To know the Celtic case thoroughly, one must know the Celtic people; and
to know them, one must know that by which a people best express
themselves,—their literature. Few of us have any notion what a mass of
Celtic literature is really yet extant and accessible. One constantly
finds even very accomplished people, who fancy that the remains of Welsh
and Irish literature are as inconsiderable by their volume, as, in their
opinion, they are by their intrinsic merit; that these remains consist of
a few prose stories, in great part borrowed from the literature of
nations more civilised than the Welsh or Irish nation, and of some
unintelligible poetry. As to Welsh literature, they have heard, perhaps,
of the _Black Book of Caermarthen_, or of the _Red Book of Hergest_, and
they imagine that one or two famous manuscript books like these contain
the whole matter. They have no notion that, in real truth, to quote the
words of one who is no friend to the high pretensions of Welsh
literature, but their most formidable impugner, Mr. Nash:—‘The Myvyrian
manuscripts alone, now deposited in the British Museum, amount to 47
volumes of poetry, of various sizes, containing about 4,700 pieces of
poetry, in 16,000 pages, besides about 2,000 englynion or epigrammatic
stanzas. There are also, in the same collection, 53 volumes of prose, in
about 15,300 pages, containing great many curious documents on various
subjects. Besides these, which were purchased of the widow of the
celebrated Owen Jones, the editor of the _Myvyrian Archæology_, there are
a vast number of collections of Welsh manuscripts in London, and in the
libraries of the gentry of the principality.’ The _Myvyrian Archæology_,
here spoken of by Mr. Nash, I have already mentioned; he calls its
editor, Owen Jones, celebrated; he is not so celebrated but that he
claims a word, in passing, from a professor of poetry. He was a
Denbighshire _statesman_, as we say in the north, born before the middle
of last century, in that vale of Myvyr, which has given its name to his
archæology. From his childhood he had that passion for the old treasures
of his Country’s literature, which to this day, as I have said, in the
common people of Wales is so remarkable; these treasures were unprinted,
scattered, difficult of access, jealously guarded. ‘More than once,’
says Edward Lhuyd, who in his _Archæologia Britannica_, brought out by
him in 1707, would gladly have given them to the world, ‘more than once I
had a promise from the owner, and the promise was afterwards retracted at
the instigation of certain persons, pseudo-politicians, as I think,
rather than men of letters.’ So Owen Jones went up, a young man of
nineteen, to London, and got employment in a furrier’s shop in Thames
Street; for forty years, with a single object in view, he worked at his
business; and at the end of that time his object was won. He had risen
in his employment till the business had become his own, and he was now a
man of considerable means; but those means had been sought by him for one
purpose only, the purpose of his life, the dream of his youth,—the giving
permanence and publicity to the treasures of his national literature.
Gradually he got manuscript after manuscript transcribed, and at last, in
1801, he jointly with two friends brought out in three large volumes,
printed in double columns, his _Myvyrian Archæology of Wales_. The book
is full of imperfections, it presented itself to a public which could not
judge of its importance, and it brought upon its author, in his lifetime,
more attack than honour. He died not long afterwards, and now he lies
buried in Allhallows Church, in London, with his tomb turned towards the
east, away from the green vale of Clwyd and the mountains of his native
Wales; but his book is the great repertory of the literature of his
nation, the comparative study of languages and literatures gains every
day more followers, and no one of these followers, at home or abroad,
touches Welsh literature without paying homage to the Denbighshire
peasant’s name; if the bard’s glory and his own are still matter of
moment to him,—_si quid mentem mortalia tangunt_,—he may be satisfied.
Even the printed stock of early Welsh literature is, therefore,
considerable, and the manuscript stock of it is very great indeed. Of
Irish literature, the stock, printed and manuscript, is truly vast; the
work of cataloguing and describing this has been admirably performed by
another remarkable man, who died only the other day, Mr. Eugene O’Curry.
