We have seen how philology carries us towards ideas of affinity of race
which are new to us. But it is evident that this affinity, even if
proved, can be no very potent affair, unless it goes beyond the stage at
which we have hitherto observed it. Affinity between races still, so to
speak, in their mother’s womb, counts for something, indeed, but cannot
count for very much. So long as Celt and Teuton are in their embryo
rudimentary state, or, at least, no such great while out of their cradle,
still engaged in their wanderings, changes of place and struggle for
development, so long as they have not yet crystallised into solid
nations, they may touch and mix in passing, and yet very little come of
it. It is when the embryo has grown and solidified into a distinct
nation, into the Gaul or German of history, when it has finally acquired
the characters which make the Gaul of history what he is, the German of
history what he is, that contact and mixture are important, and may leave
a long train of effects; for Celt and Teuton by this time have their
formed, marked, national, ineffaceable qualities to oppose or to
communicate. The contact of the German of the Continent with the Celt
was in the pre-historic times, and the definite German type, as we know
it, was fixed later, and from the time when it became fixed was not
influenced by the Celtic type. But here in our country, in historic
times, long after the Celtic embryo had crystallised into the Celt
proper, long after the Germanic embryo had crystallised into the German
proper, there was an important contact between the two peoples; the
Saxons invaded the Britons and settled themselves in the Britons’
country. Well, then, here was a contact which one might expect would
leave its traces; if the Saxons got the upper hand, as we all know they
did, and made our country be England and us be English, there must yet,
one would think, be some trace of the Saxon having met the Briton; there
must be some Celtic vein or other running through us. Many people say
there is nothing at all of the kind, absolutely nothing; the _Saturday
Review_ treats these matters of ethnology with great power and learning,
and the _Saturday Review_ says we are ‘a nation into which a Norman
element, like a much smaller Celtic element, was so completely absorbed
that it is vain to seek after Norman or Celtic elements in any modern
Englishman.’ And the other day at Zurich I read a long essay on English
literature by one of the professors there, in which the writer observed,
as a remarkable thing, that while other countries conquered by the
Germans,—France, for instance, and Italy,—had ousted all German influence
from their genius and literature, there were two countries, not
originally Germanic, but conquered by the Germans, England and German
Switzerland, of which the genius and the literature were purely and
unmixedly German; and this he laid down as a position which nobody would
dream of challenging.
I say it is strange that this should be so, and we in particular have
reason for inquiring whether it really is so; because though, as I have
said, even as a matter of science the Celt has a claim to be known, and
we have an interest in knowing him, yet this interest is wonderfully
enhanced if we find him to have actually a part in us. The question is
to be tried by external and by internal evidence; the language and the
physical type of our race afford certain data for trying it, and other
data are afforded by our literature, genius, and spiritual production
generally. Data of this second kind belong to the province of the
literary critic; data of the first kind to the province of the
philologist and of the physiologist.
The province of the philologist and of the physiologist is not mine; but
this whole question as to the mixture of Celt with Saxon in us has been
so little explored, people have been so prone to settle it off-hand
according to their prepossessions, that even on the philological and
physiological side of it I must say a few words in passing. Surely it
must strike with surprise any one who thinks of it, to find that without
any immense inpouring of a whole people, that by mere expeditions of
invaders having to come over the sea, and in no greater numbers than the
Saxons, so far as we can make out, actually came, the old occupants of
this island, the Celtic Britons, should have been completely annihilated,
or even so completely absorbed that it is vain to seek after Celtic
elements in the existing English race. Of deliberate wholesale
extermination of the Celtic race, all of them who could not fly to Wales
or Scotland, we hear nothing; and without some such extermination one
would suppose that a great mass of them must have remained in the
country, their lot the obscure and, so to speak, underground lot of a
subject race, but yet insensibly getting mixed with their conquerors, and
their blood entering into the composition of a new people, in which the
stock of the conquerors counts for most, but the stock of the conquered,
too, counts for something. How little the triumph of the conqueror’s
laws, manners, and language, proves the extinction of the old race, we
may see by looking at France; Gaul was Latinised in language, manners,
and laws, and yet her people remained essentially Celtic. The
Germanisation of Britain went far deeper than the Latinisation of France,
and not only laws, manners, and language, but the main current of the
blood became Germanic; but how, without some process of radica
extirpation, of which, as I say, there is no evidence, can there have
failed to subsist in Britain, as in Gaul, a Celtic current too? The
indications of this in our language have never yet been thoroughly
searched out; the Celtic names of places prove nothing, of course, as to
the point here in question; they come from the pre-historic times, the
times before the nations, Germanic or Celtic, had crystallised, and they
are everywhere, as the impetuous Celt was formerly everywhere,—in the
Alps, the Apennines, the Cevennes, the Rhine, the Po, as well as in the
Thames, the Humber, Cumberland, London. But it is said that the words of
Celtic origin for things having to do with every-day peaceful life,—the
life of a settled nation,—words like _basket_ (to take an instance which
all the world knows) form a much larger body in our language than is
commonly supposed; it is said that a number of our raciest, most
idiomatic, popular words—for example, _bam_, _kick_, _whop_, _twaddle_,
_fudge_, _hitch_, _muggy_,—are Celtic. These assertions require to be
carefully examined, and it by no means follows that because an English
word is found in Celtic, therefore we get it from thence; but they have
not yet had the attention which, as illustrating through language this
matter of the subsistence and intermingling in our nation of a Celtic
part, they merit.
