If I were asked where English poetry got these three things, its turn for
style, its turn for melancholy, and its turn for natural magic, for
catching and rendering the charm of nature in a wonderfully near and
vivid way,—I should answer, with some doubt, that it got much of its turn
for style from a Celtic source; with less doubt, that it got much of its
melancholy from a Celtic source; with no doubt at all, that from a Celtic
source it got nearly all its natural magic.
Any German with penetration and tact in matters of literary criticism
will own that the principal deficiency of German poetry is in style; that
for style, in the highest sense, it shows but little feeling. Take the
eminent masters of style, the poets who best give the idea of what the
peculiar power which lies in style is, Pindar, Virgil, Dante, Milton. An
example of the peculiar effect which these poets produce, you can hardly
give from German poetry. Examples enough you can give from German poetry
of the effect produced by genius, thought, and feeling expressing
themselves in clear language, simple language, passionate language,
eloquent language, with harmony and melody; but not of the peculiar
effect exercised by eminent power of style. Every reader of Dante can at
once call to mind what the peculiar effect I mean is; I spoke of it in my
lectures on translating Homer, and there I took an example of it from
Dante, who perhaps manifests it more eminently than any other poet. But
from Milton, too, one may take examples of it abundantly; compare this
from Milton:—
. . . nor sometimes forget
Those other two equal with me in fate,
So were I equall’d with them in renown,
Blind Thamyris and blind Mæonides—
with this from Goethe:—
Es bildet ein Talent sich in der Stille,
Sich ein Character in dem Strom der Welt.
Nothing can be better in its way than the style in which Goethe there
presents his thought, but it is the style of prose as much as of poetry;
it is lucid, harmonious, earnest, eloquent, but it has not received that
peculiar kneading, heightening, and re-casting which is observable in the
style of the passage from Milton,—a style which seems to have for its
cause a certain pressure of emotion, and an ever-surging, yet bridled,
excitement in the poet, giving a special intensity to his way of
delivering himself. In poetical races and epochs this turn for style is
peculiarly observable; and perhaps it is only on condition of having this
somewhat heightened and difficult manner, so different from the plain
manner of prose, that poetry gets the privilege of being loosed, at its
best moments, into that perfectly simple, limpid style, which is the
supreme style of all, but the simplicity of which is still not the
simplicity of prose. The simplicity of Menander’s style is the
simplicity of prose, and is the same kind of simplicity as that which
Goethe’s style, in the passage I have quoted, exhibits; but Menander does
not belong to a great poetical moment, he comes too late for it; it is
the simple passages in poets like Pindar or Dante which are perfect,
being masterpieces of _poetical_ simplicity. One may say the same of the
simple passages in Shakspeare; they are perfect, their simplicity being a
_poetical_ simplicity. They are the golden, easeful, crowning moments of
a manner which is always pitched in another key from that of prose; a
manner changed and heightened; the Elizabethan style, regnant in most of
our dramatic poetry to this day, is mainly the continuation of this
manner of Shakspeare’s. It was a manner much more turbid and strewn with
blemishes than the manner of Pindar, Dante, or Milton; often it was
detestable; but it owed its existence to Shakspeare’s instinctive impulse
towards _style_ in poetry, to his native sense of the necessity for it;
and without the basis of style everywhere, faulty though it may in some
places be, we should not have had the beauty of expression, unsurpassable
for effectiveness and charm, which is reached in Shakspeare’s best
passages. The turn for style is perceptible all through English poetry,
proving, to my mind, the genuine poetical gift of the race; this turn
imparts to our poetry a stamp of high distinction, and sometimes it
doubles the force of a poet not by nature of the very highest order, such
as Gray, and raises him to a rank beyond what his natural richness and
power seem to promise. Goethe, with his fine critical perception, saw
clearly enough both the power of style in itself, and the lack of style
in the literature of his own country; and perhaps if we regard him solely
as a German, not as a European, his great work was that he laboured all
his life to impart style into German literature, and firmly to establish
it there. Hence the immense importance to him of the world of classical
art, and of the productions of Greek or Latin genius, where style so
eminently manifests its power. Had he found in the German genius and
literature an element of style existing by nature and ready to his hand,
half his work, one may say, would have been saved him, and he might have
done much more in poetry. But as it was, he had to try and create out of
his own powers, a style for German poetry, as well as to provide contents
for this style to carry; and thus his labour as a poet was doubled.