Obscure Scaliger of a despised literature, he deserves some weightier
voice to praise him than the voice of an unlearned bellettristic trifler
like me; he belongs to the race of the giants in literary research and
industry,—a race now almost extinct. Without a literary education, and
impeded too, it appears, by much trouble of mind and infirmity of body,
he has accomplished such a thorough work of classification and
description for the chaotic mass of Irish literature, that the student
has now half his labour saved, and needs only to use his materials as
Eugene O’Curry hands them to him. It was as a professor in the Catholic
University in Dublin that O’Curry gave the lectures in which he has done
the student this service; it is touching to find that these lectures, a
splendid tribute of devotion to the Celtic cause, had no hearer more
attentive, more sympathising, than a man, himself, too, the champion of a
cause more interesting than prosperous,—one of those causes which please
noble spirits, but do not please destiny, which have Cato’s adherence,
but not Heaven’s,—Dr. Newman. Eugene O’Curry, in these lectures of his,
taking as his standard the quarto page of Dr. O’Donovan’s edition of the
_Annals of the Four Masters_ (and this printed monument of one branch of
Irish literature occupies by itself, let me say in passing, seven large
quarto volumes, containing 4,215 pages of closely printed matter), Eugene
O’Curry says, that the great vellum manuscript books belonging to Trinity
College, Dublin, and to the Royal Irish Academy,—books with fascinating
titles, the _Book of the Dun Cow_, the _Book of Leinster_, the _Book of
Ballymote_, the _Speckled Book_, the _Book of Lecain_, the _Yellow Book
of Lecain_,—have, between them, matter enough to fill 11,400 of these
pages; the other vellum manuscripts in the library of Trinity College,
Dublin, have matter enough to fill 8,200 pages more; and the paper
manuscripts of Trinity College, and the Royal Irish Academy together,
would fill, he says, 30,000 such pages more. The ancient laws of
Ireland, the so-called Brehon laws, which a commission is now publishing,
were not as yet completely transcribed when O’Curry wrote; but what had
even then been transcribed was sufficient, he says, to fill nearly 8,000
of Dr. O’Donovan’s pages. Here are, at any rate, materials enough with a
vengeance. These materials fall, of course, into several divisions. The
most literary of these divisions, the _Tales_, consisting of _Historic
Tales_ and _Imaginative Tales_, distributes the contents of its _Historic
Tales_ as follows:—Battles, voyages, sieges, tragedies, cow-spoils,
courtships, adventures, land-expeditions, sea-expeditions, banquets,
elopements, loves, lake-irruptions, colonisations, visions. Of what a
treasure-house of resources for the history of Celtic life and the Celtic
genius does that bare list, even by itself, call up the image! The
_Annals of the Four Masters_ give ‘the years of foundations and
destructions of churches and castles, the obituaries of remarkable
persons, the inaugurations of kings, the battles of chiefs, the contests
of clans, the ages of bards, abbots, bishops, &c.’ {25} Through other
divisions of this mass of materials,—the books of pedigrees and
genealogies, the martyrologies and festologies, such as the _Féliré of
Angus the Culdee_, the topographical tracts, such as the
_Dinnsenchas_,—we touch ‘the most ancient traditions of the Irish,
traditions which were committed to writing at a period when the ancient
customs of the people were unbroken.’ We touch ‘the early history of
Ireland, civil and ecclesiastical.’ We get ‘the origin and history of
the countless monuments of Ireland, of the ruined church and tower, the
sculptured cross, the holy well, and the commemorative name of almost
every townland and parish in the whole island.’ We get, in short, ‘the
most detailed information upon almost every part of ancient Gaelic life,
a vast quantity of valuable details of life and manners.’ {26}
And then, besides, to our knowledge of the Celtic genius, Mr. Norris has
brought us from Cornwall, M. de la Villemarqué from Brittany,
contributions, insignificant indeed in quantity, if one compares them
with the mass of the Irish materials extant, but far from insignificant
in value.
We want to know what all this mass of documents really tells us about the
Celt. But the mode of dealing with these documents, and with the whole
question of Celtic antiquity, has hitherto been most unsatisfactory.
