I said that a sceptic like Mr. Nash, by demolishing the rubbish of the
Celtic antiquaries, might often give himself the appearance of having won
a complete victory, but that a complete victory he had, in truth, by no
means won. He has cleared much rubbish away, but this is no such very
difficult feat, and requires mainly common-sense; to be sure, Welsh
archæologists are apt to lose their common-sense, but at moments when
they are in possession of it they can do the indispensable, negative part
of criticism, not, indeed, so briskly or cleverly as Mr. Nash, but still
well enough. Edward Davies, for instance, has quite clearly seen that
the alleged remains of old Welsh literature are not to be taken for
genuine just as they stand: ‘Some petty and mendicant minstrel, who only
chaunted it as an old song, has tacked on’ (he says of a poem he is
discussing) ‘these lines, in a style and measure totally different from
the preceding verses: “May the Trinity grant us mercy in the day of
judgment: a liberal donation, good gentlemen!”’ There, fifty years
before Mr. Nash, is a clearance like one of Mr. Nash’s. But the
difficult feat in this matter is the feat of construction; to determine
when one has cleared away all that is to be cleared away, what is the
significance of that which is left; and here, I confess, I think Mr. Nash
and his fellow-sceptics, who say that next to nothing is left, and that
the significance of whatever is left is next to nothing, dissatisfy the
genuine critic even more than Edward Davies and his brother enthusiasts,
who have a sense that something primitive, august, and interesting is
there, though they fail to extract it, dissatisfy him. There is a very
edifying story told by O’Curry of the effect produced on Moore, the poet,
who had undertaken to write the history of Ireland (a task for which he
was quite unfit), by the contemplation of an old Irish manuscript. Moore
had, without knowing anything about them, spoken slightingly of the value
to the historian of Ireland of the materials afforded by such
manuscripts; but, says O’Curry:—
‘In the year 1839, during one of his last visits to the land of his
birth, he, in company with his old and attached friend Dr. Petrie,
favoured me with an unexpected visit at the Royal Irish Academy. I was
at that period employed on the Ordnance Survey of Ireland, and at the
time of his visit happened to have before me on my desk the _Books of
Ballymote and Lecain_, _The Speckled Book_, _The Annals of the Four
Masters_, and many other ancient books, for historical research and
reference. I had never before seen Moore, and after a brief introduction
and explanation of the nature of my occupation by Dr. Petrie, and seeing
the formidable array of so many dark and time-worn volumes by which I was
surrounded, he looked a little disconcerted, but after a while plucked up
courage to open the _Book of Ballymote_ and ask what it was. Dr. Petrie
and myself then entered into a short explanation of the history and
character of the books then present as well as of ancient Gaedhelic
documents in general. Moore listened with great attention, alternately
scanning the books and myself, and then asked me, in a serious tone, if I
understood them, and how I had learned to do so. Having satisfied him
upon these points, he turned to Dr. Petrie and said:—“Petrie, these huge
tomes could not have been written by fools or for any foolish purpose. I
never knew anything about them before, and I had no right to have
undertaken the History of Ireland.”’
And from that day Moore, it is said, lost all heart for going on with his
_History of Ireland_, and it was only the importunity of the publishers
which induced him to bring out the remaining volume.
_Could not have been written by fools or for any foolish purpose_. That
is, I am convinced, a true presentiment to have in one’s mind when one
looks at Irish documents like the Book of Ballymote, or Welsh documents
like the _Red Book of Hergest_. In some respects, at any rate, these
documents are what they claim to be, they hold what they pretend to hold,
they touch that primitive world of which they profess to be the voice.
The true critic is he who can detect this precious and genuine part in
them, and employ it for the elucidation of the Celt’s genius and history,
and for any other fruitful purposes to which it can be applied. Merely
to point out the mixture of what is late and spurious in them, is to
touch but the fringes of the matter. In reliance upon the discovery of
this mixture of what is late and spurious in them, to pooh-pooh them
altogether, to treat them as a heap of rubbish, a mass of middle-age
forgeries, is to fall into the greatest possible error. Granted that all
the manuscripts of Welsh poetry (to take that branch of Celtic literature
which has had, in Mr. Nash, the ablest disparager), granted that all such
manuscripts that we possess are, with the most insignificant exception,
not older than the twelfth century; granted that the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries were a time of great poetical activity in Wales, a
time when the mediæval literature flourished there, as it flourished in
England, France, and other countries; granted that a great deal of what
Welsh enthusiasts have attributed to their great traditional poets of the
sixth century belongs to this later epoch,—what then? Does that get rid
of the great traditional poets,—the Cynveirdd or old bards, Aneurin,
Taliesin, Llywarch Hen, and their compeers,—does that get rid of the
great poetical tradition of the sixth century altogether, does it merge
the whole literary antiquity of Wales in her mediæval literary antiquity,
or, at least, reduce all other than this to insignificance? Mr. Nash
says it does; all his efforts are directed to show how much of the so
called sixth-century pieces may be resolved into mediæval,
twelfth-century work; his grand thesis is that there is nothing primitive
and pre-Christian in the extant Welsh literature, no traces of the
Druidism and Paganism every one associates with Celtic antiquity; all
this, he says, was extinguished by Paulinus in AD. 59, and never
resuscitated. ‘At the time the Mabinogion and the Taliesin ballads were
composed, no tradition or popular recollection of the Druids or the
Druidical mythology existed in Wales. The Welsh bards knew of no older
mystery, nor of any mystic creed, unknown to the rest of the Christian
world.’ And Mr. Nash complains that ‘the old opinion that the Welsh
poems contain notices of Druid or Pagan superstitions of a remote origin’
should still find promulgators; what we find in them is only, he says,
what was circulating in Wales in the twelfth century, and one great
mistake in these investigations has been the supposing that the Welsh of
the twelfth, or even of the sixth century, were wiser as well as more
Pagan than their neighbours.’
