England, which has given models to Europe of the most masterly
productions in every class of learning and every province of genius, so
late as within the last three centuries was herself destitute of a
national literature. Even enlightened Europe itself amid the revolving
ages of time is but of yesterday.
How "that was performed in our tongue, which may be compared or
preferred, either to insolent Greece or haughty Rome,"[1] becomes a tale
in the history of the human mind.
In the history of an insular race and in a site so peculiar as our own,
a people whom the ocean severed from all nations, where are we to seek
for our ABORIGINES? A Welsh triad, and a Welsh is presumed to be a
British, has commemorated an epoch when these mighty realms were a
region of impenetrable forests and impassable morasses, and their sole
tenants were wolves, bears, and beavers, and wild cattle. Who were the
first human beings in this lone world?
Every people have had a fabulous age. Priests and poets invented, and
traditionists expatiated; we discover gods who seem to have been men, or
men who resemble gods; we read in the form of prose what had once been a
poem; imaginations so wildly constructed, and afterwards as strangely
allegorised, served as the milky food of the children of society,
quieting their vague curiosity, and circumscribing the illimitable
unknown. The earliest epoch of society is unapproachable to human
inquiry. Greece, with all her ambiguous poetry, was called "the
mendacious;" credulous Rome rested its faith on five centuries of
legends; and our Albion dates from that unhistorical period when, as our
earliest historian, the Monk of Monmouth, aiming at probability,
affirms, "there were but a few giants in the land,"[2] and these the
more melancholy Gildas, to familiarise us with hell itself, accompanied
by "a few devils." Every people however long acknowledged, with national
pride, beings as fabulous, in those tutelary heroes who bore their own
names.
The landing of Brutus with his fugitive Trojans on "the White Island,"
and here founding a "Troynovant," was one of the results of the
immortality of Homer, though it came reflected through his imitator
Virgil, whose Latin in the mediaeval ages was read when Greek was
unknown. The landing of Aeneas on the shores of Italy, and the pride of
the Romans in their Trojan ancestry, as their flattering Epic
sanctioned, every modern people, in their jealousy of antiquity, eagerly
adopted, and claimed a lineal descent from some of this spurious progeny
of Priam. The idle humour of the learned flattered the imaginations of
their countrymen; and each, in his own land, raised up a fictitious
personage who was declared to have left his name to the people. The
excess of their patriotism exposed their forgeries, while every
pretended Trojan betrayed a Gothic name. France had its Francion,
Ireland its Iberus, the Danes their Danus, and the Saxons their Saxo.
The descent of Brutus into Britain is even tenderly touched by so late a
writer as our CAMDEN; for while he abstains from affording us either
denial or assent, he expends his costly erudition in furnishing every
refutation which had been urged against the preposterous existence of
these fabulous founders of every European people.
Such is the corruption of the earliest history, either to gratify the
idle pride of a people, or to give completeness to inquiries extending
beyond human knowledge. Even BUCHANAN, to gratify the ancestral vanity
of his countrymen, has recorded the names of three hundred fabulous
monarchs, and presents a nomenclature without an event; and in his
classical latinity we must silently drop a thousand unhistorical years.
Even HENRY and WHITAKER, in the gravity of English history, sketched the
manners and the characteristics of an unchronicled generation from the
fragmentary romances of Ossian.
Caesar imagined that the inhabitants of the interior of Britain, a
fiercer people than the dwellers on the coasts, were an indigenous race.
But the philosophy of Caesar did not exceed that of Horace and Ovid, who
conceived no other origin of man than _Mater Terra_. Man indeed was
formed out of "the dust of the ground," but the Divine Spirit alone
could have dictated the history of primeval man in the solitude of Eden.
To Caesar was not revealed that man was an oriental creature; that a
single locality served as the cradle of the human race; and that the
generations of man were the offspring of a single pair, when once "the
whole earth was of one language and of one speech." "And there is no
antiquity but this that can tell _any other beginning_," exclaims our
honest VERSTEGAN, exulting in his Teutonic blood, while furnishing an
extraordinary evidence of the retreat of Tuisco and his Teutons from the
conspiracy against the skies.[3]
The dispersion of Babel, and, consequently, the diversity of languages,
is the mysterious link which connects sacred and profane history. There
is but a single point whence human nature begins--the universe has been
populated by migrations. Wherever the human being is found, he has been
transplanted; however varied in structure and dissimilar in dialect, the
first inhabitants of every land were not born there: unlike plants and
animals, which seem coeval with the region in which they are found,
never removing from the soil they occupy. Thus the miracle of Holy Writ
solves the enigmas of philosophical theories; of more than one Adam, of
distinct stocks of mankind, and of the mechanism of language--vague
conjectures, and contested opinions! which have left us without even a
conception how the human being is white, or tawny, or sable; or how the
first letters of the alphabet are Aleph and Bet, or Alpha and Beta, or A
and B!