Those who have dealt with them, have gone to work, in general, either as
warm Celt-lovers or as warm Celt-haters, and not as disinterested
students of an important matter of science. One party seems to set out
with the determination to find everything in Celtism and its remains; the
other, with the determination to find nothing in them. A simple seeker
for truth has a hard time between the two. An illustration or so will
make clear what I mean. First let us take the Celt-lovers, who, though
they engage one’s sympathies more than the Celt-haters, yet, inasmuch as
assertion is more dangerous than denial, show their weaknesses in a more
signal way. A very learned man, the Rev. Edward Davies, published in the
early part of this century two important books on Celtic antiquity. The
second of these books, _The Mythology and Rites of the British Druids_,
contains, with much other interesting matter, the charming story of
Taliesin. Bryant’s book on mythology was then in vogue, and Bryant, in
the fantastical manner so common in those days, found in Greek mythology
what he called an arkite idolatry, pointing to Noah’s deluge and the ark.
Davies, wishing to give dignity to his Celtic mythology, determines to
find the arkite idolatry there too, and the style in which he proceeds to
do this affords a good specimen of the extravagance which has caused
Celtic antiquity to be looked upon with so much suspicion. The story of
Taliesin begins thus:—
‘In former times there was a man of noble descent in Penllyn. His name
was Tegid Voel, and his paternal estate was in the middle of the Lake of
Tegid, and his wife was called Ceridwen.’
Nothing could well be simpler; but what Davies finds in this simple
opening of Taliesin’s story is prodigious:—
‘Let us take a brief view of the proprietor of this estate. Tegid
Voel—_bald serenity_—presents itself at once to our fancy. The painter
would find no embarrassment in sketching the portrait of this sedate
venerable personage, whose crown is partly stripped of its hoary honours.
But of all the gods of antiquity, none could with propriety sit for this
picture excepting Saturn, the acknowledged representative of Noah, and
the husband of Rhea, which was but another name for Ceres, the genius of
the ark.’
And Ceres, the genius of the ark, is of course found in Ceridwen, ‘the
British Ceres, the arkite goddess who initiates us into the deepest
mysteries of the arkite superstition.’
Now the story of Taliesin, as it proceeds, exhibits Ceridwen as a
sorceress; and a sorceress, like a goddess, belongs to the world of the
supernatural; but, beyond this, the story itself does not suggest one
particle of relationship between Ceridwen and Ceres. All the rest comes
out of Davies’s fancy, and is established by reasoning of the force of
that about ‘bald serenity.’
It is not difficult for the other side, the Celt-haters, to get a triumph
over such adversaries as these. Perhaps I ought to ask pardon of Mr.
Nash, whose _Taliesin_ it is impossible to read without profit and
instruction, for classing him among the Celt-haters; his determined
scepticism about Welsh antiquity seems to me, however, to betray a
preconceived hostility, a bias taken beforehand, as unmistakable as Mr.
Davies’s prepossessions. But Mr. Nash is often very happy in
demolishing, for really the Celt-lovers seem often to try to lay
themselves open, and to invite demolition. Full of his notions about an
arkite idolatry and a Helio-dæmonic worship, Edward Davies gives this
translation of an old Welsh poem, entitled _The Panegyric of Lludd the
Great_:—
‘A song of dark import was composed by the distinguished Ogdoad, who
assembled on the day of the moon, and went in open procession. On the
day of Mars they allotted wrath to their adversaries; and on the day of
Mercury they enjoyed their full pomp; on the day of Jove they were
delivered from the detested usurpers; on the day of Venus, the day of the
great influx, they swam in the blood of men; {29} on the day of the Sun
there truly assemble five ships and five hundred of those who make
supplication: O Brithi, O Brithoi! O son of the compacted wood, the
shock overtakes me; we all attend on Adonai, on the area of Pwmpai.’
That looks Helio-dæmonic enough, undoubtedly; especially when Davies
prints _O Brithi_, _O Brithoi_! in Hebrew characters, as being ‘vestiges
of sacred hymns in the Phœnician language.’ But then comes Mr. Nash, and
says that the poem is a middle-age composition, with nothing
Helio-dæmonic about it; that it is meant to ridicule the monks; and that
_O Brithi_, _O Brithoi_! is a mere piece of unintelligible jargon in
mockery of the chants used by the monks at prayers; and he gives this
counter-translation of the poem:—
‘They make harsh songs; they note eight numbers. On Monday they will be
prying about. On Tuesday they separate, angry with their adversaries.