Why, what a wonderful thing is this! We have, in the first place, the
most weighty and explicit testimony,—Strabo’s, Cæsar’s, Lucan’s,—that
this race once possessed a special, profound, spiritual discipline, that
they were, to use Mr. Nash’s words, ‘wiser than their neighbours.’
Lucan’s words are singularly clear and strong, and serve well to stand as
a landmark in this controversy, in which one is sometimes embarrassed by
hearing authorities quoted on this side or that, when one does not feel
sure precisely what they say, how much or how little; Lucan, addressing
those hitherto under the pressure of Rome, but now left by the Roman
civil war to their own devices, says:—
‘Ye too, ye bards, who by your praises perpetuate the memory of the
fallen brave, without hindrance poured forth your strains. And ye, ye
Druids, now that the sword was removed, began once more your barbaric
rites and weird solemnities. To you only is given knowledge or ignorance
(whichever it be) of the gods and the powers of heaven; your dwelling is
in the lone heart of the forest. From you we learn, that the bourne of
man’s ghost is not the senseless grave, not the pale realm of the monarch
below; in another world his spirit survives still;—death, if your lore be
true, is but the passage to enduring life.’
There is the testimony of an educated Roman, fifty years after Christ, to
the Celtic race being then ‘wiser than their neighbours;’ testimony all
the more remarkable because civilised nations, though very prone to
ascribe to barbarous people an ideal purity and simplicity of life and
manners, are by no means naturally inclined to ascribe to them high
attainment in intellectual and spiritual things. And now, along with
this testimony of Lucan’s, one has to carry in mind Cæsar’s remark, that
the Druids, partly from a religious scruple, partly from a desire to
discipline the memory of their pupils, committed nothing to writing.
Well, then come the crushing defeat of the Celtic race in Britain and the
Roman conquest; but the Celtic race subsisted here still, and any one can
see that, while the race subsisted, the traditions of a discipline such
as that of which Lucan has drawn the picture were not likely to be so
very speedily ‘extinguished.’ The withdrawal of the Romans, the
recovered independence of the native race here, the Saxon invasion, the
struggle with the Saxons, were just the ground for one of those bursts of
energetic national life and self-consciousness which find a voice in a
burst of poets and poetry. Accordingly, to this time, to the sixth
century, the universal Welsh tradition attaches the great group of
British poets, Taliesin and his fellows. In the twelfth century there
began for Wales, along with another burst of national life, another burst
of poetry; and this burst _literary_ in the stricter sense of the word,—a
burst which left, for the first time, written records. It wrote the
records of its predecessors, as well as of itself, and therefore Mr. Nash
wants to make it the real author of the whole poetry, one may say, of the
sixth century, as well as its own. No doubt one cannot produce the texts
of the poetry of the sixth century; no doubt we have this only as the
twelfth and succeeding centuries wrote it down; no doubt they mixed and
changed it a great deal in writing it down. But, since a continuous
stream of testimony shows the enduring existence and influence among the
kindred Celts of Wales and Brittany, from the sixth century to the
twelfth, of an old national literature, it seems certain that much of
this must be traceable in the documents of the twelfth century, and the
interesting thing is to trace it. It cannot be denied that there is such
a continuous stream of testimony; there is Gildas in the sixth century,
Nennius in the eighth, the laws of Howel in the tenth; in the eleventh,
twenty or thirty years before the new literary epoch began, we hear of
Rhys ap Tudor having ‘brought with him from Brittany the system of the
Round Table, which at home had become quite forgotten, and he restored it
as it is, with regard to minstrels and bards, as it had been at
Caerleon-upon-Usk, under the Emperor Arthur, in the time of the
sovereignty of the race of the Cymry over the island of Britain and its
adjacent islands.’ Mr. Nash’s own comment on this is: ‘We here see the
introduction of the Arthurian romance from Brittany, preceding by nearly
one generation the revival of music and poetry in North Wales;’ and yet
he does not seem to perceive what a testimony is here to the reality,
fulness, and subsistence of that primitive literature about which he is
so sceptical. Then in the twelfth century testimony to this primitive
literature absolutely abounds; one can quote none better than that of
Giraldus de Barri, or Giraldus Cambrensis, as he is usually called.
Giraldus is an excellent authority, who knew well what he was writing
about, and he speaks of the Welsh bards and rhapsodists of his time as
having in their possession ‘ancient and authentic books’ in the Welsh
language. The apparatus of technical terms of poetry, again, and the
elaborate poetical organisation which we find, both in Wales and Ireland,
existing from the very commencement of the mediæval literary period in
each, and to which no other mediæval literature, so far as I know, shows
at its first beginnings anything similar, indicates surely, in these
Celtic peoples, the clear and persistent tradition of an older poetical
period of great development, and almost irresistibly connects itself in
one’s mind with the elaborate Druidic discipline which Cæsar mentions.
