mountain. Let men see, let them know, a real man, who lives as he was
meant to live. If they cannot endure him, let them kill him. For that is
better than to live as men do."[242]
It is remarkable how little of a merely local and temporary character,
how little of those _scoriæ_ which a reader has to clear away before he
gets to the precious ore, how little that even admits of doubt or
question, the morality of Marcus Aurelius exhibits. Perhaps as to one
point we must make an exception. Marcus Aurelius is fond of urging as a
motive for man's cheerful acquiescence in whatever befalls him, that
"whatever happens to every man _is for the interest of the
universal_";[243] that the whole contains nothing _which is not for its
advantage_; that everything which happens to a man is to be accepted,
"even if it seems disagreeable, _because it leads to the health of the
universe_."[244] And the whole course of the universe, he adds, has a
providential reference to man's welfare: "_all other things have been
made for the sake of rational beings_."[245] Religion has in all ages
freely used this language, and it is not religion which will object to
Marcus Aurelius's use of it; but science can hardly accept as severely
accurate this employment of the terms _interest_ and _advantage_. To a
sound nature and a clear reason the proposition that things happen "for
the interest of the universal," as men conceive of interest, may seem to
have no meaning at all, and the proposition that "all things have been
made for the sake of rational beings" may seem to be false. Yet even to
this language, not irresistibly cogent when it is thus absolutely used,
Marcus Aurelius gives a turn which makes it true and useful, when he
says: "The ruling part of man can make a material for itself out of that
which opposes it, as fire lays hold of what falls into it, and rises
higher by means of this very material";[246]--when he says: "What else
are all things except exercises for the reason? Persevere then until
thou shalt have made all things thine own, as the stomach which is
strengthened makes all things its own, as the blazing fire makes flame
and brightness out of everything that is thrown into it";[247]--when he
says: "Thou wilt not cease to be miserable till thy mind is in such a
condition, that, what luxury is to those who enjoy pleasure, such shall
be to thee, in every matter which presents itself, the doing of the
things which are conformable to man's constitution; for a man ought to
consider as an enjoyment everything which it is in his power to do
according to his own nature,--and it is in his power everywhere."[248]
In this sense it is, indeed, most true that "all things have been made
for the sake of rational beings"; that "all things work together for
good."
In general, however, the action Marcus Aurelius prescribes is action
which every sound nature must recognize as right, and the motives he
assigns are motives which every clear reason must recognize as valid.
And so he remains the especial friend and comforter of all clear-headed
and scrupulous, yet pure-hearted and upward striving men, in those ages
most especially that walk by sight, not by faith, but yet have no open
vision. He cannot give such souls, perhaps, all they yearn for, but he
gives them much; and what he gives them, they can receive.
Yet no, it is not for what he thus gives them that such souls love him
most! it is rather because of the emotion which lends to his voice so
touching an accent, it is because he too yearns as they do for something
unattained by him. What an affinity for Christianity had this persecutor
of the Christians! The effusion of Christianity, its relieving tears,
its happy self-sacrifice, were the very element, one feels, for which
his soul longed; they were near him, they brushed him, he touched them,
he passed them by. One feels, too, that the Marcus Aurelius one reads
must still have remained, even had Christianity been fully known to him,
in a great measure himself; he would have been no Justin;--but how would
Christianity have affected him? in what measure would it have changed
him? Granted that he might have found, like the _Alogi_[249] of modern
times, in the most beautiful of the Gospels, the Gospel which has
leavened Christendom most powerfully, the Gospel of St. John, too much
Greek metaphysics, too much _gnosis_;[250] granted that this Gospel
might have looked too like what he knew already to be a total surprise
to him: what, then, would he have said to the Sermon on the Mount, to
the twenty-sixth chapter of St. Matthew? What would have become of his
notions of the _exitiabilis superstitio_, of the "obstinacy of the
Christians"? Vain question! yet the greatest charm of Marcus Aurelius is
that he makes us ask it. We see him wise, just, self-governed, tender,
thankful, blameless; yet, with all this, agitated, stretching out his
arms for something beyond,--_tendentemque manus ripæ ulterioris
amore_.[251]
THE CONTRIBUTION OF THE CELTS TO ENGLISH LITERATURE[252]
If I were asked where English poetry got these three things, its turn
for style, its turn for melancholy, and its turn for natural magic, for
catching and rendering the charm of nature in a wonderfully near and
vivid way,--I should answer, with some doubt, that it got much of its
turn for style from a Celtic source; with less doubt, that it got much
of its melancholy from a Celtic source; with no doubt at all, that from
a Celtic source it got nearly all its natural magic.