In tracing the origin of nations later speculators have therefore more
discreetly, though not wanting in hardy conjectures or fanciful
affinities, conducted people after people, from the mysterious fount of
human existence in the Asian region. Through countless centuries they
have followed the myriads who, propelling each other, took the right or
the left, as chance led them: vanished nations may have received names
which they themselves might not have recognised. Kelt or Kimmerian,
Scandinavian or Goth, Phoenician or Iberian, have been hurried to the
Isles of Britain. Their tale is older, though less "divine," than the
tale of Troy; and the difficulty remains to unravel the reality of the
fabulous. The learned have rarely satisfied their consciences in
arranging their dates in the confusion of unnoted time; nor in that
other confusion of races, often mingling together under one common
appellative, have they always agreed in assigning that ancient people
who were the progenitors of the modern nation; and the aborigines have
been more than once described as "an ancient people whose name is
unknown." In the pride of erudition, and the irascibility of
confutation, they have involved themselves in interminable discussions,
yet one might be seduced to adopt any hypothesis, for more or less each
bears some ambiguous evidence, or some startling circumstance sufficient
to rock the dreaming antiquary, and to kindle the bitter blood of
pedantic patriots. The origin of the population of Europe and the first
inhabitants of our British Isles has produced some antiquarian romances,
often ingenious and amusing, till the romances turn out to be mere
polemics, and give us angry words amid the most quaint fancies. This
theme, still continued, becomes a cavern of antiquity, where many waving
their torches, the light has sometimes fallen on an unperceived angle;
but the scattered light has shown the depth and the darkness.
Among those shadows of time we grasp at one certainty. Whoever might be
the first-comers to this solitary island, when we obtain any knowledge
of the inhabitants, we are struck by their close resemblance to those
tribes of savage life whom our navigators have discovered, and who are
now found in almost a primitive state among that innumerable cluster of
what has recently been designated the Polynesian Isles. The aborigines
of Britain took the same modes of existence, and fell into similar
customs. We discover their rude population divided into jealous tribes,
in perpetual battle with one another; they lived in what Hobbes has
called the _status belli_, with no notion of the _meum_ and _tuum_; in
the same community of their women as was found in Otaheite;[4] and with
the same ignorance of property, when its representative in some form was
not yet invented. Our aborigines resembled these races even in their
personal appearance; a Polynesian chief has been drawn and coloured
after the life, and the figure exhibits the perfect picture of an
ancient Briton, almost naked, the body painted red; the British savage
chose blue, and made deep incisions in the flesh to insert his indelible
woad.[5] The fierce eye, and the bearded lip, with the long hair
scattered to the waist, exhibit the Briton as he was seen by Caesar, and,
a century afterwards, as the British monarch Caractacus appeared before
the Emperor Claudius at Rome: his sole ornaments consisted of an iron
collar, and an iron girdle; but as his naked majesty had his skin
painted with figures of animals, however rudely, this was probably a
distinctive dress of British royalty. These Britons lived in thick
woods, herding among circular huts of reed, as we find other tribes in
this early state of society; and submissive to the absolute dominion of
a priesthood of magicians, as we find even among the Esquimaux; and
performing sanguinary rites, similar to those of the ancient Mexicans:
we are struck with the conviction that men in a parallel condition
remain but uniform beings.
It seems a solecism in the intellectual history of man to discover among
such a semi-barbarous people a government of sages, who, we are assured,
"invented and taught such philosophy and other learning as were never
read of nor heard of by any men before."[6] This paradoxical incident
deepens in mystery when we are to be taught that the druidical
institution of Britain was Pythagorean, or patriarchal, or Brahminical.
The presumed encyclopedic knowledge which this order possessed, and the
singular customs which they practised, have afforded sufficient
analogies and affinities to maintain the occult and remote origin of
Druidism. Nor has this notion been the mere phantom of modern
system-makers. It was a subject of inquiry among the ancients whether
the Druids had received their singular art of teaching by secret
initiation, and the prohibition of all writing, with their doctrine of
the pre-existence and transmigration of souls, from Pythagoras; or,
whether this philosopher in his universal travels had not alighted among
the Druids, and had passed through their initiation?[7] This discussion
is not yet obsolete, and it may still offer all the gust of novelty. A
Welsh antiquary, according to the spirit of Welsh antiquity, insists
that the Druidical system of the Metempsychosis was conveyed to the
Brahmins of India by a former emigration from Wales; but the reverse may
have occurred, if we trust the elaborate researches which copiously
would demonstrate that the Druids were a scion of the oriental
family.[8] Every point of the Druidical history, from its mysterious
antiquity, may terminate with reversing the proposition. A recent writer
confidently intimated that the knowledge of Druidism must be searched
for in the Talmudical writings; but another, in return, asserts that the
Druids were older than the Jews.
Whence and when the British Druids transplanted themselves to this lone
world amid the ocean, bringing with them all the wisdom of far
antiquity, to an uncivilized race, is one of those events in the history
of man which no historian can write. It is evident that they long
preserved what they had brought; since the Druids of Gaul were fain to
resort to the Druids of Britain to renovate their instruction.
