OSSIAN.

SOME time ago I spent some weeks at Llandudno, on the Welsh coast. The

best lodging-houses at Llandudno look eastward, towards Liverpool; and

from that Saxon hive swarms are incessantly issuing, crossing the bay,

and taking possession of the beach and the lodging-houses. Guarded by

the Great and Little Orme’s Head, and alive with the Saxon invaders from

Liverpool, the eastern bay is an attractive point of interest, and many

visitors to Llandudno never contemplate anything else. But, putting

aside the charm of the Liverpool steamboats, perhaps the view, on this

side, a little dissatisfies one after a while; the horizon wants mystery,

the sea wants beauty, the coast wants verdure, and has a too bare

austereness and aridity. At last one turns round and looks westward.

Everything is changed. Over the mouth of the Conway and its sands is the

eternal softness and mild light of the west; the low line of the mystic

Anglesey, and the precipitous Penmaenmawr, and the great group of Carnedd

Llewelyn and Carnedd David and their brethren fading away, hill behind

hill, in an aërial haze, make the horizon; between the foot of

Penmaenmawr and the bending coast of Anglesey, the sea, a silver stream,

disappears one knows not whither. On this side, Wales,—Wales, where the

past still lives, where every place has its tradition, every name its

poetry, and where the people, the genuine people, still knows this past,

this tradition, this poetry, and lives with it, and clings to it; while,

alas, the prosperous Saxon on the other side, the invader from Liverpool

and Birkenhead, has long ago forgotten his. And the promontory where

Llandudno stands is the very centre of this tradition; it is Creuddyn,

_the bloody city_, where every stone has its story; there, opposite its

decaying rival, Conway Castle, is Diganwy, not decaying but long since

utterly decayed, some crumbling foundations on a crag top and nothing

more; Diganwy, where Mael-gwyn shut up Elphin, and where Taliesin came to

free him. Below, in a fold of the hill, is Llan-rhos, the church of the

marsh, where the same Mael-gwyn, a British prince of real history, a bold

and licentious chief, the original, it is said, of Arthur’s Lancelot,

shut himself up in the church to avoid the Yellow Plague, and peeped out

through a hole in the door, and saw the monster and died. Behind among

the woods, is Gloddaeth, _the place of feasting_, where the bards were

entertained; and farther away, up the valley of the Conway towards

Llanrwst, is the Lake of Ceirio-nydd and Taliesin’s grave. Or, again,

looking seawards and Anglesey-wards you have Pen-mon, Seiriol’s isle and

priory, where Mael-gwyn lies buried; you have the _Sands of Lamentation_

and Llys Helig, _Heilig’s Mansion_, a mansion under the waves, a

sea-buried palace and realm. _Hac ibat Simois_; _hic est Sigeia tellus_.

As I walked up and down, looking at the waves as they washed this Sigeian

land which has never had its Homer, and listening with curiosity to the

strange, unfamiliar speech of its old possessors’ obscure

descendants,—bathing people, vegetable-sellers, and donkey-boys, who were

all about me, suddenly I heard, through the stream of unknown Welsh,

words, not English, indeed, but still familiar. They came from a French

nursery-maid, with some children. Profoundly ignorant of her

relationship, this Gaulish Celt moved among her British cousins, speaking

her polite neo-Latin tongue, and full of compassionate contempt,

probably, for the Welsh barbarians and their jargon. What a revolution

was here! How had the star of this daughter of Gomer waxed, while the

star of these Cymry, his sons, had waned! What a difference of fortune

in the two, since the days when, speaking the same language, they left

their common dwelling-place in the heart of Asia; since the Cimmerians of

the Euxine came in upon their western kinsmen, the sons of the giant

Galates; since the sisters, Gaul and Britain, cut the mistletoe in their

forests, and saw the coming of Cæsar! _Blanc_, _rouge_, _rocher champ_,

_église_, _seigneur_,—these words, by which the Gallo-Roman Celt now

names white, and red, and rock, and field, and church, and lord, are no

part of the speech of his true ancestors, they are words he has learnt;