But perhaps the best way to get a full sense of the storied antiquity,
forming as it were the background to those mediæval documents which in
Mr. Nash’s eyes pretty much begin and end with themselves, is to take,
almost at random, a passage from such a tale as _Kilhwch and Olwen_, in
the _Mabinogion_,—that charming collection, for which we owe such a debt
of gratitude to Lady Charlotte Guest (to call her still by the name she
bore when she made her happy entry into the world of letters), and which
she so unkindly suffers to remain out of print. Almost every page of
this tale points to traditions and personages of the most remote
antiquity, and is instinct with the very breath of the primitive world.
Search is made for Mabon, the son of Modron, who was taken when three
nights old from between his mother and the wall. The seekers go first to
the Ousel of Cilgwri; the Ousel had lived long enough to peck a smith’s
anvil down to the size of a nut, but he had never heard of Mabon. ‘But
there is a race of animals who were formed before me, and I will be your
guide to them.’ So the Ousel guides them to the Stag of Redynvre. The
Stag has seen an oak sapling, in the wood where he lived, grow up to be
an oak with a hundred branches, and then slowly decay down to a withered
stump, yet he had never heard of Mabon. ‘But I will be your guide to the
place where there is an animal which was formed before I was;’ and he
guides them to the Owl of Cwm Cawlwyd. ‘When first I came hither,’ says
the Owl, ‘the wide valley you see was a wooded glen. And a race of men
came and rooted it up. And there grew a second wood; and this wood is
the third. My wings, are they not withered stumps?’ Yet the Owl, in
spite of his great age, had never heard of Mabon; but he offered to be
guide ‘to where is the oldest animal in the world, and the one that has
travelled most, the Eagle of Gwern Abwy.’ The Eagle was so old, that a
rock, from the top of which he pecked at the stars every evening, was now
not so much as a span high. He knew nothing of Mabon; but there was a
monster Salmon, into whom he once struck his claws in Llyn Llyw, who
might, perhaps, tell them something of him. And at last the Salmon of
Llyn Llyw told them of Mabon. ‘With every tide I go along the river
upwards, until I come near to the walls of Gloucester, and there have I
found such wrong as I never found elsewhere.’ And the Salmon took
Arthur’s messengers on his shoulders up to the wall of the prison in
Gloucester, and they delivered Mabon.
Nothing could better give that sense of primitive and pre-mediæval
antiquity which to the observer with any tact for these things is, I
think, clearly perceptible in these remains, at whatever time they may
have been written; or better serve to check too absolute an acceptance of
Mr. Nash’s doctrine,—in some respects very salutary,—‘that the common
assumption of such remains of the date of the sixth century, has been
made upon very unsatisfactory grounds.’ It is true, it has; it is true,
too, that, as he goes on to say, ‘writers who claim for productions
actually existing only in manuscripts of the twelfth, an origin in the
sixth century, are called upon to demonstrate the links of evidence,
either internal or external, which bridge over this great intervening
period of at least five hundred years.’ Then Mr. Nash continues: ‘This
external evidence is altogether wanting.’ Not altogether, as we have
seen; that assertion is a little too strong. But I am content to let it
pass, because it is true, that without internal evidence in this matter
the external evidence would be of no moment. But when Mr. Nash continues
further: ‘And the internal evidence even of the so-called historic poems
themselves, is, in some instances at least, opposed to their claims to an
origin in the sixth century,’ and leaves the matter there, and finishes
his chapter, I say that is an unsatisfactory turn to give to the matter,
and a lame and impotent conclusion to his chapter; because the one
interesting, fruitful question here is, not in what instances the
internal evidence opposes the claims of these poems to a sixth-century
origin, but in what instances it supports them, and what these
sixth-century remains, thus established, signify.
So again with the question as to the mythological import of these poems.
