as his charming flower-gatherer, who—
Pallentes violas et summa papavera carpens
Narcissum et florem jungit bene olentis anethi—
as his quinces and chestnuts:—
. . . cana legam tenera lanugine mala
Castaneasque nuces . . .
then, I think, we shall be disposed to say that in Shakspeare’s—
I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine—
it is mainly a Greek note which is struck. Then, again in his:—
. . . look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold!
we are at the very point of transition from the Greek note to the Celtic;
there is the Greek clearness and brightness, with the Celtic aërialness
and magic coming in. Then we have the sheer, inimitable Celtic note in
passages like this:—
Met we on hill, in dale, forest or mead,
By paved fountain or by rushy brook,
Or in the beached margent of the sea—
or this, the last I will quote:—
The moon shines bright. In such a night as this,
When the sweet wind did gently kiss the trees,
And they did make no noise, in such a night
Troilus, methinks, mounted the Trojan walls—
. . . in such a night
Did Thisbe fearfully o’ertrip the dew—
. . . in such a night
_Stood Dido_, _with a willow in her hand_,
_Upon the wild sea-banks_, _and waved her love_
_To come again to Carthage_.
And those last lines of all are so drenched and intoxicated with the
fairy-dew of that natural magic which is our theme, that I cannot do
better then end with them.
And now, with the pieces of evidence in our hand, let us go to those who
say it is vain to look for Celtic elements in any Englishman, and let us
ask them, first, if they seize what we mean by the power of natural magic
in Celtic poetry; secondly, if English poetry does not eminently exhibit
this power; and, thirdly, where they suppose English poetry got it from?
* * * * *
I perceive that I shall be accused of having rather the air, in what I
have said, of denying this and that gift to the Germans, and of
establishing our difference from them a little ungraciously and at their
expense. The truth is, few people have any real care to analyse closely
in their criticism; they merely employ criticism as a means for heaping
all praise on what they like, and all blame on what they dislike. Those
of us (and they are many) who owe a great debt of gratitude to the German
spirit and to German literature, do not like to be told of any powers
being lacking there; we are like the young ladies who think the hero of
their novel is only half a hero unless he has all perfections united in
him. But nature does not work, either in heroes or races, according to
the young ladies’ notion. We all are what we are, the hero and the great
nation are what they are, by our limitations as well as by our powers, by
lacking something as well as by possessing something. It is not always
gain to possess this or that gift, or loss to lack this or that gift.
Our great, our only first-rate body of contemporary poetry is the German;
the grand business of modern poetry,—a moral interpretation, from an
independent point of view, of man and the world,—it is only German
poetry, Goethe’s poetry, that has, since the Greeks, made much way with.
Campbell’s power of style, and the natural magic of Keats and Wordsworth,
and Byron’s Titanic personality, may be wanting to this poetry; but see
what it has accomplished without them! How much more than Campbell with
his power of style, and Keats and Wordsworth with their natural magic,
and Byron with his Titanic personality! Why, for the immense serious
task it had to perform, the steadiness of German poetry, its going near
the ground, its patient fidelity to nature, its using great plainness of
speech, poetical drawbacks in one point of view, were safeguards and
helps in another. The plainness and earnestness of the two lines I have
already quoted from Goethe:—
Es bildet ein Talent sich in der Stille,
Sich ein Character in dem Strom der Welt—
compared with the play and power of Shakspeare’s style or Dante’s,
suggest at once the difference between Goethe’s task and theirs, and the
fitness of the faithful laborious German spirit for its own task.
Dante’s task was to set forth the lesson of the world from the point of
view of mediæval Catholicism; the basis of spiritual life was given,
Dante had not to make this anew. Shakspeare’s task was to set forth the
spectacle of the world when man’s spirit re-awoke to the possession of
the world at the Renaissance. The spectacle of human life, left to bear
its own significance and tell its own story, but shown in all its
fulness, variety, and power, is at that moment the great matter; but, if
we are to press deeper, the basis of spiritual life is still at that time
the traditional religion, reformed or unreformed, of Christendom, and
Shakspeare has not to supply a new basis. But when Goethe came, Europe
had lost her basis of spiritual life; she had to find it again; Goethe’s
task was,—the inevitable task for the modern poet henceforth is,—as it
was for the Greek poet in the days of Pericles, not to preach a sublime
sermon on a given text like Dante, not to exhibit all the kingdoms of
human life and the glory of them like Shakspeare, but to interpret human
life afresh, and to supply a new spiritual basis to it. This is not only
a work for style, eloquence, charm, poetry; it is a work for science; and
the scientific, serious German spirit, not carried away by this and that
intoxication of ear, and eye, and self-will, has peculiar aptitudes for
it.