but since he learned them they have had a worldwide success, and we all

teach them to our children, and armies speaking them have domineered in

every city of that Germany by which the British Celt was broken, and in

the train of these armies, Saxon auxiliaries, a humbled contingent, have

been fain to follow; the poor Welshman still says, in the genuine tongue

of his ancestors, {4} _gwyn_, _goch_, _craig_, _maes_, _llan_,

_arglwydd_; but his land is a province, and his history petty, and his

Saxon subduers scout his speech as an obstacle to civilisation; and the

echo of all its kindred in other lands is growing every day fainter and

more feeble; gone in Cornwall, going in Brittany and the Scotch

Highlands, going, too, in Ireland; and there, above all, the badge of the

beaten race, the property of the vanquished.

But the Celtic genius was just then preparing, in Llandudno, to have its

hour of revival. Workmen were busy in putting up a large tent-like

wooden building, which attracted the eye of every newcomer, and which my

little boys believed (their wish, no doubt, being father to their

belief,) to be a circus. It turned out, however, to be no circus for

Castor and Pollux, but a temple for Apollo and the Muses. It was the

place where the Eisteddfod, or Bardic Congress of Wales, was about to be

held; a meeting which has for its object (I quote the words of its

promoters) ‘the diffusion of useful knowledge, the eliciting of native

talent, and the cherishing of love of home and honourable fame by the

cultivation of poetry, music, and art.’ My little boys were

disappointed; but I, whose circus days are over, I, who have a

professional interest in poetry, and who, also, hating all one-sidedness

and oppression, wish nothing better than that the Celtic genius should be

able to show itself to the world and to make its voice heard, was

delighted. I took my ticket, and waited impatiently for the day of

opening. The day came, an unfortunate one; storms of wind, clouds of

dust, an angry, dirty sea. The Saxons who arrived by the Liverpool

steamers looked miserable; even the Welsh who arrived by land,—whether

they were discomposed by the bad morning, or by the monstrous and

crushing tax which the London and North-Western Railway Company levies on

all whom it transports across those four miles of marshy peninsula

between Conway and Llandudno,—did not look happy. First we went to the

Gorsedd, or preliminary congress for conferring the degree of bard. The

Gorsedd was held in the open air, at the windy corner of a street, and

the morning was not favourable to open-air solemnities. The Welsh, too,

share, it seems to me, with their Saxon invaders, an inaptitude for show

and spectacle. Show and spectacle are better managed by the Latin race

and those whom it has moulded; the Welsh, like us, are a little awkward

and resourceless in the organisation of a festival. The presiding genius

of the mystic circle, in our hideous nineteenth-century costume, relieved

only by a green scarf, the wind drowning his voice and the dust powdering

his whiskers, looked thoroughly wretched; so did the aspirants for bardic

honours; and I believe, after about an hour of it, we all of us, as we

stood shivering round the sacred stones, began half to wish for the

Druid’s sacrificial knife to end our sufferings. But the Druid’s knife

is gone from his hands; so we sought the shelter of the Eisteddfod

building.

The sight inside was not lively. The president and his supporters

mustered strong on the platform. On the floor the one or two front

benches were pretty well filled, but their occupants were for the most

part Saxons, who came there from curiosity, not from enthusiasm; and all

the middle and back benches, where should have been the true

enthusiasts,—the Welsh people, were nearly empty. The president, I am

sure, showed a national spirit which was admirable. He addressed us

Saxons in our own language, and called us ‘the English branch of the

descendants of the ancient Britons.’ We received the compliment with the

impassive dulness which is the characteristic of our nature; and the

lively Celtic nature, which should have made up for the dulness of ours,

was absent. A lady who sat by me, and who was the wife, I found, of a

distinguished bard on the platform, told me, with emotion in her look and

voice, how dear were these solemnities to the heart of her people, how

deep was the interest which is aroused by them. I believe her, but still

the whole performance, on that particular morning, was incurably

lifeless. The recitation of the prize compositions began: pieces of

verse and prose in the Welsh language, an essay on punctuality being, if

I remember right, one of them; a poem on the march of Havelock, another.