Nor have the physiological data which illustrate this matter had much
more attention from us in England. But in France, a physician, half
English by blood though a Frenchman by home and language, Monsieur W. F.
Edwards, brother to Monsieur Milne-Edwards, the well-known zoologist,
published in 1839 a letter to Monsieur Amédée Thierry with this title:
_Des Caractères Physiologiques des Races Humaines considérés dans leurs
Rapports avec l’Histoire_. The letter attracted great attention on the
Continent; it fills not much more than a hundred pages, and they are a
hundred pages which well deserve reading and re-reading. Monsieur
Thierry in his _Histoire des Gaulois_ had divided the population of Gaul
into certain groups, and the object of Monsieur Edwards was to try this
division by physiology. Groups of men have, he says, their physical type
which distinguishes them, as well as their language; the traces of this
physical type endure as the traces of language endure, and physiology is
enabled to verify history by them. Accordingly, he determines the
physical type of each of the two great Celtic families, the Gaels and the
Cymris, who are said to have been distributed in a certain order through
Gaul, and then he tracks these types in the population of France at the
present day, and so verifies the alleged original order of distribution.
In doing this, he makes excursions into neighbouring countries where the
Gaels and the Cymris have been, and he declares that in England he finds
abundant traces of the physical type which he has established as the
Cymric, still subsisting in our population, and having descended from the
old British possessors of our soil before the Saxon conquest. But if we
are to believe the current English opinion, says Monsieur Edwards, the
stock of these old British possessors is clean gone. On this opinion he
makes the following comment:—
‘In the territory occupied by the Saxons, the Britons were no longer an
independent nation, nor even a people with any civil existence at all.
For history, therefore, they were dead, above all for history as it was
then written; but they had not perished; they still lived on, and
undoubtedly in such numbers as the remains of a great nation, in spite of
its disasters, might still be expected to keep. That the Britons were
destroyed or expelled from England, properly so called, is, as I have
said, a popular opinion in that country. It is founded on the
exaggeration of the writers of history; but in these very writers, when
we come to look closely at what they say, we find the confession that the
remains of this people were reduced to a state of strict servitude.
Attached to the soil, they will have shared in that emancipation which
during the course of the middle ages gradually restored to political life
the mass of the population in the countries of Western Europe; recovering
by slow degrees their rights without resuming their name, and rising
gradually with the rise of industry, they will have got spread through
all ranks of society. The gradualness of this movement, and the
obscurity which enwrapped its beginnings, allowed the contempt of the
conqueror and the shame of the conquered to become fixed feelings; and so
it turns out, that an Englishman who now thinks himself sprung from the
Saxons or the Normans, is often in reality the descendant of the
Britons.’
So physiology, as well as language, incomplete though the application of
their tests to this matter has hitherto been, may lead us to hesitate
before accepting the round assertion that it is vain to search for Celtic
elements in any modern Englishman. But it is not only by the tests of
physiology and language that we can try this matter. As there are for
physiology physical marks, such as the square heads of the German, the
round head of the Gael, the oval head of the Cymri, which determine the
type of a people, so for criticism there are spiritual marks which
determine the type, and make us speak of the Greek genius, the Teutonic
genius, the Celtic genius, and so on. Here is another test at our
service; and this test, too, has never yet been thoroughly employed.
Foreign critics have indeed occasionally hazarded the idea that in
English poetry there is a Celtic element traceable; and Mr. Morley, in
his very readable as well as very useful book on the English writers
before Chaucer, has a sentence which struck my attention when I read it,
because it expresses an opinion which I, too, have long held. Mr. Morley
says:—‘The main current of English literature cannot be disconnected from
the lively Celtic wit in which it has one of its sources. The Celts do
not form an utterly distinct part of our mixed population. But for
early, frequent, and various contact with the race that in its
half-barbarous days invented Ossian’s dialogues with St. Patrick, and
that quickened afterwards the Northmen’s blood in France, Germanic
England would not have produced a Shakspeare.’ But there Mr. Morley
leaves the matter. He indicates this Celtic element and influence, but
he does not show us,—it did not come within the scope of his work to show
us,—how this influence has declared itself. Unlike the physiological
test, or the linguistic test, this literary, spiritual test is one which
I may perhaps be allowed to try my hand at applying. I say that there is
a Celtic element in the English nature, as well as a Germanic element,
and that this element manifests itself in our spirit and literature. But
before I try to point out how it manifests itself, it may be as well to
get a clear notion of what we mean by a Celtic element, a Germanic
element; what characters, that is, determine for us the Celtic genius,
the Germanic genius, as we commonly conceive the two.