{0a} See p. 28 of the following essay. [Starts with “It is not
difficult for the other side . . . ”—DP.]
{0b} See particularly pp. 9, 10, 11, of the following essay.
{4} Lord Strangford remarks on this passage:—‘Your Gomer and your
Cimmerians are of course only lay figures, to be accepted in the
rhetorical and subjective sense. As such I accept them, but I enter a
protest against the “genuine tongue of his ancestors.” Modern Celtic
tongues are to the old Celtic heard by Julius Cæsar, broadly speaking,
what the modern Romanic tongues are to Cæsar’s own Latin. Welsh, in
fact, is a _detritus_; a language in the category of modern French, or,
to speak less roughly and with a closer approximation, of old Provençal,
not in the category of Lithuanian, much less in the category of Basque.
By true inductive research, based on an accurate comparison of such forms
of Celtic speech, oral and recorded, as we now possess, modern philology
has, in so far as was possible, succeeded in restoring certain forms of
the parent speech, and in so doing has achieved not the least striking of
its many triumphs; for those very forms thus restored have since been
verified past all cavil by their actual discovery in the old Gaulish
inscriptions recently come to light. The _phonesis_ of Welsh as it
stands is modern, not primitive its grammar,—the verbs excepted,—is
constructed out of the fragments of its earlier forms, and its vocabulary
is strongly Romanised, two out of the six words here given being Latin of
the Empire. Rightly understood, this enhances the value of modern Celtic
instead of depreciating it, because it serves to rectify it. To me it is
a wonder that Welsh should have retained so much of its integrity under
the iron pressure of four hundred years of Roman dominion. Modern Welsh
tenacity and cohesive power under English pressure is nothing compared
with what that must have been.’
{14} Here again let me have the pleasure of quoting Lord
Strangford:—‘When the Celtic tongues were first taken in hand at the dawn
of comparative philological inquiry, the tendency was, for all practical
results, to separate them from the Indo-European aggregate, rather than
to unite them with it. The great gulf once fixed between them was
narrowed on the surface, but it was greatly and indefinitely deepened.
Their vocabulary and some of their grammar were seen at once to be
perfectly Indo-European, but they had no case-endings to their nouns,
none at all in Welsh, none that could be understood in Gaelic; their
_phonesis_ seemed primeval and inexplicable, and nothing could be made
out of their pronouns which could not be equally made out of many wholly
un-Aryan languages. They were therefore co-ordinated, not with each
single Aryan tongue, but with the general complex of Aryan tongues, and
were conceived to be anterior to them and apart from them, as it were the
strayed vanguard of European colonisation or conquest from the East. The
reason of this misconception was, that their records lay wholly
uninvestigated as far as all historical study of the language was
concerned, and that nobody troubled himself about the relative age and
the development of forms, so that the philologists were fain to take them
as they were put into their hands by uncritical or perverse native
commentators and writers, whose grammars and dictionaries teemed with
blunders and downright forgeries. One thing, and one thing alone, led to
the truth: the sheer drudgery of thirteen long years spent by Zeuss in
the patient investigation of the most ancient Celtic records, in their
actual condition, line by line and letter by letter. Then for the first
time the foundation of Celtic research was laid; but the great
philologist did not live to see the superstructure which never could have
been raised but for him. Prichard was first to indicate the right path,
and Bopp, in his monograph of 1839, displayed his incomparable and
masterly sagacity as usual, but for want of any trustworthy record of
Celtic words and forms to work upon, the truth remained concealed or
obscured until the publication of the _Gramatica Celtica_. Dr. Arnold, a
man of the past generation, who made more use of the then uncertain and
unfixed doctrines of comparative philology in his historical writings
than is done by the present generation in the fullest noonday light of
the _Vergleichende Grammatik_, was thus justified in his view by the
philology of the period, to which he merely gave an enlarged historical
expression. The prime fallacy then as now, however, was that of
antedating the distinction between Gaelic and Cymric Celts.’
{25} Dr. O’Conor in his _Catalogue of the Stowe MSS._ (quoted by
O’Curry).
{26} O’Curry.
{29} Here, where Saturday should come, something is wanting in the
manuscript.