This went on for some time. Then Dr. Vaughan,—the well-known

Nonconformist minister, a Welshman, and a good patriot,—addressed us in

English. His speech was a powerful one, and he succeeded, I confess, in

sending a faint thrill through our front benches; but it was the old

familiar thrill which we have all of us felt a thousand times in Saxon

chapels and meeting-halls, and had nothing bardic about it. I stepped

out, and in the street I came across an acquaintance fresh from London

and the parliamentary session. In a moment the spell of the Celtic

genius was forgotten, the Philistinism of our Saxon nature made itself

felt; and my friend and I walked up and down by the roaring waves,

talking not of ovates and bards, and triads and englyns, but of the

sewage question, and the glories of our local self-government, and the

mysterious perfections of the Metropolitan Board of Works.

I believe it is admitted, even by the admirers of Eisteddfods in general,

that this particular Eisteddfod was not a success. Llandudno, it is

said, was not the right place for it. Held in Conway Castle, as a few

years ago it was, and its spectators,—an enthusiastic multitude,—filling

the grand old ruin, I can imagine it a most impressive and interesting

sight, even to a stranger labouring under the terrible disadvantage of

being ignorant of the Welsh language. But even seen as I saw it at

Llandudno, it had the power to set one thinking. An Eisteddfod is, no

doubt, a kind of Olympic meeting; and that the common people of Wales

should care for such a thing, shows something Greek in them, something

spiritual, something humane, something (I am afraid one must add) which

in the English common people is not to be found. This line of reflection

has been followed by the accomplished Bishop of St. David’s, and by the

_Saturday Review_, it is just, it is fruitful, and those who pursued it

merit our best thanks. But, from peculiar circumstances, the Llandudno

meeting was, as I have said, such as not at all to suggest ideas of

Olympia, and of a multitude touched by the divine flame, and hanging on

the lips of Pindar. It rather suggested the triumph of the prosaic,

practical Saxon, and the approaching extinction of an enthusiasm which he

derides as factitious, a literature which he disdains as trash, a

language which he detests as a nuisance.

I must say I quite share the opinion of my brother Saxons as to the

practical inconvenience of perpetuating the speaking of Welsh. It may

cause a moment’s distress to one’s imagination when one hears that the

last Cornish peasant who spoke the old tongue of Cornwall is dead; but,

no doubt, Cornwall is the better for adopting English, for becoming more

thoroughly one with the rest of the country. The fusion of all the

inhabitants of these islands into one homogeneous, English-speaking

whole, the breaking down of barriers between us, the swallowing up of

separate provincial nationalities, is a consummation to which the natural

course of things irresistibly tends; it is a necessity of what is called

modern civilisation, and modern civilisation is a real, legitimate force;

the change must come, and its accomplishment is a mere affair of time.

The sooner the Welsh language disappears as an instrument of the

practical, political, social life of Wales, the better; the better for

England, the better for Wales itself. Traders and tourists do excellent

service by pushing the English wedge farther and farther into the heart

of the principality; Ministers of Education, by hammering it harder and

harder into the elementary schools. Nor, perhaps, can one have much

sympathy with the literary cultivation of Welsh as an instrument of

living literature; and in this respect Eisteddfods encourage, I think, a

fantastic and mischief-working delusion.

For all serious purposes in modern literature (and trifling purposes in

it who would care to encourage?) the language of a Welshman is and must

be English; if an Eisteddfod author has anything to say about punctuality

or about the march of Havelock, he had much better say it in English; or

rather, perhaps, what he has to say on these subjects may as well be said

in Welsh, but the moment he has anything of real importance to say,

anything the world will the least care to hear, he must speak English.

Dilettanteism might possibly do much harm here, might mislead and waste

and bring to nought a genuine talent. For all modern purposes, I repeat,

let us all as soon as possible be one people; let the Welshman speak

English, and, if he is an author, let him write English.

