Let me repeat what I have often said of the characteristics which mark
the English spirit, the English genius. This spirit, this genius,
judged, to be sure, rather from a friend’s than an enemy’s point of view,
yet judged on the whole fairly, is characterised, I have repeatedly said,
by _energy with honesty_. Take away some of the energy which comes to
us, as I believe, in part from Celtic and Roman sources; instead of
energy, say rather _steadiness_; and you have the Germanic genius
_steadiness with honesty_. It is evident how nearly the two
characterisations approach one another; and yet they leave, as we shall
see, a great deal of room for difference. Steadiness with honesty; the
danger for a national spirit thus composed is the humdrum, the plain and
ugly, the ignoble: in a word, _das Gemeine_, _die Gemeinheit_, that curse
of Germany, against which Goethe was all his life fighting. The
excellence of a national spirit thus composed is freedom from whim,
flightiness, perverseness; patient fidelity to Nature, in a word,
_science_,—leading it at last, though slowly, and not by the most
brilliant road, out of the bondage of the humdrum and common, into the
better life. The universal dead-level of plainness and homeliness, the
lack of all beauty and distinction in form and feature, the slowness and
clumsiness of the language, the eternal beer, sausages, and bad tobacco,
the blank commonness everywhere, pressing at last like a weight on the
spirits of the traveller in Northern Germany, and making him impatient to
be gone, this is the weak side; the industry, the well-doing, the patient
steady elaboration of things, the idea of science governing all
departments of human activity—this is the strong side; and through this
side of her genius, Germany has already obtained excellent results, and
is destined, we may depend upon it, however her pedantry, her slowness,
her fumbling, her ineffectiveness, her bad government, may at times make
us cry out, to an immense development. {82}
_For dulness_, _the creeping Saxons_,—says an old Irish poem, assigning
the characteristics for which different nations are celebrated:—
For acuteness and valour, the Greeks,
For excessive pride, the Romans,
For dulness, the creeping Saxons;
For beauty and amorousness, the Gaedhils.
We have seen in what sense, and with what explanation, this
characterisation of the German may be allowed to stand; now let us come
to the beautiful and amorous Gaedhil. Or rather, let us find a
definition which may suit both branches of the Celtic family, the Cymri
as well as the Gael. It is clear that special circumstances may have
developed some one side in the national character of Cymri or Gael,
Welshman or Irishman, so that the observer’s notice shall be readily
caught by this side, and yet it may be impossible to adopt it as
characteristic of the Celtic nature generally. For instance, in his
beautiful essay on the poetry of the Celtic races, M. Renan, with his
eyes fixed on the Bretons and the Welsh, is struck with the timidity, the
shyness, the delicacy of the Celtic nature, its preference for a retired
life, its embarrassment at having to deal with the great world. He talks
of the _douce petite race naturellement chrétienne_, his _race fière et
timide_, _à l’extérieur gauche et embarrassée_. But it is evident that
this description, however well it may do for the Cymri, will never do for
the Gael, never do for the typical Irishman of Donnybrook fair. Again,
M. Renan’s _infinie délicatesse de sentiment qui caractérise la race
Celtique_, how little that accords with the popular conception of an
Irishman who wants to borrow money! _Sentiment_ is, however, the word
which marks where the Celtic races really touch and are one; sentimental,
if the Celtic nature is to be characterised by a single term, is the best
term to take. An organisation quick to feel impressions, and feeling
them very strongly; a lively personality therefore, keenly sensitive to
joy and to sorrow; this is the main point. If the downs of life too much
outnumber the ups, this temperament, just because it is so quickly and
nearly conscious of all impressions, may no doubt be seen shy and
wounded; it may be seen in wistful regret, it may be seen in passionate,
penetrating melancholy; but its essence is to aspire ardently after life,
light, and emotion, to be expansive, adventurous, and gay. Our word
_gay_, it is said, is itself Celtic. It is not from _gaudium_, but from
the Celtic _gair_, to laugh; {84} and the impressionable Celt, soon up
and soon down, is the more down because it is so his nature to be up to
be sociable, hospitable, eloquent, admired, figuring away brilliantly.
He loves bright colours, he easily becomes audacious, overcrowing, full
of fanfaronade. The German, say the physiologists, has the larger volume
of intestines (and who that has ever seen a German at a table-d’hôte will
not readily believe this?), the Frenchman has the more developed organs
of respiration. That is just the expansive, eager Celtic nature; the
head in the air, snuffing and snorting; _a proud look and a high
stomach_, as the Psalmist says, but without any such settled savage
temper as the Psalmist seems to impute by those words. For good and for
bad, the Celtic genius is more airy and unsubstantial, goes less near the
ground, than the German. The Celt is often called sensual; but it is not
so much the vulgar satisfactions of sense that attract him as emotion and
excitement; he is truly, as I began by saying, sentimental.