Mr. Nash seems to me to have dealt with this, too, rather in the spirit
of a sturdy enemy of the Celts and their pretensions,—often enough
chimerical,—than in the spirit of a disinterested man of science. ‘We
find in the oldest compositions in the Welsh language no traces,’ he
says, ‘of the Druids, or of a pagan mythology.’ He will not hear of
there being, for instance, in these compositions, traces of the doctrine
of the transmigration of souls, attributed to the Druids in such clear
words by Cæsar. He is very severe upon a German scholar, long and
favourably known in this country, who has already furnished several
contributions to our knowledge of the Celtic race, and of whose labours
the main fruit has, I believe, not yet been given us,—Mr. Meyer. He is
very severe upon Mr. Meyer, for finding in one of the poems ascribed to
Taliesin, ‘a sacrificial hymn addressed to the god Pryd, in his character
of god of the Sun.’ It is not for me to pronounce for or against this
notion of Mr. Meyer’s. I have not the knowledge which is needed in order
to make one’s suffrage in these matters of any value; speaking merely as
one of the unlearned public, I will confess that allegory seems to me to
play, in Mr. Meyer’s theories, a somewhat excessive part; Arthur and his
Twelve (?) Knights of the Round Table signifying solely the year with its
twelve months; Percival and the Miller signifying solely steel and the
grindstone; Stonehenge and the _Gododin_ put to purely calendarial
purposes; the _Nibelungen_, the _Mahabharata_, and the _Iliad_, finally
following the fate of the _Gododin_; all this appears to me, I will
confess, a little prematurely grasped, a little unsubstantial. But that
any one who knows the set of modern mythological science towards
astronomical and solar myths, a set which has already justified itself in
many respects so victoriously, and which is so irresistible that one can
hardly now look up at the sun without having the sensations of a
moth;—that any one who knows this, should find in the Welsh remains no
traces of mythology, is quite astounding. Why, the heroes and heroines
of the old Cymric world are all in the sky as well as in Welsh story;
Arthur is the Great Bear, his harp is the constellation Lyra;
Cassiopeia’s chair is Llys Don, Don’s Court; the daughter of Don was
Arianrod, and the Northern Crown is Caer Arianrod; Gwydion was Don’s son,
and the Milky Way is Caer Gwydion. With Gwydion is Math, the son of
Mathonwy, the ‘man of illusion and phantasy;’ and the moment one goes
below the surface,—almost before one goes below the surface,—all is
illusion and phantasy, double-meaning, and far-reaching mythological
import, in the world which all these personages inhabit. What are the
three hundred ravens of Owen, and the nine sorceresses of Peredur, and
the dogs of Annwn the Welsh Hades, and the birds of Rhiannon, whose song
was so sweet that warriors remained spell-bound for eighty years together
listening to them? What is the Avanc, the water-monster, of whom every
lake-side in Wales, and her proverbial speech, and her music, to this day
preserve the tradition? What is Gwyn the son of Nudd, king of fairie,
the ruler of the Tylwyth Teg, or family of beauty, who till the day of
doom fights on every first day of May,—the great feast of the sun among
the Celtic peoples,—with Gwythyr, for the fair Cordelia, the daughter of
Lear? What is the wonderful mare of Teirnyon, which on the night of
every first of May foaled, and no one ever knew what became of the colt?
Who is the mystic Arawn, the king of Annwn, who changed semblance for a
year with Pwyll, prince of Dyved, and reigned in his place? These are no
mediæval personages; they belong to an older, pagan, mythological world.
The very first thing that strikes one, in reading the _Mabinogion_, is
how evidently the mediæval story-teller is pillaging an antiquity of
which he does not fully possess the secret; he is like a peasant building
his hut on the site of Halicarnassus or Ephesus; he builds, but what he
builds is full of materials of which he knows not the history, or knows
by a glimmering tradition merely;—stones ‘not of this building,’ but of
an older architecture, greater, cunninger, more majestical. In the
mediæval stories of no Latin or Teutonic people does this strike one as
in those of the Welsh. Kilhwch, in the story, already quoted, of
_Kilhwch and Olwen_, asks help at the hand of Arthur’s warriors; a list
of these warriors is given, which fills I know not how many pages of Lady
Charlotte Guest’s book; this list is a perfect treasure-house of
mysterious ruins:—
‘Teithi Hen, the son of Gwynham—(his domains were swallowed up by the
sea, and he himself hardly escaped, and he came to Arthur, and his knife
had this peculiarity, that from the time that he came there no haft would
ever remain upon it, and owing to this a sickness came over him, and he
pined away during the remainder of his life, and of this he died).
‘Drem, the son of Dremidyd—(when the gnat arose in the morning with the
sun, Drem could see it from Gelli Wic in Cornwall, as far off as Pen
Blathaon in North Britain).
‘Kynyr Keinvarvawc—(when he was told he had a son born, he said to his
wife: Damsel, if thy son be mine, his heart will be always cold, and
there will be no warmth in his hands).’
How evident, again, is the slightness of the narrator’s hold upon the
Twrch-Trwyth and his strange story! How manifest the mixture of known
and unknown, shadowy and clear, of different layers and orders of
tradition jumbled together, in the story of Bran the Blessed, a story
whose personages touch a comparatively late and historic time. Bran
invades Ireland, to avenge one of ‘the three unhappy blows of this
island,’ the daily striking of Branwen by her husband Matholwch, King of
Ireland. Bran is mortally wounded by a poisoned dart, and only seven men
of Britain, ‘the Island of the Mighty,’ escape, among them Taliesin:—
‘And Bran commanded them that they should cut off his head. And take you
my head, said he, and bear it even unto the White Mount in London, and
bury it there with the face towards France. And a long time will you be
upon the road. In Harlech you will be feasting seven years, the birds of
Rhiannon singing unto you the while. And all that time the head will be
to you as pleasant company as it ever was when on my body. And at Gwales
in Penvro you will be fourscore years, and you may remain there, and the
head with you uncorrupted, until you open the door that looks towards
Aber Henvelen and towards Cornwall. And after you have opened that door,
there you may no longer tarry; set forth then to London to bury the head,
and go straight forward.
‘So they cut off his head, and those seven went forward therewith. And
Branwen was the eighth with them, and they came to land at Aber Alaw in
Anglesey, and they sate down to rest. And Branwen looked towards Ireland
and towards the Island of the Mighty, to see if she could descry them.