So far, I go along with the stream of my brother Saxons; but here, I

imagine, I part company with them. They will have nothing to do with the

Welsh language and literature on any terms; they would gladly make a

clean sweep of it from the face of the earth. I, on certain terms, wish

to make a great deal more of it than is made now; and I regard the Welsh

literature,—or rather, dropping the distinction between Welsh and Irish,

Gaels and Cymris, let me say Celtic literature,—as an object of very

great interest. My brother Saxons have, as is well known, a terrible way

with them of wanting to improve everything but themselves off the face of

the earth; I have no such passion for finding nothing but myself

everywhere; I like variety to exist and to show itself to me, and I would

not for the world have the lineaments of the Celtic genius lost. But I

know my brother Saxons, I know their strength, and I know that the Celtic

genius will make nothing of trying to set up barriers against them in the

world of fact and brute force, of trying to hold its own against them as

a political and social counter-power, as the soul of a hostile

nationality. To me there is something mournful (and at this moment, when

one sees what is going on in Ireland, how well may one say so!) in

hearing a Welshman or an Irishman make pretensions,—natural pretensions,

I admit, but how hopelessly vain!—to such a rival self-establishment;

there is something mournful in hearing an Englishman scout them.

Strength! alas, it is not strength, strength in the material world, which

is wanting to us Saxons; we have plenty of strength for swallowing up and

absorbing as much as we choose; there is nothing to hinder us from

effacing the last poor material remains of that Celtic power which once

was everywhere, but has long since, in the race of civilisation, fallen

out of sight. We may threaten them with extinction if we will, and may

almost say in so threatening them, like Cæsar in threatening with death

the tribune Metellus who closed the treasury doors against him: ‘And when

I threaten this, young man, to threaten it is more trouble to me than to

do it.’ It is not in the outward and visible world of material life,

that the Celtic genius of Wales or Ireland can at this day hope to count

for much; it is in the inward world of thought and science. What it

_has_ been, what it _has_ done, let it ask us to attend to that, as a

matter of science and history; not to what it will be or will do, as a

matter of modern politics. It cannot count appreciably now as a material

power; but, perhaps, if it can get itself thoroughly known as an object

of science, it may count for a good deal,—far more than we Saxons, most

of us, imagine,—as a spiritual power.

The bent of our time is towards science, towards knowing things as they

are; so the Celt’s claims towards having his genius and its works fairly

treated, as objects of scientific investigation, the Saxon can hardly

reject, when these claims are urged simply on their own merits, and are

not mixed up with extraneous pretensions which jeopardise them. What the

French call the _science des origines_, the science of origins,—a science

which is at the bottom of all real knowledge of the actual world, and

which is every day growing in interest and importance—is very incomplete

without a thorough critical account of the Celts, and their genius,

language, and literature. This science has still great progress to make,

but its progress, made even within the recollection of those of us who

are in middle life, has already affected our common notions about the

Celtic race; and this change, too, shows how science, the knowing things

as they are, may even have salutary practical consequences. I remember,

when I was young, I was taught to think of Celt as separated by an

impassable gulf from Teuton; {14} my father, in particular, was never

weary of contrasting them; he insisted much oftener on the separation

between us and them than on the separation between us and any other race

in the world; in the same way Lord Lyndhurst, in words long famous,

called the Irish ‘aliens in speech, in religion, in blood.’ This

naturally created a profound sense of estrangement; it doubled the

estrangement which political and religious differences already made

between us and the Irish: it seemed to make this estrangement immense,

incurable, fatal. It begot a strange reluctance, as any one may see by

reading the preface to the great text-book for Welsh poetry, the

_Myvyrian Archæology_, published at the beginning of this century, to

further,—nay, allow,—even among quiet, peaceable people like the Welsh,

the publication of the documents of their ancient literature, the

monuments of the Cymric genius; such was the sense of repulsion, the

sense of incompatibilty, of radical antagonism, making it seem dangerous

to us to let such opposites to ourselves have speech and utterance.