On Wednesday they drink, enjoying themselves ostentatiously. On Thursday
they are in the choir; their poverty is disagreeable. Friday is a day of
abundance, the men are swimming in pleasures. On Sunday, certainly, five
legions and five hundreds of them, they pray, they make exclamations: O
Brithi, O Brithoi! Like wood-cuckoos in noise they will be, every one of
the idiots banging on the ground.’
As one reads Mr. Nash’s explanation and translation after Edward
Davies’s, one feels that a flood of the broad daylight of common-sense
has been suddenly shed over the _Panegyric on Lludd the Great_, and one
is very grateful to Mr. Nash.
Or, again, when another Celt-lover, Mr. Herbert, has bewildered us with
his fancies, as uncritical as Edward Davies’s; with his neo-Druidism, his
Mithriac heresy, his Crist-celi, or man-god of the mysteries; and above
all, his ape of the sanctuary, ‘signifying the mercurial principle, that
strange and unexplained disgrace of paganism,’ Mr. Nash comes to our
assistance, and is most refreshingly rational. To confine ourselves to
the ape of the sanctuary only. Mr. Herbert constructs his monster,—to
whom, he says, ‘great sanctity, together with foul crime, deception, and
treachery,’ is ascribed,—out of four lines of old Welsh poetry, of which
he adopts the following translation:—
‘Without the ape, without the stall of the cow, without the mundane
rampart, the world will become desolate, not requiring the cuckoos to
convene the appointed dance over the green.’
One is not very clear what all this means, but it has, at any rate, a
solemn air about it, which prepares one for the development of its
first-named personage, the ape, into the mystical ape of the sanctuary.
The cow, too,—says another famous Celt-lover, Dr. Owen, the learned
author of the Welsh Dictionary,—the cow (_henfon_) is the cow of
transmigration; and this also sounds natural enough. But Mr. Nash, who
has a keen eye for the piecing which frequently happens in these old
fragments, has observed that just here, where the ape of the sanctuary
and the cow of transmigration make their appearance, there seems to come
a cluster of adages, popular sayings; and he at once remembers an adage
preserved with the word _henfon_ in it, where, as he justly says, ‘the
cow of transmigration cannot very well have place.’ This adage, rendered
literally in English, is: ‘Whoso owns the old cow, let him go at her
tail;’ and the meaning of it, as a popular saying, is clear and simple
enough. With this clue, Mr. Nash examines the whole passage, suggests
that _heb eppa_, ‘without the ape,’ with which Mr. Herbert begins, in
truth belongs to something going before and is to be translated somewhat
differently; and, in short, that what we really have here is simply these
three adages one after another: ‘The first share is the full one.
Politeness is natural, says the ape. Without the cow-stall there would
be no dung-heap.’ And one can hardly doubt that Mr. Nash is quite right.
Even friends of the Celt, who are perfectly incapable of extravagances of
this sort, fall too often into a loose mode of criticism concerning him
and the documents of his history, which is unsatisfactory in itself, and
also gives an advantage to his many enemies. One of the best and most
delightful friends he has ever had,—M. de la Villemarqué,—has seen
clearly enough that often the alleged antiquity of his documents cannot
be proved, that it can be even disproved, and that he must rely on other
supports than this to establish what he wants; yet one finds him saying:
‘I open the collection of Welsh bards from the sixth to the tenth
century. Taliesin, one of the oldest of them,’ . . . and so on. But his
adversaries deny that we have really any such thing as a ‘collection of
Welsh bards from the sixth to the tenth century,’ or that a ‘Taliesin,
one of the oldest of them,’ exists to be quoted in defence of any thesis.