Any German with penetration and tact in matters of literary criticism
will own that the principal deficiency of German poetry is in style;
that for style, in the highest sense, it shows but little feeling. Take
the eminent masters of style, the poets who best give the idea of what
the peculiar power which lies in style is--Pindar, Virgil, Dante,
Milton. An example of the peculiar effect which these poets produce, you
can hardly give from German poetry. Examples enough you can give from
German poetry of the effect produced by genius, thought, and feeling
expressing themselves in clear language, simple language, passionate
language, eloquent language, with harmony and melody: but not of the
peculiar effect exercised by eminent power of style. Every reader of
Dante can at once call to mind what the peculiar effect I mean is; I
spoke of it in my lectures on translating Homer, and there I took an
example of it from Dante, who perhaps manifests it more eminently than
any other poet.
But from Milton, too, one may take examples of it abundantly; compare
this from Milton:--
"... nor sometimes forget
Those other two equal with me in fate,
So were I equall'd with them in renown,
Blind Thamyris and blind Mæonides--"[253]
with this from Goethe:--
"Es bildet ein Talent sich in der Stille,
Sich ein Character in dem Strom der Welt."[254]
Nothing can be better in its way than the style in which Goethe there
presents his thought, but it is the style of prose as much as of poetry;
it is lucid, harmonious, earnest, eloquent, but it has not received that
peculiar kneading, heightening, and recasting which is observable in the
style of the passage from Milton--a style which seems to have for its
cause a certain pressure of emotion, and an ever-surging, yet bridled,
excitement in the poet, giving a special intensity to his way of
delivering himself. In poetical races and epochs this turn for style is
peculiarly observable; and perhaps it is only on condition of having
this somewhat heightened and difficult manner, so different from the
plain manner of prose, that poetry gets the privilege of being loosed,
at its best moments, into that perfectly simple, limpid style, which is
the supreme style of all, but the simplicity of which is still not the
simplicity of prose. The simplicity of Menander's[255] style is the
simplicity of prose, and is the same kind of simplicity as that which
Goethe's style, in the passage I have quoted, exhibits; but Menander
does not belong to a great poetical moment, he comes too late for it; it
is the simple passages in poets like Pindar or Dante which are perfect,
being masterpieces of _poetical_ simplicity. One may say the same of the
simple passages in Shakespeare; they are perfect, their simplicity being
a _poetical_ simplicity. They are the golden, easeful, crowning moments
of a manner which is always pitched in another key from that of prose, a
manner changed and heightened; the Elizabethan style, regnant in most of
our dramatic poetry to this day, is mainly the continuation of this
manner of Shakespeare's. It was a manner much more turbid and strewn
with blemishes than the manner of Pindar, Dante, or Milton; often it was
detestable; but it owed its existence to Shakespeare's instinctive
impulse towards _style_ in poetry, to his native sense of the necessity
for it; and without the basis of style everywhere, faulty though it may
in some places be, we should not have had the beauty of expression,
unsurpassable for effectiveness and charm, which is reached in
Shakespeare's best passages. The turn for style is perceptible all
through English poetry, proving, to my mind, the genuine poetical gift
of the race; this turn imparts to our poetry a stamp of high
distinction, and sometimes it doubles the force of a poet not by nature
of the very highest order, such as Gray, and raises him to a rank beyond
what his natural richness and power seem to promise. Goethe, with his
fine critical perception, saw clearly enough both the power of style in
itself, and the lack of style in the literature of his own country; and
perhaps if we regard him solely as a German, not as a European, his
great work was that he labored all his life to impart style into German
literature, and firmly to establish it there. Hence the immense
importance to him of the world of classical art, and of the productions
of Greek or Latin genius, where style so eminently manifests its power.
Had he found in the German genius and literature an element of style
existing by nature and ready to his hand, half his work, one may say,
would have been saved him, and he might have done much more in poetry.
But as it was, he had to try and create, out of his own powers, a style
for German poetry, as well as to provide contents for this style to
carry; and thus his labor as a poet was doubled.