Sentimental,—_always ready to react against the despotism of fact_; that
is the description a great friend {85} of the Celt gives of him; and it
is not a bad description of the sentimental temperament; it lets us into
the secret of its dangers and of its habitual want of success. Balance,
measure, and patience, these are the eternal conditions, even supposing
the happiest temperament to start with, of high success; and balance,
measure, and patience are just what the Celt has never had. Even in the
world of spiritual creation, he has never, in spite of his admirable
gifts of quick perception and warm emotion, succeeded perfectly, because
he never has had steadiness, patience, sanity enough to comply with the
conditions under which alone can expression be perfectly given to the
finest perceptions and emotions. The Greek has the same perceptive,
emotional temperament as the Celt; but he adds to this temperament the
sense of _measure_; hence his admirable success in the plastic arts, in
which the Celtic genius, with its chafing against the despotism of fact,
its perpetual straining after mere emotion, has accomplished nothing. In
the comparatively petty art of ornamentation, in rings, brooches,
crosiers, relic-cases, and so on, he has done just enough to show his
delicacy of taste, his happy temperament; but the grand difficulties of
painting and sculpture, the prolonged dealings of spirit with matter, he
has never had patience for. Take the more spiritual arts of music and
poetry. All that emotion alone can do in music the Celt has done; the
very soul of emotion breathes in the Scotch and Irish airs; but with all
this power of musical feeling, what has the Celt, so eager for emotion
that he has not patience for science, effected in music, to be compared
with what the less emotional German, steadily developing his musical
feeling with the science of a Sebastian Bach or a Beethoven, has
effected? In poetry, again, poetry which the Celt has so passionately,
so nobly loved; poetry where emotion counts for so much, but where
reason, too, reason, measure, sanity, also count for so much,—the Celt
has shown genius, indeed, splendid genius; but even here his faults have
clung to him, and hindered him from producing great works, such as other
nations with a genius for poetry,—the Greeks, say, or the Italians,—have
produced. The Celt has not produced great poetical works, he has only
produced poetry with an air of greatness investing it all, and sometimes
giving, moreover, to short pieces, or to passages, lines, and snatches of
long pieces, singular beauty and power. And yet he loved poetry so much
that he grudged no pains to it; but the true art, the _architectonicé_
which shapes great works, such as the _Agamemnon_ or the _Divine Comedy_,
comes only after a steady, deep-searching survey, a firm conception of
the facts of human life, which the Celt has not patience for. So he runs
off into technic, where he employs the utmost elaboration, and attains
astonishing skill; but in the contents of his poetry you have only so
much interpretation of the world as the first dash of a quick, strong
perception, and then sentiment, infinite sentiment, can bring you. Here,
too, his want of sanity and steadfastness has kept the Celt back from the
highest success.
If his rebellion against fact has thus lamed the Celt even in spiritual
work, how much more must it have lamed him in the world of business and
politics! The skilful and resolute appliance of means to ends which is
needed both to make progress in material civilisation, and also to form
powerful states, is just what the Celt has least turn for. He is
sensual, as I have said, or at least sensuous; loves bright colours,
company, and pleasure; and here he is like the Greek and Latin races; but
compare the talent the Greek and Latin (or Latinised) races have shown
for gratifying their senses, for procuring an outward life, rich,
luxurious, splendid, with the Celt’s failure to reach any material
civilisation sound and satisfying, and not out at elbows, poor, slovenly,
and half-barbarous. The sensuousness of the Greek made Sybaris and
Corinth, the sensuousness of the Latin made Rome and Baiæ, the
sensuousness of the Latinised Frenchman makes Paris; the sensuousness of
the Celt proper has made Ireland. Even in his ideal heroic times, his
gay and sensuous nature cannot carry him, in the appliances of his
favourite life of sociability and pleasure, beyond the gross and creeping
Saxon whom he despises; the regent Breas, we are told in the _Battle of
Moytura of the Fomorians_, became unpopular because ‘the knives of his
people were not greased at his table, nor did their breath smell of ale
at the banquet.’ In its grossness and barbarousness is not that Saxon,
as Saxon as it can be? just what the Latinised Norman, sensuous and
sociable like the Celt, but with the talent to make this bent of his
serve to a practical embellishment of his mode of living, found so
disgusting in the Saxon.