It is to be observed that power of style, in the sense in which I am here
speaking of style, is something quite different from the power of
idiomatic, simple, nervous, racy expression, such as the expression of
healthy, robust natures so often is, such as Luther’s was in a striking
degree. Style, in my sense of the word, is a peculiar re-casting and
heightening, under a certain condition of spiritual excitement, of what a
man has to say, in such a manner as to add dignity and distinction to it;
and dignity and distinction are not terms which suit many acts or words
of Luther. Deeply touched with the _Gemeinheit_ which is the bane of his
nation, as he is at the same time a grand example of the honesty which is
his nation’s excellence, he can seldom even show himself brave, resolute
and truthful, without showing a strong dash of coarseness and commonness
all the while; the right definition of Luther, as of our own Bunyan, is
that he is a Philistine of genius. So Luther’s sincere idiomatic
German,—such language is this: ‘Hilf lieber Gott, wie manchen Jammer habe
ich gesehen, dass der gemeine Mann doch so gar nichts weiss von der
christlichen Lehre!’—no more proves a power of style in German
literature, than Cobbett’s sinewy idiomatic English proves it in English
literature. Power of style, properly so-called, as manifested in masters
of style like Dante or Milton in poetry, Cicero, Bossuet or Bolingbroke
in prose, is something quite different, and has, as I have said, for its
characteristic effect, this: to add dignity and distinction.
Style, then, the Germans are singularly without, and it is strange that
the power of style should show itself so strongly as it does in the
Icelandic poetry, if the Scandinavians are such genuine Teutons as is
commonly supposed. Fauriel used to talk of the Scandinavian Teutons and
the German Teutons, as if they were two divisions of the same people, and
the common notion about them, no doubt, is very much this. Since the war
in Schleswig-Holstein, however, all one’s German friends are exceedingly
anxious to insist on the difference of nature between themselves and the
Scandinavians; when one expresses surprise that the German sense of
nationality should be so deeply affronted by the rule over Germans, not
of Latins or Celts, but of brother Teutons or next door to it, a German
will give you I know not how long a catalogue of the radical points of
unlikeness, in genius and disposition, between himself and a Dane. This
emboldens me to remark that there is a fire, a sense of style, a
distinction, in Icelandic poetry, which German poetry has not. Icelandic
poetry, too, shows a powerful and developed technic; and I wish to throw
out, for examination by those who are competent to sift the matter, the
suggestion that this power of style and development of technic in the
Norse poetry seems to point towards an early Celtic influence or
intermixture. It is curious that Zeuss, in his grammar, quotes a text
which gives countenance to this notion; as late as the ninth century, he
says, there were Irish Celts in Iceland; and the text he quotes to show
this, is as follows:—‘In 870 A.D., when the Norwegians came to Iceland,
there were Christians there, who departed, and left behind them Irish
books, bells, and other things; from whence it may be inferred that these
Christians were Irish.’ I speak, and ought to speak, with the utmost
diffidence on all these questions of ethnology; but I must say that when
I read this text in Zeuss, I caught eagerly at the clue it seemed to
offer; for I had been hearing the _Nibelungen_ read and commented on in
German schools (German schools have the good habit of reading and
commenting on German poetry, as we read and comment on Homer and Virgil,
but do _not_ read and comment on Chaucer and Shakspeare), and it struck
me how the fatal humdrum and want of style of the Germans had marred
their way of telling this magnificent tradition of the _Nibelungen_, and
taken half its grandeur and power out of it; while in the Icelandic poems
which deal with this tradition, its grandeur and power are much more
fully visible, and everywhere in the poetry of the Edda there is a force
of style and a distinction as unlike as possible to the want of both in
the German _Nibelungen_. {120} At the same time the Scandinavians have a
realism, as it is called, in their genius, which abundantly proves their
relationship with the Germans; any one whom Mr. Dasent’s delightful books
have made acquainted with the prose tales of the Norsemen, will be struck
with the stamp of a Teutonic nature in them; but the Norse poetry seems
to have something which from Teutonic sources alone it could not have
derived; which the Germans have not, and which the Celts have.
