Matthew Arnold asks how much of the Celt must one imagine in the ideal
man of genius. I prefer to say, how much of the ancient hunters and
fishers and of the ecstatic dancers among hills and woods must one
imagine in the ideal man of genius. Certainly a thirst for unbounded
emotion and a wild melancholy are troublesome things in the world,
and do not make its life more easy or orderly, but it may be the arts
are founded on the life beyond the world, and that they must cry in
the ears of our penury until the world has been consumed and become a
vision. Certainly, as Samuel Palmer wrote, ‘Excess is the vivifying
spirit of the finest art, and we must always seek to make excess more
abundantly excessive.’ Matthew Arnold has said that if he were asked
‘where English got its turn for melancholy and its turn for natural
magic,’ he ‘would answer with little doubt that it got much of its
melancholy from a Celtic source, with no doubt at all that from a
Celtic source is got nearly all its natural magic.’
I will put this differently and say that literature dwindles to a mere
chronicle of circumstance, or passionless phantasies, and passionless
meditations, unless it is constantly flooded with the passions and
beliefs of ancient times, and that of all the fountains of the passions
and beliefs of ancient times in Europe, the Sclavonic, the Finnish, the
Scandinavian, and the Celtic, the Celtic alone has been for centuries
close to the main river of European literature. It has again and again
brought ‘the vivifying spirit’ ‘of excess’ into the arts of Europe.
Ernest Renan has told how the visions of purgatory seen by pilgrims to
Lough Derg—once visions of the pagan under-world, as the boat made out
of a hollow tree that bore the pilgrim to the holy island were alone
enough to prove—gave European thought new symbols of a more abundant
penitence; and had so great an influence that he has written, ‘It
cannot be doubted for a moment that to the number of poetical themes
Europe owes to the genius of the Celt is to be added the framework of
the divine comedy.’
A little later the legends of Arthur and his table, and of the Holy
Grail, once it seems the cauldron of an Irish god, changed the
literature of Europe, and it maybe changed, as it were, the very roots
of man’s emotions by their influence on the spirit of chivalry and
on the spirit of romance; and later still Shakespeare found his Mab,
and probably his Puck, and one knows not how much else of his faery
kingdom, in Celtic legend; while at the beginning of our own day Sir
Walter Scott gave Highland legends and Highland excitability so great a
mastery over all romance that they seem romance itself.
In our own time Scandinavian tradition, because of the imagination
of Richard Wagner and of William Morris and of the earlier and, as I
think, greater Heinrich Ibsen, has created a new romance, and through
the imagination of Richard Wagner, become all but the most passionate
element in the arts of the modern world. There is indeed but one other
element as passionate, the still unfaded legends of Arthur and of the
Holy Grail; and now a new fountain of legends, and, as I think, a
more abundant fountain than any in Europe, is being opened, the great
fountain of Gaelic legends; the tale of Deirdre, who alone among the
women who have set men mad was at once the white flame and the red
flame, wisdom and loveliness; the tale of the Sons of Tuireann, with
its unintelligible mysteries, an old Grail Quest as I think; the tale
of the four children changed into four swans, and lamenting over many
waters; the tale of the love of Cuchulain for an immortal goddess, and
his coming home to a mortal woman in the end; the tale of his many
battles at the ford with that dear friend he kissed before the battles,
and over whose dead body he wept when he had killed him; the tale of
his death and of the lamentations of Emer; the tale of the flight of
Grainne with Diarmuid, strangest of all tales of the fickleness of
woman, and the tale of the coming of Oisin out of faeryland, and of
his memories and lamentations. ‘The Celtic movement,’ as I understand
it, is principally the opening of this fountain, and none can measure
of how great importance it may be to coming times, for every new
fountain of legends is a new intoxication for the imagination of the
world. It comes at a time when the imagination of the world is as
ready, as it was at the coming of the tales of Arthur and of the Grail,
for a new intoxication. The reaction against the rationalism of the
eighteenth century has mingled with a reaction against the materialism
of the nineteenth century, and the symbolical movement, which has come
to perfection in Germany in Wagner, in England in the Pre-Raphaelites,
and in France in Villiers de L’Isle Adam, and Mallarmé, and
Maeterlinck, and has stirred the imagination of Ibsen and D’Annunzio,
is certainly the only movement that is saying new things. The arts
by brooding upon their own intensity have become religious, and are
seeking, as I think Verhaeren has said, to create a sacred book. They
must, as religious thought has always done, utter themselves through
legends; and the Sclavonic and Finnish legends tell of strange woods
and seas, and the Scandinavian legends are held by a great master, and
tell also of strange woods and seas, and the Welsh legends are held
by almost as many great masters as the Greek legends, while the Irish
legends move among known woods and seas, and have so much of a new
beauty, that they may well give the opening century its most memorable
symbols.
1897.
I could have written this essay with much more precision and have much
better illustrated my meaning if I had waited until Lady Gregory had
finished her book of legends, _Cuchulain of Muirthemne_, a book to set
beside the _Morte d’Arthur_ and the _Mabinogion_.
1902.