It is to be observed that power of style, in the sense in which I am
here speaking of style, is something quite different from the power of
idiomatic, simple, nervous, racy expression, such as the expression of
healthy, robust natures so often is, such as Luther's was in a striking
degree. Style, in my sense of the word, is a peculiar recasting and
heightening, under a certain condition of spiritual excitement, of what
a man has to say, in such a manner as to add dignity and distinction to
it; and dignity and distinction are not terms which suit many acts or
words of Luther. Deeply touched with the _Gemeinheit_[256] which is the
bane of his nation, as he is at the same time a grand example of the
honesty which is his nation's excellence, he can seldom even show
himself brave, resolute, and truthful, without showing a strong dash of
coarseness and commonness all the while; the right definition of Luther,
as of our own Bunyan, is that he is a Philistine of genius. So Luther's
sincere idiomatic German,--such language as this: "Hilf, lieber Gott,
wie manchen Jammer habe ich gesehen, dass der gemeine Mann doch so gar
nichts weiss von der christlichen Lehre!"--no more proves a power of
style in German literature, than Cobbett's[257] sinewy idiomatic English
proves it in English literature. Power of style, properly so-called, as
manifested in masters of style like Dante or Milton in poetry, Cicero,
Bossuet[258] or Bolingbroke[259] in prose, is something quite different,
and has, as I have said, for its characteristic effect, this: to add
dignity and distinction.
* * * * *
This something is _style_, and the Celts certainly have it in a
wonderful measure. Style is the most striking quality of their poetry.
Celtic poetry seems to make up to itself for being unable to master the
world and give an adequate interpretation of it, by throwing all its
force into style, by bending language at any rate to its will, and
expressing the ideas it has with unsurpassable intensity, elevation, and
effect. It has all through it a sort of intoxication of style--a
_Pindarism_, to use a word formed from the name of the poet, on whom,
above all other poets, the power of style seems to have exercised an
inspiring and intoxicating effect; and not in its great poets only, in
Taliesin, or Llywarch Hen, or Ossian,[260] does the Celtic genius show
this Pindarism, but in all its productions:--
"The grave of March is this, and this the grave of Gwythyr;
Here is the grave of Gwgawn Gleddyfreidd;
But unknown is the grave of Arthur."[261]
That comes from the _Welsh Memorials of the Graves of the Warriors_, and
if we compare it with the familiar memorial inscriptions of an English
churchyard (for we English have so much Germanism in us that our
productions offer abundant examples of German want of style as well as
of its opposite):--
"Afflictions sore long time I bore,
Physicians were in vain,
Till God did please Death should me seize
And ease me of my pain--"
if, I say, we compare the Welsh memorial lines with the English, which
in their _Gemeinheit_ of style are truly Germanic, we shall get a clear
sense of what that Celtic talent for style I have been speaking of is.
* * * * *
Its chord of penetrating passion and melancholy, again, its _Titanism_
as we see it in Byron,--what other European poetry possesses that like
the English, and where do we get it from? The Celts, with their vehement
reaction against the despotism of fact, with their sensuous nature,
their manifold striving, their adverse destiny, their immense
calamities, the Celts are the prime authors of this vein of piercing
regret and passion,--of this Titanism in poetry. A famous book,
Macpherson's _Ossian_,[262] carried in the last century this vein like a
flood of lava through Europe. I am not going to criticize Macpherson's
_Ossian_ here. Make the part of what is forged, modern, tawdry,
spurious, in the book, as large as you please; strip Scotland, if you
like, of every feather of borrowed plumes which on the strength of
Macpherson's _Ossian_ she may have stolen from that _vetus et major
Scotia_, the true home of the Ossianic poetry, Ireland; I make no
objection. But there will still be left in the book a residue with the
very soul of the Celtic genius in it, and which has the proud
distinction of having brought this soul of the Celtic genius into
contact with the genius of the nations of modern Europe, and enriched
all our poetry by it. Woody Morven, and echoing Sora, and Selma with its
silent halls!--we all owe them a debt of gratitude, and when we are
unjust enough to forget it, may the Muse forget us! Choose any one of
the better passages in Macpherson's _Ossian_ and you can see even at
this time of day what an apparition of newness and power such a strain
must have been to the eighteenth century:--
"I have seen the walls of Balclutha, but they were desolate. The fox
looked out from the windows, the rank grass of the wall waved round her
head. Raise the song of mourning, O bards, over the land of strangers.