This something is _style_, and the Celts certainly have it in a wonderful
measure. Style is the most striking quality of their poetry. Celtic
poetry seems to make up to itself for being unable to master the world
and give an adequate interpretation of it, by throwing all its force into
style, by bending language at any rate to its will, and expressing the
ideas it has with unsurpassable intensity, elevation, and effect. It has
all through it a sort of intoxication of style,—a _Pindarism_, to use a
word formed from the name of the poet, on whom, above all other poets,
the power of style seems to have exercised an inspiring and intoxicating
effect; and not in its great poets only, in Taliesin, or Llywarch Hen, or
Ossian, does the Celtic genius show this Pindarism, but in all its
productions:—
The grave of March is this, and this the grave of Gwythyr;
Here is the grave of Gwgawn Gleddyfreidd;
But unknown is the grave of Arthur.
That comes from the Welsh _Memorials of the Graves of the Warriors_, and
if we compare it with the familiar memorial inscriptions of an English
churchyard (for we English have so much Germanism in us that our
productions offer abundant examples of German want of style as well as of
its opposite):—
Afflictions sore long time I bore,
Physicians were in vain,
Till God did please Death should me seize
And ease me of my pain—
if, I say, we compare the Welsh memorial lines with the English, which in
their _Gemeinheit_ of style are truly Germanic, we shall get a clear
sense of what that Celtic talent for style I have been speaking of is.
Or take this epitaph of an Irish Celt, Angus the Culdee, whose _Féliré_,
or festology, I have already mentioned; a festology in which, at the end
of the eighth or beginning of the ninth century, he collected from ‘the
countless hosts of the illuminated books of Erin’ (to use his own words)
the festivals of the Irish saints, his poem having a stanza for every day
in the year. The epitaph on Angus, who died at Cluain Eidhnech, in
Queen’s County, runs thus:—
Angus in the assembly of Heaven,
Here are his tomb and his bed;
It is from hence he went to death,
In the Friday, to holy Heaven.
It was in Cluain Eidhnech he was rear’d;
It was in Cluain Eidhnech he was buried;
In Cluain Eidhnech, of many crosses,
He first read his psalms.
That is by no eminent hand; and yet a Greek epitaph could not show a
finer perception of what constitutes propriety and felicity of style in
compositions of this nature. Take the well-known Welsh prophecy about
the fate of the Britons:—
Their Lord they will praise,
Their speech they will keep,
Their land they will lose,
Except wild Wales.
To however late an epoch that prophecy belongs, what a feeling for style,
at any rate, it manifests! And the same thing may be said of the famous
Welsh triads. We may put aside all the vexed questions as to their
greater or less antiquity, and still what important witness they bear to
the genius for literary style of the people who produced them!
