Celtic Literature Read Online

Nash wants to make it the real author of the whole poetry, one may say, of the sixth century, as well as its own.  No doubt one cannot produce the texts of the poetry of the sixth century; no doubt we have this only as the twelfth and succeeding centuries wrote it down; no doubt they mixed and changed it a great deal in writing it down.  But, since a continuous stream of testimony shows the enduring existence and influence among the kindred Celts of Wales and Brittany, from the sixth century to the twelfth, of an old national literature, it seems certain that much of this must be traceable in the documents of the twelfth century, and the interesting thing is to trace it.  It cannot be denied that there is such a continuous stream of testimony; there is Gildas in the sixth century, Nennius in the eighth, the laws of Howel in the tenth; in the eleventh, twenty or thirty years before the new literary epoch began, we hear of Rhys ap Tudor having ‘brought with him from Brittany the system of the Round Table, which at home had become quite forgotten, and he restored it as it is, with regard to minstrels and bards, as it had been at Caerleon-upon-Usk, under the Emperor Arthur, in the time of the sovereignty of the race of the Cymry over the island of Britain and its adjacent islands.’  Mr. Nash’s own comment on this is: ‘We here see the introduction of the Arthurian romance from Brittany, preceding by nearly one generation the revival of music and poetry in North Wales;’ and yet he does not seem to perceive what a testimony is here to the reality, fulness, and subsistence of that primitive literature about which he is so sceptical.  Then in the twelfth century testimony to this primitive literature absolutely abounds; one can quote none better than that of Giraldus de Barri, or Giraldus Cambrensis, as he is usually called.  Giraldus is an excellent authority, who knew well what he was writing about, and he speaks of the Welsh bards and rhapsodists of his time as having in their possession ‘ancient and authentic books’ in the Welsh language.  The apparatus of technical terms of poetry, again, and the elaborate poetical organisation which we find, both in Wales and Ireland, existing from the very commencement of the mediæval literary period in each, and to which no other mediæval literature, so far as I know, shows at its first beginnings anything similar, indicates surely, in these Celtic peoples, the clear and persistent tradition of an older poetical period of great development, and almost irresistibly connects itself in one’s mind with the elaborate Druidic discipline which Cæsar mentions.

But perhaps the best way to get a full sense of the storied antiquity, forming as it were the background to those mediæval documents which in Mr. Nash’s eyes pretty much begin and end with themselves, is to take, almost at random, a passage from such a tale as Kilhwch and Olwen, in the Mabinogion, - that charming collection, for which we owe such a debt of gratitude to Lady Charlotte Guest (to call her still by the name she bore when she made her happy entry into the world of letters), and which she so unkindly suffers to remain out of print.  Almost every page of this tale points to traditions and personages of the most remote antiquity, and is instinct with the very breath of the primitive world.  Search is made for Mabon, the son of Modron, who was taken when three nights old from between his mother and the wall.  The seekers go first to the Ousel of Cilgwri; the Ousel had lived long enough to peck a smith’s anvil down to the size of a nut, but he had never heard of Mabon.  ‘But there is a race of animals who were formed before me, and I will be your guide to them.’  So the Ousel guides them to the Stag of Redynvre.  The Stag has seen an oak sapling, in the wood where he lived, grow up to be an oak with a hundred branches, and then slowly decay down to a withered stump, yet he had never heard of Mabon.  ‘But I will be your guide to the place where there is an animal which was formed before I was;’ and he guides them to the Owl of Cwm Cawlwyd.  ‘When first I came hither,’ says the Owl, ‘the wide valley you see was a wooded glen.  And a race of men came and rooted it up.  And there grew a second wood; and this wood is the third.  My wings, are they not withered stumps?’  Yet the Owl, in spite of his great age, had never heard of Mabon; but he offered to be guide ‘to where is the oldest animal in the world, and the one that has travelled most, the Eagle of Gwern Abwy.’  The Eagle was so old, that a rock, from the top of which he pecked at the stars every evening, was now not so much as a span high.  He knew nothing of Mabon; but there was a monster Salmon, into whom he once struck his claws in Llyn Llyw, who might, perhaps, tell them something of him.  And at last the Salmon of Llyn Llyw told them of Mabon.  ‘With every tide I go along the river upwards, until I come near to the walls of Gloucester, and there have I found such wrong as I never found elsewhere.’  And the Salmon took Arthur’s messengers on his shoulders up to the wall of the prison in Gloucester, and they delivered Mabon.