“Alas,” said she, “woe is me that I was ever born; two islands have been
destroyed because of me.” Then she uttered a loud groan, and there broke
her heart. And they made her a four-sided grave, and buried her upon the
banks of the Alaw.
‘Then they went to Harlech, and sate down to feast and to drink there;
and there came three birds and began singing, and all the songs they had
ever heard were harsh compared thereto; and at this feast they continued
seven years. Then they went to Gwales in Penvro, and there they found a
fair and regal spot overlooking the ocean, and a spacious hall was
therein. And they went into the hall, and two of its doors were open,
but the third door was closed, that which looked towards Cornwall. “See
yonder,” said Manawyddan, “is the door that we may not open.” And that
night they regaled themselves and were joyful. And there they remained
fourscore years, nor did they think they had ever spent a time more
joyous and mirthful. And they were not more weary than when first they
came, neither did they, any of them, know the time they had been there.
And it was as pleasant to them having the head with them as if Bran had
been with them himself.
‘But one day said Heilyn, the son of Gwyn: “Evil betide me if I do not
open the door to know if that is true which is said concerning it.” So
he opened the door and looked towards Cornwall and Aber Henvelen. And
when they had looked, they were as conscious of all the evils they had
ever sustained, and of all the friends and companions they had lost, and
of all the misery that had befallen them, as if all had happened in that
very spot; and especially of the fate of their lord. And because of
their perturbation they could not rest, but journeyed forth with the head
towards London. And they buried the head in the White Mount.’
Arthur afterwards, in his pride and self-confidence, disinterred the
head, and this was one of ‘the three unhappy disclosures of the island of
Britain.’
There is evidently mixed here, with the newer legend, a _detritus_, as
the geologists would say, of something far older; and the secret of Wales
and its genius is not truly reached until this _detritus_, instead of
being called recent because it is found in contact with what is recent,
is disengaged, and is made to tell its own story.
But when we show him things of this kind in the Welsh remains, Mr. Nash
has an answer for us. ‘Oh,’ he says, ‘all this is merely a machinery of
necromancers and magic, such as has probably been possessed by all people
in all ages, more or less abundantly. How similar are the creations of
the human mind in times and places the most remote! We see in this
similarity only an evidence of the existence of a common stock of ideas,
variously developed according to the formative pressure of external
circumstances. The materials of these tales are not peculiar to the
Welsh.’ And then Mr. Nash points out, with much learning and ingenuity,
how certain incidents of these tales have their counterparts in Irish, in
Scandinavian, in Oriental romance. He says, fairly enough, that the
assertions of Taliesin, in the famous _Hanes Taliesin_, or _History of
Taliesin_, that he was present with Noah in the Ark, at the Tower of
Babel, and with Alexander of Macedon, ‘we may ascribe to the poetic fancy
of the Christian priest of the thirteenth century, who brought this
romance into its present form. We may compare these statements of the
universal presence of the wonder-working magician with those of the
gleeman who recites the Anglo-Saxon metrical tale called the _Traveller’s
Song_.’ No doubt, lands the most distant can be shown to have a common
property in many marvellous stories. This is one of the most interesting
discoveries of modern science; but modern science is equally interested
in knowing how the genius of each people has differentiated, so to speak,
this common property of theirs; in tracking out, in each case, that
special ‘variety of development,’ which, to use Mr. Nash’s own words,
‘the formative pressure of external circumstances’ has occasioned; and
not the formative pressure from without only, but also the formative
pressure from within. It is this which he who deals with the Welsh
remains in a philosophic spirit wants to know. Where is the force, for
scientific purposes, of telling us that certain incidents by which Welsh
poetry has been supposed to indicate a surviving tradition of the
doctrine of transmigration, are found in Irish poetry also, when Irish
poetry has, like Welsh, its roots in that Celtism which is said to have
held this doctrine of transmigration so strongly? Where is even the
great force, for scientific purposes, of proving, if it were possible to
prove, that the extant remains of Welsh poetry contain not one plain
declaration of Druidical, Pagan, pre-Christian doctrine, if one has in
the extant remains of Breton poetry such texts as this from the prophecy
of Gwenchlan: ‘Three times must we all die, before we come to our final
repose’? or as the cry of the eagles, in the same poem, of fierce thirst
for Christian blood, a cry in which the poet evidently gives vent to his
own hatred? since the solidarity, to use that convenient French word, of
Breton and Welsh poetry is so complete, that the ideas of the one may be
almost certainly assumed not to have been wanting to those of the other.