{66} See _Les Scythes_, _les Ancêtres des Peuples Germaniques et
Slaves_, par F. G. Bergmann, professeur à la faculté des Lettres de
Strasbourg: Colmar, 1858. But Professor Bergmann’s etymologies are
often, says Lord Strangford, ‘false lights, held by an uncertain hand.’
And Lord Strangford continues:—‘The Apian land certainly meant the watery
land, _Meer-Umschlungon_, among the pre-Hellenic Greeks, just as the same
land is called Morea by the modern post-Hellenic or Romaic Greeks from
_more_, the name for the sea in the Slavonic vernacular of its
inhabitants during the heart of the middle ages. But it is only
connected by a remote and secondary affinity, if connected at all, with
the _avia_ of Scandinavia, assuming that to be the true German word for
_water_, which, if it had come down to us in Gothic, would have been
_avi_, genitive _aujôs_, and not a mere Latinised termination. Scythian
is surely a negative rather than a positive term, much like our _Indian_,
or the _Turanian_ of modern ethnologists, used to comprehend nomads and
barbarians of all sorts and races north and east of the Black and Caspian
seas. It is unsafe to connect their name with anything as yet; it is
quite as likely that it refers to the bow and arrow as to the shield, and
is connected with our word to _shoot_, _sceótan_, _skiutan_, Lithuanian
_szau-ti_. Some of the Scythian peoples may have been Anarian,
Allophylic, Mongolian; some were demonstrably Aryan, and not only that,
but Iranian as well, as is best shown in a memoir read before the Berlin
Academy this last year; the evidence having been first indicated in the
rough by Schaffarik the Slavonic antiquary. Coins, glosses, proper
names, and inscriptions prove it. Targitaos (not -tavus) and the rest is
guess-work or wrong. Herodotus’s Ταβιτι for the goddess Vesta is not
connected with the root _div_ whence Dêvas, Deus, &c., but the root
_tap_, in Latin _tep_ (of tepere, tepefacere), Slavonic _tepl_, _topl_
(for _tep_ or _top_), in modern Persian _tâb_. _Thymele_ refers to the
hearth as the place of smoke (θύω, _thus_, _fumus_), but _familia_
denotes household from _famulus_ for _fagmulus_, the root _fag_ being
equated with the Sansk. _bhaj_, _servira_. Lucan’s Hesus or Esus may
fairly be compared with the Welsh _Hu_ Gadarn by legitimate process, but
no letter-change can justify his connection with _Gaisos_, the spear, not
the sword, Virgil’s _gæsum_, A. S. _gár_, our verb to _gore_, retained in
its outer form in _gar_-fish. For _Theuthisks lege Thiudisks_, from
_thiuda_, _populus_; in old high German Diutisk, Diotisk, _popularis_,
_vulgaris_, the country vernacular as distinguished from the cultivated
Latin; hence the word _Dutch_, _Deutsch_. With our ancestors _theód_
stood for nation generally and _getheóde_ for any speech. Our diet in
the political sense is the same word, but borrowed from our German
cousins, not inherited from our fathers. The modern Celtic form is the
Irish _tuath_, in ancient Celtic it must have been _teuta_, _touta_, of
which we actually have the adjective _toutius_ in the Gaulish inscription
of Nismes. In Oscan we have it as _turta_, _tuta_, its adjective being
handed down in Livy’s _meddix tuticus_, the mayor or chief magistrate of
the _tuta_. In the Umbrian inscriptions it is _tota_. In Lithuanian
_tauta_, the country opposed to the town, and in old Prussian _tauta_,
the country generally, _en Prusiskan tautan_, _im Land zu Preussen_.’
{68} Lord Strangford observes here:—‘The original forms of Gael should
be mentioned—Gaedil, Goidil: in modern Gaelic orthography Gaoidheal where
the _dh_ is not realised in pronunciation. There is nothing impossible
in the connection of the root of this with that of Scot, _if_ the _s_ of
the latter be merely prosthetic. But the whole thing is _in nubibus_,
and given as a guess only.’