Sharon Turner, again, whose _Vindication of the Ancient British Poems_
was prompted, it seems to me, by a critical instinct at bottom sound, is
weak and uncritical in details like this: ‘The strange poem of Taliesin,
called the _Spoils of Annwn_, implies the existence (in the sixth
century, he means) of mythological tales about Arthur; and the frequent
allusion of the old Welsh bards to the persons and incidents which we
find in the _Mabinogion_, are further proofs that there must have been
such stories in circulation amongst the Welsh.’ But the critic has to
show, against his adversaries, that the _Spoils of Annwn_ is a real poem
of the sixth century, with a real sixth-century poet called Taliesin for
its author, before he can use it to prove what Sharon Turner there wishes
to prove; and, in like manner, the high antiquity of persons and
incidents that are found in the manuscripts of the
_Mabinogion_,—manuscripts written, like the famous _Red Book of Hergest_,
in the library of Jesus College at Oxford, in the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries,—is not proved by allusions of the old Welsh bards,
until (which is just the question at issue) the pieces containing these
allusions are proved themselves to possess a very high antiquity. In the
present state of the question as to the early Welsh literature, this sort
of reasoning is inconclusive and bewildering, and merely carries us round
in a circle. Again, it is worse than inconclusive reasoning, it shows so
uncritical a spirit that it begets grave mistrust, when Mr. Williams ab
Ithel, employed by the Master of the Rolls to edit the _Brut y
Tywysogion_, the ‘Chronicle of the Princes,’ says in his introduction, in
many respects so useful and interesting: ‘We may add, on the authority of
a scrupulously faithful antiquary, and one that was deeply versed in the
traditions of his order—the late Iolo Morganwg—that King Arthur in his
Institutes of the Round Table introduced the age of the world for events
which occurred before Christ, and the year of Christ’s nativity for all
subsequent events.’ Now, putting out of the question Iolo Morganwg’s
character as an antiquary, it is obvious that no one, not Grimm himself,
can stand in that way as ‘authority’ for King Arthur’s having thus
regulated chronology by his Institutes of the Round Table, or even for
there ever having been any such institutes at all. And finally, greatly
as I respect and admire Mr. Eugene O’Curry, unquestionable as is the
sagacity, the moderation, which he in general unites with his immense
learning, I must say that he, too, like his brother Celt-lovers,
sometimes lays himself dangerously open. For instance, the Royal Irish
Academy possesses in its Museum a relic of the greatest value, the
_Domhnach Airgid_, a Latin manuscript of the four gospels. The outer box
containing this manuscript is of the fourteenth century, but the
manuscript itself, says O’Curry (and no man is better able to judge) is
certainly of the sixth. This is all very well. ‘But,’ O’Curry then goes
on, ‘I believe no reasonable doubt can exist that the _Domhnach Airgid_
was actually sanctified by the hand of our great Apostle.’ One has a
thrill of excitement at receiving this assurance from such a man as
Eugene O’Curry; one believes that he is really going to make it clear
that St. Patrick did actually sanctify the _Domhnach Airgid_ with his own
hands; and one reads on:—
‘As St. Patrick, says an ancient life of St. Mac Carthainn preserved by
Colgan in his _Acta Sanctorum Hiberniæ_, was on his way from the north,
and coming to the place now called Clogher, he was carried over a stream
by his strong man, Bishop Mac Carthainn, who, while bearing the Saint,
groaned aloud, exclaiming: “Ugh! Ugh!”
‘“Upon my good word,” said the Saint, “it was not usual with you to make
that noise.”
‘“I am now old and infirm,” said Bishop Mac Carthainn, “and all my early
companions in mission-work you have settled down in their respective
churches, while I am still on my travels.”
‘“Found a church then,” said the Saint, “that shall not be too near us”
(that is to his own Church of Armagh) “for familiarity, nor too far from
us for intercourse.”
‘And the Saint then left Bishop Mac Carthainn there, at Clogher, and
bestowed the _Domhnach Airgid_ upon him, which had been given to Patrick
from heaven, when he was on the sea, coming to Erin.’
The legend is full of poetry, full of humour; and one can quite
appreciate, after reading it, the tact which gave St. Patrick such a
prodigious success in organising the primitive church in Ireland; the new
bishop, ‘not too near us for familiarity, nor too far from us for
intercourse,’ is a masterpiece. But how can Eugene O’Curry have imagined
that it takes no more than a legend like that, to prove that the
particular manuscript now in the Museum of the Royal Irish Academy was
once in St. Patrick’s pocket?
I insist upon extravagances like these, not in order to throw ridicule
upon the Celt-lovers,—on the contrary, I feel a great deal of sympathy
with them,—but rather, to make it clear what an immense advantage the
Celt-haters, the negative side, have in the controversy about Celtic
antiquity; how much a clear-headed sceptic, like Mr. Nash, may utterly
demolish, and, in demolishing, give himself the appearance of having won
an entire victory. But an entire victory he has, as I will next proceed
to show, by no means won.