent to sift the matter, the suggestion that this power of style and development of technic in the Norse poetry seems to point towards an early Celtic influence or intermixture.  It is curious that Zeuss, in his grammar, quotes a text which gives countenance to this notion; as late as the ninth century, he says, there were Irish Celts in Iceland; and the text he quotes to show this, is as follows:—‘In 870 A.D., when the Norwegians came to Iceland, there were Christians there, who departed, and left behind them Irish books, bells, and other things; from whence it may be inferred that these Christians were Irish.’  I speak, and ought to speak, with the utmost diffidence on all these questions of ethnology; but I must say that when I read this text in Zeuss, I caught eagerly at the clue it seemed to offer; for I had been hearing the Nibelungen read and commented on in German schools (German schools have the good habit of reading and commenting on German poetry, as we read and comment on Homer and Virgil, but do not read and comment on Chaucer and Shakspeare), and it struck me how the fatal humdrum and want of style of the Germans had marred their way of telling this magnificent tradition of the Nibelungen, and taken half its grandeur and power out of it; while in the Icelandic poems which deal with this tradition, its grandeur and power are much more fully visible, and everywhere in the poetry of the Edda there is a force of style and a distinction as unlike as possible to the want of both in the German Nibelungen. 15  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 seizeAnd 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.