The question is, when Taliesin says, in the _Battle of the Trees_: ‘I
have been in many shapes before I attained a congenial form. I have been
a narrow blade of a sword, I have been a drop in the air, I have been a
shining star, I have been a word in a book, I have been a book in the
beginning, I have been a light in a lantern a year and a half, I have
been a bridge for passing over three-score rivers; I have journeyed as an
eagle, I have been a boat on the sea, I have been a director in battle, I
have been a sword in the hand, I have been a shield in fight, I have been
the string of a harp, I have been enchanted for a year in the foam of
water. There is nothing in which I have not been,’—the question is, have
these ‘statements of the universal presence of the wonder-working
magician’ nothing which distinguishes them from ‘similar creations of the
human mind in times and places the most remote;’ have they not an
inwardness, a severity of form, a solemnity of tone, which indicates the
still reverberating echo of a profound doctrine and discipline, such as
was Druidism? Suppose we compare Taliesin, as Mr. Nash invites us, with
the gleeman of the Anglo-Saxon _Traveller’s Song_. Take the specimen of
this song which Mr. Nash himself quotes: ‘I have been with the Israelites
and with the Essyringi, with the Hebrews and with the Indians and with
the Egyptians; I have been with the Medes and with the Persians and with
the Myrgings.’ It is very well to parallel with this extract Taliesin’s:
‘I carried the banner before Alexander; I was in Canaan when Absalom was
slain; I was on the horse’s crupper of Elias and Enoch; I was on the high
cross of the merciful son of God; I was the chief overseer at the
building of the tower of Nimrod; I was with my King in the manger of the
ass; I supported Moses through the waters of Jordan; I have been in the
buttery in the land of the Trinity; it is not known what is the nature of
its meat and its fish.’ It is very well to say that these assertions ‘we
may fairly ascribe to the poetic fancy of a Christian priest of the
thirteenth century.’ Certainly we may; the last of Taliesin’s assertions
more especially; though one must remark at the same time that the
Welshman shows much more fire and imagination than the Anglo-Saxon. But
Taliesin adds, after his: ‘I was in Canaan when Absalom was slain,’ ‘_I
was in the hall of Don before Gwydion was born_;’ he adds, after: ‘I was
chief overseer at the building of the tower of Nimrod,’ ‘_I have been
three times resident in the castle of Arianrod_;’ he adds, after: ‘I was
at the cross with Mary Magdalene,’ ‘_I obtained my inspiration from the
cauldron of Ceridwen_.’ And finally, after the mediæval touch of the
visit to the buttery in the land of the Trinity, he goes off at score: ‘I
have been instructed in the whole system of the universe; I shall be till
the day of judgment on the face of the earth. I have been in an uneasy
chair above Caer Sidin, and the whirling round without motion between
three elements. Is it not the wonder of the world that cannot be
discovered?’ And so he ends the poem. But here is the Celtic, the
essential part of the poem: it is here that the ‘formative pressure’ has
been really in operation; and here surely is paganism and mythology
enough, which the Christian priest of the thirteenth century can have had
nothing to do with. It is unscientific, no doubt, to interpret this part
as Edward Davies and Mr. Herbert do; but it is unscientific also to get
rid of it as Mr. Nash does. Wales and the Welsh genius are not to be
known without this part; and the true critic is he who can best disengage
its real significance.
I say, then, what we want is to _know_ the Celt and his genius; not to
exalt him or to abase him, but to know him. And for this a
disinterested, positive, and constructive criticism is needed. Neither
his friends nor his enemies have yet given us much of this. His friends
have given us materials for criticism, and for these we ought to be
grateful; his enemies have given us negative criticism, and for this,
too, up to a certain point, we may be grateful; but the criticism we
really want neither of them has yet given us.
Philology, however, that science which in our time has had so many
successes, has not been abandoned by her good fortune in touching the
Celt; philology has brought, almost for the first time in their lives,
the Celt and sound criticism together. The Celtic grammar of Zeuss,
whose death is so grievous a loss to science, offers a splendid specimen
of that patient, disinterested way of treating objects of knowledge,
which is the best and most attractive characteristic of Germany. Zeuss
proceeds neither as a Celt-lover nor as a Celt-hater; not the slightest
trace of a wish to glorify Teutonism or to abase Celtism, appears in his
book. The only desire apparent there, is the desire to know his object,
the language of the Celtic peoples, as it really is. In this he stands
as a model to Celtic students; and it has been given to him, as a reward
for his sound method, to establish certain points which are henceforth
cardinal points, landmarks, in all the discussion of Celtic matters, and
which no one had so established before. People talked at random of
Celtic writings of this or that age; Zeuss has definitely fixed the age
of what we actually have of these writings. To take the Cymric group of
languages: our earliest Cornish document is a vocabulary of the
thirteenth century; our earliest Breton document is a short description
of an estate in a deed of the ninth century; our earliest Welsh documents
are Welsh glosses of the eighth century to Eutychus, the grammarian, and
Ovid’s _Art of Love_, and the verses found by Edward Lhuyd in the
_Juvencus_ manuscript at Cambridge. The mention of this _Juvencus_
fragment, by-the-by, suggests the difference there is between an
interested and a disinterested critical habit. Mr. Nash deals with this
fragment; but, in spite of all his great acuteness and learning, because
he has a bias, because he does not bring to these matters the
disinterested spirit they need, he is capable of getting rid, quite
unwarrantably, of a particular word in the fragment which does not suit
him; his dealing with the verses is an advocate’s dealing, not a
critic’s. Of this sort of thing Zeuss is incapable.
The test which Zeuss used for establishing the age of these documents is
a scientific test, the test of orthography and of declensional and
syntactical forms. These matters are far out of my province, but what is
clear, sound, and simple, has a natural attraction for us all, and one
feels a pleasure in repeating it. It is the grand sign of age, Zeuss
says, in Welsh and Irish words, when what the grammarians call the
‘_destitutio tenuium_’ has not yet taken place; when the sharp consonants
have not yet been changed into flat, _p_ or t into _b_ or _d_; when, for
instance, _map_, a son, has not yet become _mab_; _coet_ a wood, _coed_;
_ocet_, a harrow, _oged_. This is a clear, scientific test to apply, and
a test of which the accuracy can be verified; I do not say that Zeuss was
the first person who knew this test or applied it, but I say that he is
the first person who in dealing with Celtic matters has invariably
proceeded by means of this and similar scientific tests; the first
person, therefore, the body of whose work has a scientific, stable
character; and so he stands as a model to all Celtic inquirers.
