Celtic Literature

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

Angus in the assembly of Heaven,Here are his tomb and his bed;It is from hence he went to death,In the Friday, to holy Heaven.It was in Cluain Eidhnech he was rear’d;It was in Cluain Eidhnech he was buried;In Cluain Eidhnech, of many crosses,He first read his psalms.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

O my crutch! is it not autumn, when the fern is red, the water-flag yellow?  Have I not hated that which I love?O my crutch! is it not winter-time now, when men talk together after that they have drunken?  Is not the side of my bed left desolate?O my crutch! is it not spring, when the cuckoo passes through the air, when the foam sparkles on the sea?  The young maidens no longer love me.O my crutch! is it not the first day of May?  The furrows, are they not shining; the young corn, is it not springing?  Ah! the sight of thy handle makes me wroth.O my crutch! stand straight, thou wilt support me the better; it is very long since I was Llywarch.Behold old age, which makes sport of me, from the hair of my head to my teeth, to my eyes, which women loved.The four things I have all my life most hated fall upon me together,—coughing and old age, sickness and sorrow.I am old, I am alone, shapeliness and warmth are gone from me; the couch of honour shall be no more mine: I am miserable, I am bent on my crutch.How evil was the lot allotted to Llywarch, the night when he was brought forth! sorrows without end, and no deliverance from his burden.

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

The fire which on my bosom preysIs 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 againThe 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. 16  Magic is just the word for it,—the magic of nature; not merely the beauty of nature,—that the Greeks and Latins had; not merely an honest smack of the soil, a faithful realism,—that the Germans had; but the intimate life of nature, her weird power and her fairy charm.  As the Saxon names of places, with the pleasant wholesome smack of the soil in them,—Weathersfield, Thaxted, Shalford,—are to the Celtic names of places, with their penetrating, lofty beauty,—Velindra, Tyntagel, Caernarvon,—so is the homely realism of German and Norse nature to the fairy-like loveliness of Celtic nature.  Gwydion wants a wife for his pupil: ‘Well,’ says Math, ‘we will seek, I and thou, by charms and illusions, to form a wife for him out of flowers.  So they took the blossoms of the oak, and the blossoms of the broom, and the blossoms of the meadow-sweet, and produced from them a maiden, the fairest and most graceful that man ever saw.  And they baptized her, and gave her the name of Flower-Aspect.’  Celtic romance is full of exquisite touches like that, showing the delicacy of the Celt’s feeling in these matters, and how deeply nature lets him come into her secrets.  The quick dropping of blood is called ‘faster than the fall of the dewdrop from the blade of reed-grass upon the earth, when the dew of June is at the heaviest.’  And thus is Olwen described: ‘More yellow was her hair than the flower of the broom, and her skin was whiter than the foam of the wave, and fairer were her hands and her fingers than the blossoms of the wood-anemony amidst the spray of the meadow fountains.’  For loveliness it would be hard to beat that; and for magical clearness and nearness take the following:—

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

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

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

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

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

Magic is the word to insist upon,—a magically vivid and near interpretation of nature; since it is this which constitutes the special charm and power of the effect I am calling attention to, and it is for this that the Celt’s sensibility gives him a peculiar aptitude.  But the matter needs rather fine handling, and it is easy to make mistakes here in our criticism.  In the first place, Europe tends constantly to become more and more one community, and we tend to become Europeans instead of merely Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans, Italians; so whatever aptitude or felicity one people imparts into spiritual work, gets imitated by the others, and thus tends to become the common property of all.  Therefore anything so beautiful and attractive as the natural magic I am speaking of, is sure, now-a-days, if it appears in the productions of the Celts, or of the English, or of the French, to appear in the productions of the Germans also, or in the productions of the Italians; but there will be a stamp of perfectness and inimitableness about it in the literatures where it is native, which it will not have in the literatures where it is not native.  Novalis or Rückert, for instance, have their eye fixed on nature, and have undoubtedly a feeling for natural magic; a rough-and-ready critic easily credits them and the Germans with the Celtic fineness of tact, the Celtic nearness to nature and her secret; but the question is whether the strokes in the German’s picture of nature 17 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:—

λειμὼν yάρ σφιν ἔκειτο μέyας, στιβάδεσσιν ὄνειαρ—

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 foamOf 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 carpensNarcissum et florem jungit bene olentis anethi—

as his quinces and chestnuts:—

. . . cana legam tenera lanugine malaCastaneasque 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 heavenIs thick inlaid with patines of bright gold!

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