Matthew Arnold asks how much of the Celt must one imagine in the ideal man
of genius. I prefer to say, how much of the ancient hunters and fishers
and of the ecstatic dancers among hills and woods must one imagine in the
ideal man of genius. Certainly a thirst for unbounded emotion and a wild
melancholy are troublesome things in the world, and do not make its life
more easy or orderly, but it may be the arts are founded on the life
beyond the world, and that they must cry in the ears of our penury until
the world has been consumed and become a vision. Certainly, as Samuel
Palmer wrote, 'Excess is the vivifying spirit of the finest art, and we
must always seek to make excess more abundantly excessive.' Matthew Arnold
has said that if he were asked 'where English got its turn for melancholy
and its turn for natural magic,' he 'would answer with little doubt that
it got much of its melancholy from a Celtic source, with no doubt at all
that from a Celtic source is got nearly all its natural magic.'
I will put this differently and say that literature dwindles to a mere
chronicle of circumstance, or passionless phantasies, and passionless
meditations, unless it is constantly flooded with the passions and beliefs
of ancient times, and that of all the fountains of the passions and
beliefs of ancient times in Europe, the Sclavonic, the Finnish, the
Scandinavian, and the Celtic, the Celtic alone has been for centuries
close to the main river of European literature. It has again and again
brought 'the vivifying spirit' 'of excess' into the arts of Europe. Ernest
Renan has told how the visions of purgatory seen by pilgrims to Lough
Derg--once visions of the pagan under-world, as the boat made out of a
hollow tree that bore the pilgrim to the holy island were alone enough to
prove--gave European thought new symbols of a more abundant penitence; and
had so great an influence that he has written, 'It cannot be doubted for a
moment that to the number of poetical themes Europe owes to the genius of
the Celt is to be added the framework of the divine comedy.'
A little later the legends of Arthur and his table, and of the Holy Grail,
once it seems the cauldron of an Irish God, changed the literature of
Europe, and it may be changed, as it were, the very roots of man's
emotions by their influence on the spirit of chivalry and on the spirit of
romance; and later still Shakespeare found his Mab, and probably his Puck,
and one knows not how much else of his faery kingdom, in Celtic legend;
while at the beginning of our own day Sir Walter Scott gave Highland
legends and Highland excitability so great a mastery over all romance
that they seem romance herself.
In our own time Scandinavian tradition, because of the imagination of
Richard Wagner and of William Morris and of the earlier and, as I think,
greater Heinrich Ibsen, has created a new romance, and through the
imagination of Richard Wagner, become all but the most passionate element
in the arts of the modern world. There is indeed but one other element as
passionate, the still unfaded legends of Arthur and of the Holy Grail; and
now a new fountain of legends, and, as I think, a more abundant fountain
than any in Europe, is being opened, the great fountain of Gaelic legends;
the tale of Deirdre, who alone among the women who have set men mad was at
once the white flame and the red flame, wisdom and loveliness; the tale of
the Sons of Tuireann, with its unintelligible mysteries, an old Grail
Quest as I think; the tale of the four children changed into four swans,
and lamenting over many waters; the tale of the love of Cuchulain for an
immortal goddess, and his coming home to a mortal woman in the end; the
tale of his many battles at the ford with that dear friend he kissed
before the battles, and over whose dead body he wept when he had killed
him; the tale of his death and of the lamentations of Emer; the tale of
the flight of Grainne with Diarmuid, strangest of all tales of the
fickleness of woman, and the tale of the coming of Oisin out of faeryland,
and of his memories and lamentations. 'The Celtic movement,' as I
understand it, is principally the opening of this fountain, and none can
measure of how great importance it may be to coming times, for every new
fountain of legends is a new intoxication for the imagination of the
world. It comes at a time when the imagination of the world is as ready,
as it was at the coming of the tales of Arthur and of the Grail, for a
new intoxication. The reaction against the rationalism of the eighteenth
century has mingled with a reaction against the materialism of the
nineteenth century, and the symbolical movement, which has come to
perfection in Germany in Wagner, in England in the Pre-Raphaelites, and in
France in Villiers De l'Isle Adam, and Mallarmé, and Maeterlinck, and has
stirred the imagination of Ibsen and D'Annunzio, is certainly the only
movement that is saying new things. The arts by brooding upon their own
intensity have become religious, and are seeking, as I think Verhaeren has
said, to create a sacred book. They must, as religious thought has always
done, utter themselves through legends; and the Sclavonic and Finnish
legends tell of strange woods and seas, and the Scandinavian legends are
held by a great master, and tell also of strange woods and seas, and the
Welsh legends are held by almost as many great masters as the Greek
legends, while the Irish legends move among known woods and seas, and
have so much of a new beauty, that they may well give the opening century
its most memorable symbols.
1897.
I could have written this essay with much more precision and have much
better illustrated my meaning if I had waited until Lady Gregory had
finished her book of legends, _Cuchulain of Muirthemne_, a book to set
beside the _Morte D'Arthur_ and the _Mabinogion_.
1902.