His influence has already been most happy; and as I have enlarged on a
certain failure in criticism of Eugene O’Curry’s,—whose business, after
all, was the description and classification of materials rather than
criticism,—let me show, by another example from Eugene O’Curry, this good
influence of Zeuss upon Celtic studies. Eugene O’Curry wants to
establish that compositions of an older date than the twelfth century
existed in Ireland in the twelfth century, and thus he proceeds. He
takes one of the great extant Irish manuscripts, the _Leabhar na
h’Uidhre_; or, _Book of the Dun Cow_. The compiler of this book was, he
says, a certain Maelmuiri, a member of the religious house of
Cluainmacnois. This he establishes from a passage in the manuscript
itself: ‘This is a trial of his pen here, by Maelmuiri, son of the son of
Conn na m’Bocht.’ The date of Maelmuiri he establishes from a passage in
the _Annals of the Four Masters_, under the year 1106: ‘Maelmuiri, son of
the son of Conn na m’Bocht, was killed in the middle of the great stone
church of Cluainmacnois, by a party of robbers.’ Thus he gets the date
of the _Book of the Dun Cow_. This book contains an elegy on the death
of St. Columb. Now, even before 1106, the language of this elegy was so
old as to require a gloss to make it intelligible, for it is accompanied
by a gloss written between the lines. This gloss quotes, for the
explanation of obsolete words, a number of more ancient compositions; and
these compositions, therefore, must, at the beginning of the twelfth
century, have been still in existence. Nothing can be sounder; every
step is proved, and fairly proved, as one goes along. O’Curry thus
affords a good specimen of the sane mode of proceeding so much wanted in
Celtic researches, and so little practised by Edward Davies and his
brethren; and to found this sane method, Zeuss, by the example he sets in
his own department of philology, has mainly contributed.
Science’s reconciling power, too, on which I have already touched,
philology, in her Celtic researches, again and again illustrates. Races
and languages have been absurdly joined, and unity has been often rashly
assumed at stages where one was far, very far, from having yet really
reached unity. Science has and will long have to be a divider and a
separatist, breaking arbitrary and fanciful connections, and dissipating
dreams of a premature and impossible unity. Still, science,—true
science,—recognises in the bottom of her soul a law of ultimate fusion,
of conciliation. To reach this, but to reach it legitimately, she tends.
She draws, for instance, towards the same idea which fills her elder and
diviner sister, poetry,—the idea of the substantial unity of man; though
she draws towards it by roads of her own. But continually she is showing
us affinity where we imagined there was isolation. What school-boy of us
has not rummaged his Greek dictionary in vain for a satisfactory account
of that old name for the Peloponnese, the _Apian Land_? and within the
limits of Greek itself there is none. But the Scythian name for earth
‘apia,’ _watery_, _water-issued_, meaning first _isle_ and then
_land_—this name, which we find in ‘avia,’ Scandin_avia_, and in ‘ey’ for
Aldern_ey_, not only explains the _Apian Land_ of Sophocles for us, but
points the way to a whole world of relationships of which we knew
nothing. The Scythians themselves again,—obscure, far-separated
Mongolian people as they used to appear to us,—when we find that they are
essentially Teutonic and Indo-European, their very name the same word as
the common Latin word ‘scutum,’ the _shielded_ people, what a surprise
they give us! And then, before we have recovered from this surprise we
learn that the name of their father and god, Targitavus, carries us I
know not how much further into familiar company. This divinity, _Shining
with the targe_, the Greek Hercules, the Sun, contains in the second half
of his name, _tavus_, ‘shining,’ a wonderful cement to hold times and
nations together. _Tavus_, ‘shining,’ from ‘tava’—in Sanscrit, as well
as Scythian, ‘to burn’ or ‘shine,’—is _Divus_, _dies_, _Zeus_, _Θεός_,
_Dêva_, and I know not how much more; and _Taviti_, the bright and burnt,
fire, the place of fire, the hearth, the centre of the family, becomes
the family itself, just as our word family, the Latin _familia_, is from
_thymelé_, the sacred centre of fire. The hearth comes to mean home.
Then from home it comes to mean the group of homes, the tribe; from the
tribe the entire nation; and in this sense of nation or people, the word
appears in Gothic, Norse, Celtic, and Persian, as well as in Scythian;
the _Theuthisks_, Deutschen, Tudesques, are the men of one _theuth_,
nation, or people; and of this our name _Germans_ itself is, perhaps,
only the Roman translation, meaning the men of one germ or stock. The
Celtic divinity, Teutates, has his name from the Celtic _teuta_, people;
_taviti_, fire, appearing here in its secondary and derived sense of
_people_, just as it does in its own Scythian language in Targitavus’s
second name, _Tavit-varus_, _Teutaros_, the protector of the people.