Now we English undoubtedly exhibit very often the want of sense for style
of our German kinsmen. The churchyard lines I just now quoted afford an
instance of it: but the whole branch of our literature,—and a very
popular branch it is, our hymnology,—to which those lines are to be
referred, is one continued instance of it. Our German kinsmen and we are
the great people for hymns. The Germans are very proud of their hymns,
and we are very proud of ours; but it is hard to say which of the two,
the German hymn-book or ours, has least poetical worth in itself, or does
least to prove genuine poetical power in the people producing it. I have
not a word to say against Sir Roundell Palmer’s choice and arrangement of
materials for his _Book of Praise_; I am content to put them on a level
(and that is giving them the highest possible rank) with Mr. Palgrave’s
choice and arrangement of materials for his _Golden Treasury_; but yet no
sound critic can doubt that, so far as poetry is concerned, while the
_Golden Treasury_ is a monument of a nation’s strength, the _Book of
Praise_ is a monument of a nation’s weakness. Only the German race, with
its want of quick instinctive tact, of delicate, sure perception, could
have invented the hymn as the Germans and we have it; and our non-German
turn for style,—style, of which the very essence is a certain happy
fineness and truth of poetical perception,—could not but desert us when
our German nature carried us into a kind of composition which can please
only when the perception is somewhat blunt. Scarcely any one of us ever
judges our hymns fairly, because works of this kind have two sides,—their
side for religion and their side for poetry. Everything which has helped
a man in his religious life, everything which associates itself in his
mind with the growth of that life, is beautiful and venerable to him; in
this way, productions of little or no poetical value, like the German
hymns and ours, may come to be regarded as very precious. Their worth in
this sense, as means by which we have been edified, I do not for a moment
hold cheap; but there is an edification proper to all our stages of
development, the highest as well as the lowest, and it is for man to
press on towards the highest stages of his development, with the
certainty that for those stages, too, means of edification will not be
found wanting. Now certainly it is a higher state of development when
our fineness of perception is keen than when it is blunt. And
if,—whereas the Semitic genius placed its highest spiritual life in the
religious sentiment, and made that the basis of its poetry,—the
Indo-European genius places its highest spiritual life in the imaginative
reason, and makes that the basis of its poetry, we are none the better
for wanting the perception to discern a natural law, which is, after all,
like every natural law, irresistible; we are none the better for trying
to make ourselves Semitic, when Nature has made us Indo-European, and to
shift the basis of our poetry. We may mean well; all manner of good may
happen to us on the road we go; but we are not on our real right road,
the road we must in the end follow.
That is why, when our hymns betray a false tendency by losing a power
which accompanies the poetical work of our race on our other more
suitable lines, the indication thus given is of great value and
instructiveness for us. One of our main gifts for poetry deserts us in
our hymns, and so gives us a hint as to the one true basis for the
spiritual work of an Indo-European people, which the Germans, who have
not this particular gift of ours, do not and cannot get in this way,
though they may get it in others. It is worth noticing that the
masterpieces of the spiritual work of Indo-Europeans, taking the pure
religious sentiment, and not the imaginative reason, for their basis, are
works like the _Imitation_, the _Dies Iræ_, the _Stabat Mater_—works
clothing themselves in the middle-age Latin, the genuine native voice of
no Indo-European nation. The perfection of their kind, but that kind not
perfectly legitimate, they take a language not perfectly legitimate; as
if to show, that when mankind’s Semitic age is once passed, the age which
produced the great incomparable monuments of the pure religious
sentiment, the books of Job and Isaiah, the Psalms,—works truly to be
called inspired, because the same divine power which worked in those who
produced them works no longer,—as if to show us, that, after this
primitive age, we Indo-Europeans must feel these works without attempting
to re-make them; and that our poetry, if it tries to make itself simply
the organ of the religious sentiment, leaves the true course, and must
conceal this by not speaking a living language. The moment it speaks a
living language, and still makes itself the organ of the religious
sentiment only, as in the German and English hymns, it betrays
weakness;—the weakness of all false tendency.
But if by attending to the Germanism in us English and to its works, one
has come to doubt whether we, too, are not thorough Germans by genius and
with the German deadness to style, one has only to repeat to oneself a
line of Milton,—a poet intoxicated with the passion for style as much as
Taliesin or Pindar,—to see that we have another side to our genius beside
the German one. Whence do we get it? The Normans may have brought in
among us the Latin sense for rhetoric and style,—for, indeed, this sense
goes naturally with a high spirit and a strenuousness like theirs,—but
the sense for style which English poetry shows is something finer than we
could well have got from a people so positive and so little poetical as
the Normans; and it seems to me we may much more plausibly derive it from
a root of the poetical Celtic nature in us.
Its chord of penetrating passion and melancholy, again, its _Titanism_ as
we see it in Byron,—what other European poetry possesses that like the
English, and where do we get it from? The Celts, with their vehement
reaction against the despotism of fact, with their sensuous nature, their
manifold striving, their adverse destiny, their immense calamities, the
Celts are the prime authors of this vein of piercing regret and
passion,—of this Titanism in poetry. A famous book, Macpherson’s
_Ossian_, carried in the last century this vein like a flood of lava
through Europe. I am not going to criticise Macpherson’s _Ossian_ here.