They have but fallen before us, for one day we must fall. Why dost thou
build the hall, son of the winged days? Thou lookest from thy towers
today; yet a few years, and the blast of the desert comes; it howls in
thy empty court, and whistles round thy half-worn shield. Let the blast
of the desert come! we shall be renowned in our day."
All Europe felt the power of that melancholy; but what I wish to point
out is, that no nation of Europe so caught in its poetry the passionate
penetrating accent of the Celtic genius, its strain of Titanism, as the
English. Goethe, like Napoleon, felt the spell of Ossian very
powerfully, and he quotes a long passage from him in his _Werther_.[263]
But what is there Celtic, turbulent, and Titanic about the German
Werther, that amiable, cultivated and melancholy young man, having for
his sorrow and suicide the perfectly definite motive that Lotte cannot
be his? Faust, again, has nothing unaccountable, defiant, and Titanic in
him; his knowledge does not bring him the satisfaction he expected from
it, and meanwhile he finds himself poor and growing old, and balked of
the palpable enjoyment of life; and here is the motive for Faust's
discontent. In the most energetic and impetuous of Goethe's creations,--
his _Prometheus_,[264]--it is not Celtic self-will and passion, it is
rather the Germanic sense of justice and reason, which revolts against
the despotism of Zeus. The German _Sehnsucht_ itself is a wistful, soft,
tearful longing, rather than a struggling, fierce, passionate one. But
the Celtic melancholy is struggling, fierce, passionate; to catch its
note, listen to Llywarch Hen in old age, addressing his crutch:--
"O my crutch! is it not autumn, when the fern is red, the water-flag
yellow? Have I not hated that which I love?
O my crutch! is it not winter-time now, when men talk together after
that they have drunken? Is not the side of my bed left desolate?
O my crutch! is it not spring, when the cuckoo passes through the air,
when the foam sparkles on the sea? The young maidens no longer love me.
O my crutch! is it not the first day of May? The furrows, are they not
shining; the young corn, is it not springing? Ah! the sight of thy
handle makes me wroth.
O my crutch! stand straight, thou wilt support me the better; it is very
long since I was Llywarch.
Behold old age, which makes sport of me, from the hair of my head to my
teeth, to my eyes, which women loved.
The four things I have all my life most hated fall upon me together,--
coughing and old age, sickness and sorrow.
I am old, I am alone, shapeliness and warmth are gone from me; the couch
of honor shall be no more mine; I am miserable, I am bent on my crutch.
How evil was the lot allotted to Llywarch, the night when he was brought
forth! sorrows without end, and no deliverance from his burden."[265]
There is the Titanism of the Celt, his passionate, turbulent,
indomitable reaction against the despotism of fact; and of whom does it
remind us so much as of Byron?
"The fire which on my bosom preys
Is lone as some volcanic isle;
No torch is kindled at its blaze;
A funeral pile!"[266]
Or, again:--
"Count o'er the joys thine hours have seen,
Count o'er thy days from anguish free,
And know, whatever thou hast been,
'Tis something better not to be."[267]
One has only to let one's memory begin to fetch passages from Byron
striking the same note as that passage from Llywarch Hen, and she will
not soon stop. And all Byron's heroes, not so much in collision with
outward things, as breaking on some rock of revolt and misery in the
depths of their own nature; Manfred, self-consumed, fighting blindly and
passionately with I know not what, having nothing of the consistent
development and intelligible motive of Faust,--Manfred, Lara, Cain,[268]
what are they but Titanic? Where in European poetry are we to find this
Celtic passion of revolt so warm-breathing, puissant, and sincere;
except perhaps in the creation of a yet greater poet than Byron, but an
English poet, too, like Byron,--in the Satan of Milton?
"... What though the field be lost?
All is not lost; the unconquerable will,
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield,
And what is else not to be overcome."[269]
There, surely, speaks a genius to whose composition the Celtic fibre was
not wholly a stranger!
* * * * *
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.[270] 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."[271] 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."[272] 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."[273]
And this, which is perhaps less striking, is not less beautiful:--
"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."[274]
And here the landscape, up to this point so Greek in its clear beauty,
is suddenly magicalized 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."