We, on the other hand, do not necessarily gain by the commixture of
elements in us; we have seen how the clashing of natures in us hampers
and embarrasses our behaviour; we might very likely be more attractive,
we might very likely be more successful, if we were all of a piece. Our
want of sureness of taste, our eccentricity, come in great measure, no
doubt, from our not being all of a piece, from our having no fixed,
fatal, spiritual centre of gravity. The Rue de Rivoli is one thing, and
Nuremberg is another, and Stonehenge is another; but we have a turn for
all three, and lump them all up together. Mr. Tom Taylor’s translations
from Breton poetry offer a good example of this mixing; he has a genuine
feeling for these Celtic matters, and often, as in the _Evil Tribute of
Nomenoë_, or in _Lord Nann and the Fairy_, he is, both in movement and
expression, true and appropriate; but he has a sort of Teutonism and
Latinism in him too, and so he cannot forbear mixing with his Celtic
strain such disparates as:—
’Twas mirk, mirk night, and the water bright
Troubled and drumlie flowed—
which is evidently Lowland-Scotchy; or as:—
Foregad, but thou’rt an artful hand!
which is English-stagey; or as:—
To Gradlon’s daughter, bright of blee,
Her lover he whispered tenderly—
_Bethink thee_, _sweet Dahut_! _the key_!
which is Anacreontic in the manner of Tom Moore. Yes, it is not a sheer
advantage to have several strings to one’s bow! if we had been all
German, we might have had the science of Germany; if we had been all
Celtic, we might have been popular and agreeable; if we had been all
Latinised, we might have governed Ireland as the French govern Alsace,
without getting ourselves detested. But now we have Germanism enough to
make us Philistines, and Normanism enough to make us imperious, and
Celtism enough to make us self-conscious and awkward; but German fidelity
to Nature, and Latin precision and clear reason, and Celtic
quick-wittedness and spirituality, we fall short of. Nay, perhaps, if we
are doomed to perish (Heaven avert the omen!), we shall perish by our
Celtism, by our self-will and want of patience with ideas, our inability
to see the way the world is going; and yet those very Celts, by our
affinity with whom we are perishing, will be hating and upbraiding us all
the time.
This is a somewhat unpleasant view to take of the matter; but if it is
true, its being unpleasant does not make it any less true, and we are
always the better for seeing the truth. What we here see is not the
whole truth, however. So long as this mixed constitution of our nature
possesses us, we pay it tribute and serve it; so soon as we possess it,
it pays us tribute and serves us. So long as we are blindly and
ignorantly rolled about by the forces of our nature, their contradiction
baffles us and lames us; so soon as we have clearly discerned what they
are, and begun to apply to them a law of measure, control, and guidance,
they may be made to work for our good and to carry us forward. Then we
may have the good of our German part, the good of our Latin part, the
good of our Celtic part; and instead of one part clashing with the other,
we may bring it in to continue and perfect the other, when the other has
given us all the good it can yield, and by being pressed further, could
only give us its faulty excess. Then we may use the German faithfulness
to Nature to give us science, and to free us from insolence and
self-will; we may use the Celtic quickness of perception to give us
delicacy, and to free us from hardness and Philistinism; we may use the
Latin decisiveness to give us strenuous clear method, and to free us from
fumbling and idling. Already, in their untrained state, these elements
give signs, in our life and literature, of their being present in us, and
a kind of prophecy of what they could do for us if they were properly
observed, trained, and applied. But this they have not yet been; we ride
one force of our nature to death; we will be nothing but Anglo-Saxons in
the Old World or in the New; and when our race has built Bold Street,
Liverpool, and pronounced it very good, it hurries across the Atlantic,
and builds Nashville, and Jacksonville, and Milledgeville, and thinks it
is fulfilling the designs of Providence in an incomparable manner. But
true Anglo-Saxons, simply and sincerely rooted in the German nature, we
are not and cannot be; all we have accomplished by our onesidedness is to
blur and confuse the natural basis in ourselves altogether, and to become
something eccentric, unattractive, and inharmonious.
A man of exquisite intelligence and charming character, the late Mr.
Cobden, used to fancy that a better acquaintance with the United States
was the grand panacea for us; and once in a speech he bewailed the
inattention of our seats of learning to them, and seemed to think that if
our ingenuous youth at Oxford were taught a little less about Ilissus,
and a little more about Chicago, we should all be the better for it.