Make the part of what is forged, modern, tawdry, spurious, in the book,
as large as you please; strip Scotland, if you like, of every feather of
borrowed plumes which on the strength of Macpherson’s _Ossian_ she may
have stolen from that _vetus et major Scotia_, the true home of the
Ossianic poetry, Ireland; I make no objection. But there will still be
left in the book a residue with the very soul of the Celtic genius in it,
and which has the proud distinction of having brought this soul of the
Celtic genius into contact with the genius of the nations of modern
Europe, and enriched all our poetry by it. Woody Morven, and echoing
Sora, and Selma with its silent halls!—we all owe them a debt of
gratitude, and when we are unjust enough to forget it, may the Muse
forget us! Choose any one of the better passages in Macpherson’s
_Ossian_ and you can see even at this time of day what an apparition of
newness and power such a strain must have been to the eighteenth
century:—
‘I have seen the walls of Balclutha, but they were desolate. The fox
looked out from the windows, the rank grass of the wall waved round her
head. Raise the song of mourning, O bards, over the land of strangers.
They have but fallen before us, for one day we must fall. Why dost thou
build the hall, son of the winged days? Thou lookest from thy towers
to-day; yet a few years, and the blast of the desert comes; it howls in
thy empty court, and whistles round thy half-worn shield. Let the blast
of the desert come! we shall be renowned in our day.’
All Europe felt the power of that melancholy; but what I wish to point
out is, that no nation of Europe so caught in its poetry the passionate
penetrating accent of the Celtic genius, its strain of Titanism, as the
English. Goethe, like Napoleon, felt the spell of Ossian very
powerfully, and he quotes a long passage from him in his _Werther_. But
what is there Celtic, turbulent, and Titanic about the German Werther,
that amiable, cultivated, and melancholy young man, having for his sorrow
and suicide the perfectly definite motive that Lotte cannot be his?
Faust, again, has nothing unaccountable, defiant and Titanic in him; his
knowledge does not bring him the satisfaction he expected from it, and
meanwhile he finds himself poor and growing old, and baulked of the
palpable enjoyment of life; and here is the motive for Faust’s
discontent. In the most energetic and impetuous of Goethe’s
creations,—his _Prometheus_,—it is not Celtic self-will and passion, it
is rather the Germanic sense of justice and reason, which revolts against
the despotism of Zeus. The German _Sehnsucht_ itself is a wistful, soft,
tearful longing, rather than a struggling, fierce, passionate one. But
the Celtic melancholy is struggling, fierce, passionate; to catch its
note, listen to Llywarch Hen in old age, addressing his crutch:—
O my crutch! is it not autumn, when the fern is red, the water-flag
yellow? Have I not hated that which I love?
O my crutch! is it not winter-time now, when men talk together after
that they have drunken? Is not the side of my bed left desolate?
O my crutch! is it not spring, when the cuckoo passes through the
air, when the foam sparkles on the sea? The young maidens no longer
love me.
O my crutch! is it not the first day of May? The furrows, are they
not shining; the young corn, is it not springing? Ah! the sight of
thy handle makes me wroth.
O my crutch! stand straight, thou wilt support me the better; it is
very long since I was Llywarch.
Behold old age, which makes sport of me, from the hair of my head to
my teeth, to my eyes, which women loved.
The four things I have all my life most hated fall upon me
together,—coughing and old age, sickness and sorrow.
I am old, I am alone, shapeliness and warmth are gone from me; the
couch of honour shall be no more mine: I am miserable, I am bent on
my crutch.
How evil was the lot allotted to Llywarch, the night when he was
brought forth! sorrows without end, and no deliverance from his
burden.
There is the Titanism of the Celt, his passionate, turbulent, indomitable
reaction against the despotism of fact; and of whom does it remind us so
much as of Byron?
The fire which on my bosom preys
Is lone as some volcanic isle;
No torch is kindled at its blaze;
A funeral pile!