The Druids have left no record of themselves; they seem to have
disdained an immortality separate from the existence of their order; but
the shadow of their glory is reflected for ever in the verse of Lucan,
and the prose of Caesar. The poet imagined that if the knowledge of the
gods was known to man, it had been alone revealed to these priests of
Britain. The narrative of the historian is comprehensive, but, with all
the philosophical cast of his mind and the intensity of his curiosity,
Caesar was not a Druid;[9] and only a Druid could have written--had he
dared!--on DRUIDHEACHT--a sacred, unspeakable word at which the people
trembled in their veneration.
The British Druids constituted a sacred and a secret society, religious,
political, and literary. In the rude mechanism of society in a state of
pupilage, the first elements of government, however gross, or even
puerile, were the levers to lift and to sustain the unhewn masses of the
barbaric mind. Invested with all privileges and immunities, amid that
transient omnipotence which man in his first feeble condition can
confer, the wild children of society crouched together before those
illusions which superstition so easily forges; but the supernatural
dominion lay in the secret thoughts of the people; the marauder had not
the daring to touch the open treasure as it lay in the consecrated
grove; and a single word from a Druid for ever withered a human being,
"cut down like grass." The loyalty of the land was a religion of wonder
and fear, and to dispute with a Druid was a state crime.
They were a secret society, for whatever was taught was forbidden to be
written; and not only their doctrines and their sciences were veiled in
this sacred obscurity, but the laws which governed the community were
also oral. For the people, the laws, probably, were impartially
administered; for the Druids were not the people, and without their
sympathies, these judges at least sided with no party. But if these
sages, amid the conflicting interests of the multitude, seemed placed
above the vicissitudes of humanity, their own more solitary passions
were the stronger, violently compressed within a higher sphere:
ambition, envy, and revenge, those curses of nobler minds, often broke
their dreams. The election of an Arch-Druid was sometimes to be decided
by a battle. Some have been chronicled by a surname which indicates a
criminal. No king could act without a Druid by his side, for peace or
war were on his lips; and whenever the order made common cause, woe to
the kingdom![10] It was a terrible hierarchy. The golden knife which
pruned the mistletoe beneath the mystic oak, immolated the human victim.
The Druids were the common fathers of the British youth, for they were
the sole educators; but the genius of the order admitted of no inept
member. For the acolyte unendowed with the faculty of study all
initiation ceased; nature herself had refused this youth the glory of
Druidism; but he was taught the love of his country. The Druidical lyre
kindled patriotism through the land, and the land was saved--for the
Druids!
The Druidical custom of unwritten instruction was ingeniously suggested
by Cicero, as designed to prevent their secret doctrines from being
divulged to those unworthy or ill fitted to receive them, and to
strengthen the memory of their votaries by its continued exercise; but
we may suspect, that this barbarous custom of this most ancient sodality
began at a period when they themselves neither read nor wrote, destitute
of an alphabet of their own; for when the Druids had learned from the
Greeks their characters, they adopted them in all their public and
private affairs. We learn that the Druidical sciences were contained in
twenty thousand verses, which were to prompt their perpetual memory.
Such traditional science could not be very progressive; what was to be
got by rote no disciple would care to consider obsolete, and a century
might elapse without furnishing an additional couplet. The Druids, like
some other institutions of antiquity, by not perpetuating their
doctrines, or their secrets, in this primeval state of theology and
philosophy, by writing, have effectually concealed their own puerile
simplicity. But the monuments of a people remain to perpetuate their
character. We may judge of the genius or state of the Druidical arts and
sciences by such objects. We are told that the Druids were so wholly
devoted to nature, that they prohibited the use of any tool in the
construction of their rude works; all are unhewn masses, or heaps of
stones; such are their cairns and cromleches and corneddes, and that
wild architecture whose stones hang on one another, still frowning on
the plains of Salisbury.[11] A circle of stones marked the consecrated
limits of the Druidical tribunal; and in the midst a hillock heaped up
for the occasion was the judgment-seat. Here, in the open air, in "the
eye of light and the face of the sun," to use the bardic style, the
decrees were pronounced, and the Druids harangued the people. Such a
scene was exhibited by the Hebrew patriarchs, from whom some imagined
these Druids descended; but whether or not the Celtic be of this origin
we must not decide by any analogous manners or customs, because these
are nearly similar, wherever we trace a primitive race--so uniform is
nature, till art, infinitely various, conceals nature herself.
In the depth of antiquity, misty superstition and pristine tradition
gave a false magnitude to the founders of human knowledge; and our own
literary historians who have been over-curious about "the Genesis" of
their antiquities, have inveigled us into the mystic groves of Druidism
in all their cloudy obscurity. The "Antiquities of the University of
Oxford" open with "the Originals of Learning in this Nation;" and our
antiquary discerns the first shadowings of the University of Oxford in
"the universal knowledge" of the Druidical institution in "ethics,
politics, civil law, divinity, and poetry." Such are the reveries of an
antiquary.