{69} ‘The name of Erin,’ says Lord Strangford, ‘is treated at length in
a masterly note by Whitley Stokes in the 1st series of Max Müller’s
lectures (4th ed.) p. 255, where its earliest _tangible_ form is shown to
have been Iverio. Pictet’s connection with Arya is quite baseless.’
{82} It is to be remembered that the above was written before the recent
war between Prussia and Austria.
{84} The etymology is Monsieur Henri Martin’s, but Lord Strangford
says—‘Whatever _gai_ may be, it is assuredly not Celtic. Is there any
authority for this word _gair_, to laugh, or rather “laughter,” beyond
O’Reilly? O’Reilly is no authority at all except in so far as tested and
passed by the new school. It is hard to give up _gavisus_. But Diez,
chief authority in Romanic matters, is content to accept Muratori’s
reference to an old High-German _gâhi_, modern _jähe_, sharp, quick,
sudden, brisk, and so to the sense of lively, animated, high in spirits.’
{85} Monsieur Henri Martin, whose chapters on the Celts, in his
_Histoire de France_, are full of information and interest.
{97} The above is really a sentence taken from the _Cologne Gazette_.
Lord Strangford’s comment here is as follows:—‘Modern Germanism, in a
general estimate of Germanism, should not be taken, absolutely and
necessarily, as the constant, whereof we are the variant. The Low-Dutch
of Holland, anyhow, are indisputably as genuine Dutch as the High-Dutch
of Germany Proper. But do they write sentences like this one—_informe_,
_ingens_, _cui lumen ademptum_? If not, the question must be asked, not
how we have come to deviate, but how the Germans have come to deviate.
Our modern English prose in plain matters is often all just the same as
the prose of _King Alfred_ and the _Chronicle_. Ohthere’s _North Sea
Voyage_ and Wulfstan’s _Baltic Voyage_ is the sort of thing which is sent
in every day, one may say, to the Geographical or Ethnological Society,
in the whole style and turn of phrase and thought.’
The mass of a stock must supply our data for judging the stock. But see,
moreover, what I have said at p. 100.
{120} Lord Strangford’s note on this is:—‘The Irish monks whose bells
and books were found in Iceland could not have contributed anything to
the old Norse spirit, for they had perished before the first Norseman had
set foot on the island. The form of the old Norse poetry known to us as
Icelandic, from the accident of its preservation in that island alone, is
surely Pan-Teutonic from old times; the ar and method of its strictly
literary cultivation must have been much influenced by the contemporary
Old-English national poetry, with which the Norsemen were in constant
contact; and its larger, freer, and wilder spirit must have been owing to
their freer and wilder life, to say nothing of their roused and warring
paganism. They could never have known any Celts save when living in
embryo with other Teutons.’
Very likely Lord Strangford is right, but the proposition with which he
begins is at variance with what the text quoted by Zeuss alleges.
{133} Rhyme,—the most striking characteristic of our modern poetry as
distinguished from that of the ancients, and a main source, to our
poetry, of its magic and charm, of what we call its _romantic
element_,—rhyme itself, all the weight of evidence tends to show, comes
into our poetry from the Celts.
{136} Take the following attempt to render the natural magic supposed to
pervade Tieck’s poetry:—‘In diesen Dichtungen herrscht eine
geheimnissvolle Innigkeit, ein sonderbares Einverständniss mit der Natur,
besonders mit der Pflanzen—und Steinreich. Der Leser fühlt sich da wie
in einem verzauberten Walde; er hört die unterirdischen Quellen melodisch
rauschen; wildfremde Wunderblumen schauen ihn an mit ihren bunten
schnsüchtigen Augen; unsichtbare Lippen küssen seine Wangen mit neckender
Zärtlichkeit; _hohe Pilze_, _wie goldne Glocken_, _wachsen klingend empor
am Fusse der Bäume_;’ and so on. Now that stroke of the _hohe Pilze_,
the great funguses, would have been impossible to the tact and delicacy
of a born lover of nature like the Celt, and could only have come from a
German who has _hineinstudirt_ himself into natural magic. It is a
crying false note, which carries us at once out of the world of
nature-magic and the breath of the woods, into the world of theatre-magic
and the smell of gas and orange-peel.