Chicago has its claims upon us, no doubt; but it is evident that from the
point of view to which I have been leading, a stimulation of our
Anglo-Saxonism, such as is intended by Mr. Cobden’s proposal, does not
appear the thing most needful for us; seeing our American brothers
themselves have rather, like us, to try and moderate the flame of
Anglo-Saxonism in their own breasts, than to ask us to clap the bellows
to it in ours. So I am inclined to beseech Oxford, instead of expiating
her over-addiction to the Ilissus by lectures on Chicago, to give us an
expounder for a still more remote-looking object than the Ilissus,—the
Celtic languages and literature. And yet why should I call it remote?
if, as I have been labouring to show, in the spiritual frame of us
English ourselves, a Celtic fibre, little as we may have ever thought of
tracing it, lives and works. _Aliens in speech_, _in religion_, _in
blood_! said Lord Lyndhurst; the philologists have set him right about
the speech, the physiologists about the blood; and perhaps, taking
religion in the wide but true sense of our whole spiritual activity,
those who have followed what I have been saying here will think that the
Celt is not so wholly alien to us in religion. But, at any rate, let us
consider that of the shrunken and diminished remains of this great
primitive race, all, with one insignificant exception, belongs to the
English empire; only Brittany is not ours; we have Ireland, the Scotch
Highlands, Wales, the Isle of Man, Cornwall. They are a part of
ourselves, we are deeply interested in knowing them, they are deeply
interested in being known by us; and yet in the great and rich
universities of this great and rich country there is no chair of Celtic,
there is no study or teaching of Celtic matters; those who want them must
go abroad for them. It is neither right nor reasonable that this should
be so. Ireland has had in the last half century a band of Celtic
students,—a band with which death, alas! has of late been busy,—from
whence Oxford or Cambridge might have taken an admirable professor of
Celtic; and with the authority of a university chair, a great Celtic
scholar, on a subject little known, and where all would have readily
deferred to him, might have by this time doubled our facilities for
knowing the Celt, by procuring for this country Celtic documents which
were inaccessible here, and preventing the dispersion of others which
were accessible. It is not much that the English Government does for
science or literature; but if Eugene O’Curry, from a chair of Celtic at
Oxford, had appealed to the Government to get him copies or the originals
of the Celtic treasures in the Burgundian Library at Brussels, or in the
library of St. Isidore’s College at Rome, even the English Government
could not well have refused him. The invaluable Irish manuscripts in the
Stowe Library the late Sir Robert Peel proposed, in 1849, to buy for the
British Museum; Lord Macaulay, one of the trustees of the Museum,
declared, with the confident shallowness which makes him so admired by
public speakers and leading-article writers, and so intolerable to all
searchers for truth, that he saw nothing in the whole collection worth
purchasing for the Museum, except the correspondence of Lord Melville on
the American war. That is to say, this correspondence of Lord Melville’s
was the only thing in the collection about which Lord Macaulay himself
knew or cared. Perhaps an Oxford or Cambridge professor of Celtic might
have been allowed to make his voice heard, on a matter of Celtic
manuscripts, even against Lord Macaulay. The manuscripts were bought by
Lord Ashburnham, who keeps them shut up, and will let no one consult them
(at least up to the date when O’Curry published his _Lectures_ he did
so), ‘for fear an actual acquaintance with their contents should decrease
their value as matter of curiosity at some future transfer or sale.’ Who
knows? Perhaps an Oxford professor of Celtic might have touched the
flinty heart of Lord Ashburnham.
At this moment, when the narrow Philistinism which has long had things
its own way in England, is showing its natural fruits, and we are
beginning to feel ashamed, and uneasy, and alarmed at it; now, when we
are becoming aware that we have sacrificed to Philistinism culture, and
insight, and dignity, and acceptance, and weight among the nations, and
hold on events that deeply concern us, and control of the future, and yet
that it cannot even give us the fool’s paradise it promised us, but is
apt to break down, and to leave us with Mr. Roebuck’s and Mr. Lowe’s
laudations of our matchless happiness, and the largest circulation in the
world assured to the _Daily Telegraph_, for our only comfort; at such a
moment it needs some moderation not to be attacking Philistinism by
storm, but to mine it through such gradual means as the slow approaches
of culture, and the introduction of chairs of Celtic. But the hard
unintelligence, which is just now our bane, cannot be conquered by storm;
it must be suppled and reduced by culture, by a growth in the variety,
fulness, and sweetness of our spiritual life; and this end can only be
reached by studying things that are outside of ourselves, and by studying
them disinterestedly. Let us reunite ourselves with our better mind and
with the world through science; and let it be one of our angelic revenges
on the Philistines, who among their other sins are the guilty authors of
Fenianism, to found at Oxford a chair of Celtic, and to send, through the
gentle ministration of science, a message of peace to Ireland.