Nothing could better give that sense of primitive and pre-mediæval antiquity which to the observer with any tact for these things is, I think, clearly perceptible in these remains, at whatever time they may have been written; or better serve to check too absolute an acceptance of Mr. Nash’s doctrine, - in some respects very salutary, - ‘that the common assumption of such remains of the date of the sixth century, has been made upon very unsatisfactory grounds.’  It is true, it has; it is true, too, that, as he goes on to say, ‘writers who claim for productions actually existing only in manuscripts of the twelfth, an origin in the sixth century, are called upon to demonstrate the links of evidence, either internal or external, which bridge over this great intervening period of at least five hundred years.’  Then Mr. Nash continues: ‘This external evidence is altogether wanting.’  Not altogether, as we have seen; that assertion is a little too strong.  But I am content to let it pass, because it is true, that without internal evidence in this matter the external evidence would be of no moment.  But when Mr. Nash continues further: ‘And the internal evidence even of the so-called historic poems themselves, is, in some instances at least, opposed to their claims to an origin in the sixth century,’ and leaves the matter there, and finishes his chapter, I say that is an unsatisfactory turn to give to the matter, and a lame and impotent conclusion to his chapter; because the one interesting, fruitful question here is, not in what instances the internal evidence opposes the claims of these poems to a sixth-century origin, but in what instances it supports them, and what these sixth-century remains, thus established, signify.

So again with the question as to the mythological import of these poems.  Mr. Nash seems to me to have dealt with this, too, rather in the spirit of a sturdy enemy of the Celts and their pretensions, - often enough chimerical, - than in the spirit of a disinterested man of science.  ‘We find in the oldest compositions in the Welsh language no traces,’ he says, ‘of the Druids, or of a pagan mythology.’  He will not hear of there being, for instance, in these compositions, traces of the doctrine of the transmigration of souls, attributed to the Druids in such clear words by Cæsar.  He is very severe upon a German scholar, long and favourably known in this country, who has already furnished several contributions to our knowledge of the Celtic race, and of whose labours the main fruit has, I believe, not yet been given us, - Mr. Meyer.  He is very severe upon Mr. Meyer, for finding in one of the poems ascribed to Taliesin, ‘a sacrificial hymn addressed to the god Pryd, in his character of god of the Sun.’  It is not for me to pronounce for or against this notion of Mr. Meyer’s.  I have not the knowledge which is needed in order to make one’s suffrage in these matters of any value; speaking merely as one of the unlearned public, I will confess that allegory seems to me to play, in Mr. Meyer’s theories, a somewhat excessive part; Arthur and his Twelve (?) Knights of the Round Table signifying solely the year with its twelve months; Percival and the Miller signifying solely steel and the grindstone; Stonehenge and the Gododin put to purely calendarial purposes; the Nibelungen, the Mahabharata, and the Iliad, finally following the fate of the Gododin; all this appears to me, I will confess, a little prematurely grasped, a little unsubstantial.  But that any one who knows the set of modern mythological science towards astronomical and solar myths, a set which has already justified itself in many respects so victoriously, and which is so irresistible that one can hardly now look up at the sun without having the sensations of a moth; - that any one who knows this, should find in the Welsh remains no traces of mythology, is quite astounding.  Why, the heroes and heroines of the old Cymric world are all in the sky as well as in Welsh story; Arthur is the Great Bear, his harp is the constellation Lyra; Cassiopeia’s chair is Llys Don, Don’s Court; the daughter of Don was Arianrod, and the Northern Crown is Caer Arianrod; Gwydion was Don’s son, and the Milky Way is Caer Gwydion.  With Gwydion is Math, the son of Mathonwy, the ‘man of illusion and phantasy;’ and the moment one goes below the surface, - almost before one goes below the surface, - all is illusion and phantasy, double-meaning, and far-reaching mythological import, in the world which all these personages inhabit.  What are the three hundred ravens of Owen, and the nine sorceresses of Peredur, and the dogs of Annwn the Welsh Hades, and the birds of Rhiannon, whose song was so sweet that warriors remained spell-bound for eighty years together listening to them?  What is the Avanc, the water-monster, of whom every lake-side in Wales, and her proverbial speech, and her music, to this day preserve the tradition?  What is Gwyn the son of Nudd, king of fairie, the ruler of the Tylwyth Teg, or family of beauty, who till the day of doom fights on every first day of May, - the great feast of the sun among the Celtic peoples, - with Gwythyr, for the fair Cordelia, the daughter of Lear?  What is the wonderful mare of Teirnyon, which on the night of every first of May foaled, and no one ever knew what became of the colt?  Who is the mystic Arawn, the king of Annwn, who changed semblance for a year with Pwyll, prince of Dyved, and reigned in his place?  These are no mediæval personages; they belong to an older, pagan, mythological world.  The very first thing that strikes one, in reading the Mabinogion, is how evidently the mediæval story-teller is pillaging an antiquity of which he does not fully possess the secret; he is like a peasant building his hut on the site of Halicarnassus or Ephesus; he builds, but what he builds is full of materials of which he knows not the history, or knows by a glimmering tradition merely; - stones ‘not of this building,’ but of an older architecture, greater, cunninger, more majestical.  In the mediæval stories of no Latin or Teutonic people does this strike one as in those of the Welsh.  Kilhwch, in the story, already quoted, of Kilhwch and Olwen, asks help at the hand of Arthur’s warriors; a list of these warriors is given, which fills I know not how many pages of Lady Charlotte Guest’s book; this list is a perfect treasure-house of mysterious ruins:-