Another Celtic divinity, the Hesus of Lucan, finds his brother in the
Gaisos, the sword, symbolising the god of battles of the Teutonic
Scythians. {66} And after philology has thus related to each other the
Celt and the Teuton, she takes another branch of the Indo-European
family, the Sclaves, and shows us them as having the same name with the
German Suevi, the _solar_ people; the common ground here, too, being that
grand point of union, the sun, fire. So, also, we find Mr. Meyer, whose
Celtic studies I just now mentioned, harping again and again on the
connection even in Europe, if you go back far enough, between Celt and
German. So, after all we have heard, and truly heard, of the diversity
between all things Semitic and all things Indo-European, there is now an
Italian philologist at work upon the relationship between Sanscrit and
Hebrew.
Both in small and great things, philology, dealing with Celtic matters,
has exemplified this tending of science towards unity. Who has not been
puzzled by the relation of the Scots with Ireland—that _vetus et major
Scotia_, as Colgan calls it? Who does not feel what pleasure Zeuss
brings us when he suggests that _Gael_, the name for the Irish Celt, and
_Scot_, are at bottom the same word, both having their origin in a word
meaning _wind_, and both signifying _the violent stormy people_? {68}
Who does not feel his mind agreeably cleared about our friends the
Fenians, when he learns that the root of their name, _fen_, ‘white,’
appears in the hero Fingal; in Gwynned, the Welsh name for North Wales in
the Roman Venedotia; in Vannes in Brittany; in Venice? The very name of
Ireland, some say, comes from the famous Sanscrit word _Arya_, the land
of the Aryans, or noble men; although the weight of opinion seems to be
in favour of connecting it rather with another Sanscrit word, _avara_,
occidental, the western land or isle of the west. {69} But, at any rate,
who that has been brought up to think the Celts utter aliens from us and
our culture, can come without a start of sympathy upon such words as
_heol_ (sol), or _buaist_ (fuisti)? or upon such a sentence as this,
‘_Peris Duw dui funnaun_’ (‘God prepared two fountains’)? Or when Mr.
Whitley Stokes, one of the very ablest scholars formed in Zeuss’s school,
a born philologist,—he now occupies, alas! a post under the Government of
India, instead of a chair of philology at home, and makes one think
mournfully of Montesquieu’s saying, that had he been an Englishman he
should never have produced his great work, but have caught the contagion
of practical life, and devoted himself to what is called ‘rising in the
world,’ when Mr. Whitley Stokes, in his edition of _Cormac’s Glossary_,
holds up the Irish word _traith_, the sea, and makes us remark that,
though the names _Triton_, _Amphitrite_, and those of corresponding
Indian and Zend divinities, point to the meaning _sea_, yet it is only
Irish which actually supplies the vocable, how delightfully that brings
Ireland into the Indo-European concert! What a wholesome buffet it gives
to Lord Lyndhurst’s alienation doctrines!
To go a little further. Of the two great Celtic divisions of language,
the Gaelic and the Cymric, the Gaelic, say the philologists, is more
related to the younger, more synthetic, group of languages, Sanscrit,
Greek, Zend, Latin and Teutonic; the Cymric to the older, more analytic
Turanian group. Of the more synthetic Aryan group, again, Zend and
Teutonic are, in their turn, looser and more analytic than Sanscrit and
Greek, more in sympathy with the Turanian group and with Celtic. What
possibilities of affinity and influence are here hinted at; what lines of
inquiry, worth exploring, at any rate, suggest themselves to one’s mind.
By the forms of its language a nation expresses its very self. Our
language is the loosest, the most analytic, of all European languages.
And we, then, what are we? what is England? I will not answer, A vast
obscure Cymric basis with a vast visible Teutonic superstructure; but I
will say that that answer sometimes suggests itself, at any
rate,—sometimes knocks at our mind’s door for admission; and we begin to
cast about and see whether it is to be let in.
But the forms of its language are not our only key to a people; what it
says in its language, its literature, is the great key, and we must get
back to literature. The literature of the Celtic peoples has not yet had
its Zeuss, and greatly it wants him. We need a Zeuss to apply to Celtic
literature, to all its vexed questions of dates, authenticity, and
significance, the criticism, the sane method, the disinterested endeavour
to get at the real facts, which Zeuss has shown in dealing with Celtic
language. Science is good in itself, and therefore Celtic
literature,—the Celt-haters having failed to prove it a bubble,—Celtic
literature is interesting, merely as an object of knowledge. But it
reinforces and redoubles our interest in Celtic literature if we find
that here, too, science exercises the reconciling, the uniting influence
of which I have said so much; if we find here, more than anywhere else,
traces of kinship, and the most essential sort of kinship, spiritual
kinship, between us and the Celt, of which we had never dreamed. I
settle nothing, and can settle nothing; I have not the special knowledge
needed for that. I have no pretension to do more than to try and awaken
interest; to seize on hints, to point out indications, which, to any one
with a feeling for literature, suggest themselves; to stimulate other
inquirers. I must surely be without the bias which has so often rendered
Welsh and Irish students extravagant; why, my very name expresses that
peculiar Semitico-Saxon mixture which makes the typical Englishman; I can
have no ends to serve in finding in Celtic literature more than is there.
What _is_ there, is for me the only question.