And as in material civilisation he has been ineffectual, so has the Celt
been ineffectual in politics. This colossal, impetuous, adventurous
wanderer, the Titan of the early world, who in primitive times fills so
large a place on earth’s scene, dwindles and dwindles as history goes on,
and at last is shrunk to what we now see him. For ages and ages the
world has been constantly slipping, ever more and more out of the Celt’s
grasp. ‘They went forth to the war,’ Ossian says most truly, ‘_but they
always fell_.’
And yet, if one sets about constituting an ideal genius, what a great
deal of the Celt does one find oneself drawn to put into it! Of an ideal
genius one does not want the elements, any of them, to be in a state of
weakness; on the contrary, one wants all of them to be in the highest
state of power; but with a law of measure, of harmony, presiding over the
whole. So the sensibility of the Celt, if everything else were not
sacrificed to it, is a beautiful and admirable force. For sensibility,
the power of quick and strong perception and emotion, is one of the very
prime constituents of genius, perhaps its most positive constituent; it
is to the soul what good senses are to the body, the grand natural
condition of successful activity. Sensibility gives genius its
materials; one cannot have too much of it, if one can but keep its master
and not be its slave. Do not let us wish that the Celt had had less
sensibility, but that he had been more master of it. Even as it is, if
his sensibility has been a source of weakness to him, it has been a
source of power too, and a source of happiness. Some people have found
in the Celtic nature and its sensibility the main root out of which
chivalry and romance and the glorification of a feminine ideal spring;
this is a great question, with which I cannot deal here. Let me notice
in passing, however, that there is, in truth, a Celtic air about the
extravagance of chivalry, its reaction against the despotism of fact, its
straining human nature further than it will stand. But putting all this
question of chivalry and its origin on one side, no doubt the sensibility
of the Celtic nature, its nervous exaltation, have something feminine in
them, and the Celt is thus peculiarly disposed to feel the spell of the
feminine idiosyncrasy; he has an affinity to it; he is not far from its
secret. Again, his sensibility gives him a peculiarly near and intimate
feeling of nature and the life of nature; here, too, he seems in a
special way attracted by the secret before him, the secret of natural
beauty and natural magic, and to be close to it, to half-divine it. In
the productions of the Celtic genius, nothing, perhaps, is so interesting
as the evidences of this power: I shall have occasion to give specimens
of them by-and-by. The same sensibility made the Celts full of reverence
and enthusiasm for genius, learning, and the things of the mind; _to be a
bard_, _freed a man_,—that is a characteristic stroke of this generous
and ennobling ardour of theirs, which no race has ever shown more
strongly. Even the extravagance and exaggeration of the sentimental
Celtic nature has often something romantic and attractive about it,
something which has a sort of smack of misdirected good. The Celt,
undisciplinable, anarchical, and turbulent by nature, but out of
affection and admiration giving himself body and soul to some leader,
that is not a promising political temperament, it is just the opposite of
the Anglo-Saxon temperament, disciplinable and steadily obedient within
certain limits, but retaining an inalienable part of freedom and
self-dependence; but it is a temperament for which one has a kind of
sympathy notwithstanding. And very often, for the gay defiant reaction
against fact of the lively Celtic nature one has more than sympathy; one
feels, in spite of the extravagance, in spite of good sense disapproving,
magnetised and exhilarated by it. The Gauls had a rule inflicting a fine
on every warrior who, when he appeared on parade, was found to stick out
too much in front,—to be corpulent, in short. Such a rule is surely the
maddest article of war ever framed, and to people to whom nature has
assigned a large volume of intestines, must appear, no doubt, horrible;
but yet has it not an audacious, sparkling, immaterial manner with it,
which lifts one out of routine, and sets one’s spirits in a glow?
All tendencies of human nature are in themselves vital and profitable;
when they are blamed, they are only to be blamed relatively, not
absolutely. This holds true of the Saxon’s phlegm as well as of the
Celt’s sentiment. Out of the steady humdrum habit of the creeping Saxon,
as the Celt calls him,—out of his way of going near the ground,—has come,
no doubt, Philistinism, that plant of essentially Germanic growth,
flourishing with its genuine marks only in the German fatherland, Great
Britain and her colonies, and the United States of America; but what a
soul of goodness there is in Philistinism itself! and this soul of
goodness I, who am often supposed to be Philistinism’s mortal enemy
merely because I do not wish it to have things all its own way, cherish
as much as anybody. This steady-going habit leads at last, as I have
said, up to science, up to the comprehension and interpretation of the
world. With us in Great Britain, it is true, it does not seem to lead so
far as that; it is in Germany, where the habit is more unmixed, that it
can lead to science. Here with us it seems at a certain point to meet
with a conflicting force, which checks it and prevents its pushing on to
science; but before reaching this point what conquests has it not won!
and all the more, perhaps, for stopping short at this point, for spending
its exertions within a bounded field, the field of plain sense, of direct
practical utility. How it has augmented the comforts and conveniences of
life for us! Doors that open, windows that shut, locks that turn, razors
that shave, coats that wear, watches that go, and a thousand more such
good things, are the invention of the Philistines.
