take this of Southey’s, in answer to the question whether he would like
to have his youth over again:—
Do I regret the past?
Would I live o’er again
The morning hours of life?
Nay, William, nay, not so!
Praise be to God who made me what I am,
Other I would not be.
There we have the other side of our being; the Germanic goodness,
docility, and fidelity to nature, in place of the Celtic Titanism.
The Celt’s quick feeling for what is noble and distinguished gave his
poetry style; his indomitable personality gave it pride and passion; his
sensibility and nervous exaltation gave it a better gift still, the gift
of rendering with wonderful felicity the magical charm of nature. The
forest solitude, the bubbling spring, the wild flowers, are everywhere in
romance. They have a mysterious life and grace there; they are nature’s
own children, and utter her secret in a way which makes them something
quite different from the woods, waters, and plants of Greek and Latin
poetry. Now of this delicate magic, Celtic romance is so pre-eminent a
mistress, that it seems impossible to believe the power did not come into
romance from the Celts. {133} Magic is just the word for it,—the magic
of nature; not merely the beauty of nature,—that the Greeks and Latins
had; not merely an honest smack of the soil, a faithful realism,—that the
Germans had; but the intimate life of nature, her weird power and her
fairy charm. As the Saxon names of places, with the pleasant wholesome
smack of the soil in them,—Weathersfield, Thaxted, Shalford,—are to the
Celtic names of places, with their penetrating, lofty beauty,—Velindra,
Tyntagel, Caernarvon,—so is the homely realism of German and Norse nature
to the fairy-like loveliness of Celtic nature. Gwydion wants a wife for
his pupil: ‘Well,’ says Math, ‘we will seek, I and thou, by charms and
illusions, to form a wife for him out of flowers. So they took the
blossoms of the oak, and the blossoms of the broom, and the blossoms of
the meadow-sweet, and produced from them a maiden, the fairest and most
graceful that man ever saw. And they baptized her, and gave her the name
of Flower-Aspect.’ Celtic romance is full of exquisite touches like
that, showing the delicacy of the Celt’s feeling in these matters, and
how deeply nature lets him come into her secrets. The quick dropping of
blood is called ‘faster than the fall of the dewdrop from the blade of
reed-grass upon the earth, when the dew of June is at the heaviest.’ And
thus is Olwen described: ‘More yellow was her hair than the flower of the
broom, and her skin was whiter than the foam of the wave, and fairer were
her hands and her fingers than the blossoms of the wood-anemony amidst
the spray of the meadow fountains.’ For loveliness it would be hard to
beat that; and for magical clearness and nearness take the following:—
‘And in the evening Peredur entered a valley, and at the head of the
valley he came to a hermit’s cell, and the hermit welcomed him gladly,
and there he spent the night. And in the morning he arose, and when he
went forth, behold, a shower of snow had fallen the night before, and a
hawk had killed a wild-fowl in front of the cell. And the noise of the
horse scared the hawk away, and a raven alighted upon the bird. And
Peredur stood and compared the blackness of the raven, and the whiteness
of the snow, and the redness of the blood, to the hair of the lady whom
best he loved, which was blacker than the raven, and to her skin, which
was whiter than the snow, and to her two cheeks, which were redder than
the blood upon the snow appeared to be.’