‘And early in the day Geraint and Enid left the wood, and they came to an
open country, with meadows on one hand and mowers mowing the meadows.
And there was a river before them, and the horses bent down and drank the
water. And they went up out of the river by a steep bank, and there they
met a slender stripling with a satchel about his neck; and he had a small
blue pitcher in his hand, and a bowl on the mouth of the pitcher.’
And here the landscape, up to this point so Greek in its clear beauty, is
suddenly magicalised by the romance touch:—
‘And they saw a tall tree by the side of the river, one-half of which was
in flames from the root to the top, and the other half was green and in
full leaf.’
Magic is the word to insist upon,—a magically vivid and near
interpretation of nature; since it is this which constitutes the special
charm and power of the effect I am calling attention to, and it is for
this that the Celt’s sensibility gives him a peculiar aptitude. But the
matter needs rather fine handling, and it is easy to make mistakes here
in our criticism. In the first place, Europe tends constantly to become
more and more one community, and we tend to become Europeans instead of
merely Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans, Italians; so whatever aptitude or
felicity one people imparts into spiritual work, gets imitated by the
others, and thus tends to become the common property of all. Therefore
anything so beautiful and attractive as the natural magic I am speaking
of, is sure, now-a-days, if it appears in the productions of the Celts,
or of the English, or of the French, to appear in the productions of the
Germans also, or in the productions of the Italians; but there will be a
stamp of perfectness and inimitableness about it in the literatures where
it is native, which it will not have in the literatures where it is not
native. Novalis or Rückert, for instance, have their eye fixed on
nature, and have undoubtedly a feeling for natural magic; a
rough-and-ready critic easily credits them and the Germans with the
Celtic fineness of tact, the Celtic nearness to nature and her secret;
but the question is whether the strokes in the German’s picture of nature
{136} have ever the indefinable delicacy, charm, and perfection of the
Celt’s touch in the pieces I just now quoted, or of Shakspeare’s touch in
his daffodil, Wordsworth’s in his cuckoo, Keats’s in his Autumn,
Obermann’s in his mountain birch-tree, or his Easter-daisy among the
Swiss farms. To decide where the gift for natural magic originally lies,
whether it is properly Celtic or Germanic, we must decide this question.
In the second place, there are many ways of handling nature, and we are
here only concerned with one of them; but a rough-and-ready critic
imagines that it is all the same so long as nature is handled at all, and
fails to draw the needful distinction between modes of handling her. But
these modes are many; I will mention four of them now: there is the
conventional way of handling nature, there is the faithful way of
handling nature, there is the Greek way of handling nature, there is the
magical way of handling nature. In all these three last the eye is on
the object, but with a difference; in the faithful way of handling
nature, the eye is on the object, and that is all you can say; in the
Greek, the eye is on the object, but lightness and brightness are added;
in the magical, the eye is on the object, but charm and magic are added.
In the conventional way of handling nature, the eye is not on the object;
what that means we all know, we have only to think of our
eighteenth-century poetry:—