Here, then, if commingling there is in our race, are two very unlike
elements to commingle; the steady-going Saxon temperament and the
sentimental Celtic temperament. But before we go on to try and verify,
in our life and literature, the alleged fact of this commingling, we have
yet another element to take into account, the Norman element. The critic
in the _Saturday Review_, whom I have already quoted, says that in
looking for traces of Normanism in our national genius, as in looking for
traces of Celtism in it, we do but lose our labour; he says, indeed, that
there went to the original making of our nation a very great deal more of
a Norman element than of a Celtic element, but he asserts that both
elements have now so completely disappeared, that it is vain to look for
any trace of either of them in the modern Englishman. But this sort of
assertion I do not like to admit without trying it a little. I want,
therefore, to get some plain notion of the Norman habit and genius, as I
have sought to get some plain notion of the Saxon and Celtic. Some
people will say that the Normans are Teutonic, and that therefore the
distinguishing characters of the German genius must be those of their
genius also; but the matter cannot be settled in this speedy fashion. No
doubt the basis of the Norman race is Teutonic; but the governing point
in the history of the Norman race,—so far, at least, as we English have
to do with it,—is not its Teutonic origin, but its Latin civilisation.
The French people have, as I have already remarked, an undoubtedly Celtic
basis, yet so decisive in its effect upon a nation’s habit and character
can be the contact with a stronger civilisation, that Gaul, without
changing the basis of her blood, became, for all practical intents and
purposes, a Latin country, France and not Ireland, through the Roman
conquest. Latinism conquered Celtism in her, as it also conquered the
Germanism imported by the Frankish and other invasions; Celtism is,
however, I need not say, everywhere manifest still in the French nation;
even Germanism is distinctly traceable in it, as any one who attentively
compares the French with other Latin races will see. No one can look
carefully at the French troops in Rome, amongst the Italian population,
and not perceive this trace of Germanism; I do not mean in the Alsatian
soldiers only, but in the soldiers of genuine France. But the governing
character of France, as a power in the world, is Latin; such was the
force of Greek and Roman civilisation upon a race whose whole mass
remained Celtic, and where the Celtic language still lingered on, they
say, among the common people, for some five or six centuries after the
Roman conquest. But the Normans in Neustria lost their old Teutonic
language in a wonderfully short time; when they conquered England they
were already Latinised; with them were a number of Frenchmen by race, men
from Anjou and Poitou, so they brought into England more non-Teutonic
blood, besides what they had themselves got by intermarriage, than is
commonly supposed; the great point, however, is, that by civilisation
this vigorous race, when it took possession of England, was Latin.
These Normans, who in Neustria had lost their old Teutonic tongue so
rapidly, kept in England their new Latin tongue for some three centuries.
It was Edward the Third’s reign before English came to be used in
law-pleadings and spoken at court. Why this difference? Both in
Neustria and in England the Normans were a handful; but in Neustria, as
Teutons, they were in contact with a more advanced civilisation than
their own; in England, as Latins, with a less advanced. The Latinised
Normans in England had the sense for fact, which the Celts had not; and
the love of strenuousness, clearness, and rapidity, the high Latin
spirit, which the Saxons had not. They hated the slowness and dulness of
the creeping Saxon; it offended their clear, strenuous talent for
affairs, as it offended the Celt’s quick and delicate perception. The
Normans had the Roman talent for affairs, the Roman decisiveness in
emergencies. They have been called prosaic, but this is not a right word
for them; they were neither sentimental, nor, strictly speaking,
poetical. They had more sense for rhetoric than for poetry, like the
Romans; but, like the Romans, they had too high a spirit not to like a
noble intellectual stimulus of some kind, and thus they were carried out
of the region of the merely prosaic. Their foible,—the bad excess of
their characterising quality of strenuousness,—was not a prosaic
flatness, it was hardness and insolence.
I have been obliged to fetch a very wide circuit, but at last I have got
what I went to seek. I have got a rough, but, I hope, clear notion of
these three forces, the Germanic genius, the Celtic genius, the Norman
genius. The Germanic genius has steadiness as its main basis, with
commonness and humdrum for its defect, fidelity to nature for its
excellence. The Celtic genius, sentiment as its main basis, with love of
beauty, charm, and spirituality for its excellence, ineffectualness and
self-will for its defect. The Norman genius, talent for affairs as its
main basis, with strenuousness and clear rapidity for its excellence,
hardness and insolence for its defect. And now to try and trace these in
the composite English genius.