Certainly the Jew,—the Jew of ancient times, at least,—then seemed a

thousand degrees nearer than the Celt to us. Puritanism had so

assimilated Bible ideas and phraseology; names like Ebenezer, and notions

like that of hewing Agag in pieces, came so natural to us, that the sense

of affinity between the Teutonic and the Hebrew nature was quite strong;

a steady, middleclass Anglo-Saxon much more imagined himself Ehud’s

cousin than Ossian’s. But meanwhile, the pregnant and striking ideas of

the ethnologists about the true natural grouping of the human race, the

doctrine of a great Indo-European unity, comprising Hindoos, Persians,

Greeks, Latins, Celts, Teutons, Slavonians, on the one hand, and, on the

other hand, of a Semitic unity and of a Mongolian unity, separated by

profound distinguishing marks from the Indo-European unity and from one

another, was slowly acquiring consistency and popularising itself. So

strong and real could the sense of sympathy or antipathy, grounded upon

real identity or diversity in race, grow in men of culture, that we read

of a genuine Teuton,—Wilhelm von Humboldt—finding, even in the sphere of

religion, that sphere where the might of Semitism has been so

overpowering, the food which most truly suited his spirit in the

productions not of the alien Semitic genius, but of the genius of Greece

or India, the Teutons born kinsfolk of the common Indo-European family.

‘Towards Semitism he felt himself,’ we read, ‘far less drawn;’ he had the

consciousness of a certain antipathy in the depths of his nature to this,

and to its ‘absorbing, tyrannous, terrorist religion,’ as to the opener,

more flexible Indo-European genius, this religion appeared. ‘The mere

workings of the old man in him!’ Semitism will readily reply; and though

one can hardly admit this short and easy method of settling the matter,

it must be owned that Humboldt’s is an extreme case of Indo-Europeanism,

useful as letting us see what may be the power of race and primitive

constitution, but not likely, in the spiritual sphere, to have many

companion cases equalling it. Still, even in this sphere, the tendency

is in Humboldt’s direction; the modern spirit tends more and more to

establish a sense of native diversity between our European bent and the

Semitic and to eliminate, even in our religion, certain elements as

purely and excessively Semitic, and therefore, in right, not combinable

with our European nature, not assimilable by it. This tendency is now

quite visible even among ourselves, and even, as I have said, within the

great sphere of the Semitic genius, the sphere of religion; and for its

justification this tendency appeals to science, the science of origins;

it appeals to this science as teaching us which way our natural

affinities and repulsions lie. It appeals to this science, and in part

it comes from it; it is, in considerable part, an indirect practical

result from it.

In the sphere of politics, too, there has, in the same way, appeared an

indirect practical result from this science; the sense of antipathy to

the Irish people, of radical estrangement from them, has visibly abated

amongst all the better part of us; the remorse for past ill-treatment of

them, the wish to make amends, to do them justice, to fairly unite, if

possible, in one people with them, has visibly increased; hardly a book

on Ireland is now published, hardly a debate on Ireland now passes in

Parliament, without this appearing. Fanciful as the notion may at first

seem, I am inclined to think that the march of science,—science insisting

that there is no such original chasm between the Celt and the Saxon as we

once popularly imagined, that they are not truly, what Lord Lyndhurst

called them, _aliens in blood_ from us, that they are our brothers in the

great Indo-European family,—has had a share, an appreciable share, in

producing this changed state of feeling. No doubt, the release from

alarm and struggle, the sense of firm possession, solid security, and

overwhelming power; no doubt these, allowing and encouraging humane

feelings to spring up in us, have done much; no doubt a state of fear and

danger, Ireland in hostile conflict with us, our union violently

disturbed, might, while it drove back all humane feelings, make also the

old sense of utter estrangement revive. Nevertheless, so long as such a

malignant revolution of events does not actually come about, so long the

new sense of kinship and kindliness lives, works, and gathers strength;

and the longer it so lives and works, the more it makes any such

malignant revolution improbable. And this new, reconciling sense has, I

say, its roots in science.

However, on these indirect benefits of science we must not lay too much

stress. Only this must be allowed; it is clear that there are now in

operation two influences, both favourable to a more attentive and

impartial study of Celtism than it has yet ever received from us. One

is, the strengthening in us of the feeling of Indo-Europeanism; the

other, the strengthening in us of the scientific sense generally. The

first breaks down barriers between us and the Celt, relaxes the

estrangement between us; the second begets the desire to know his case

thoroughly, and to be just to it. This is a very different matter from

the political and social Celtisation of which certain enthusiasts dream;

but it is not to be despised by any one to whom the Celtic genius is

dear; and it is possible, while the other is not.