‘Teithi Hen, the son of Gwynham - (his domains were swallowed up by the sea, and he himself hardly escaped, and he came to Arthur, and his knife had this peculiarity, that from the time that he came there no haft would ever remain upon it, and owing to this a sickness came over him, and he pined away during the remainder of his life, and of this he died).

‘Drem, the son of Dremidyd - (when the gnat arose in the morning with the sun, Drem could see it from Gelli Wic in Cornwall, as far off as Pen Blathaon in North Britain).

‘Kynyr Keinvarvawc - (when he was told he had a son born, he said to his wife: Damsel, if thy son be mine, his heart will be always cold, and there will be no warmth in his hands).’

How evident, again, is the slightness of the narrator’s hold upon the Twrch-Trwyth and his strange story!  How manifest the mixture of known and unknown, shadowy and clear, of different layers and orders of tradition jumbled together, in the story of Bran the Blessed, a story whose personages touch a comparatively late and historic time.  Bran invades Ireland, to avenge one of ‘the three unhappy blows of this island,’ the daily striking of Branwen by her husband Matholwch, King of Ireland.  Bran is mortally wounded by a poisoned dart, and only seven men of Britain, ‘the Island of the Mighty,’ escape, among them Taliesin:-

‘And Bran commanded them that they should cut off his head.  And take you my head, said he, and bear it even unto the White Mount in London, and bury it there with the face towards France.  And a long time will you be upon the road.  In Harlech you will be feasting seven years, the birds of Rhiannon singing unto you the while.  And all that time the head will be to you as pleasant company as it ever was when on my body.  And at Gwales in Penvro you will be fourscore years, and you may remain there, and the head with you uncorrupted, until you open the door that looks towards Aber Henvelen and towards Cornwall.  And after you have opened that door, there you may no longer tarry; set forth then to London to bury the head, and go straight forward.

‘So they cut off his head, and those seven went forward therewith.  And Branwen was the eighth with them, and they came to land at Aber Alaw in Anglesey, and they sate down to rest.  And Branwen looked towards Ireland and towards the Island of the Mighty, to see if she could descry them.  “Alas,” said she, “woe is me that I was ever born; two islands have been destroyed because of me.”  Then she uttered a loud groan, and there broke her heart.  And they made her a four-sided grave, and buried her upon the banks of the Alaw.

‘Then they went to Harlech, and sate down to feast and to drink there; and there came three birds and began singing, and all the songs they had ever heard were harsh compared thereto; and at this feast they continued seven years.  Then they went to Gwales in Penvro, and there they found a fair and regal spot overlooking the ocean, and a spacious hall was therein.  And they went into the hall, and two of its doors were open, but the third door was closed, that which looked towards Cornwall.  “See yonder,” said Manawyddan, “is the door that we may not open.”  And that night they regaled themselves and were joyful.  And there they remained fourscore years, nor did they think they had ever spent a time more joyous and mirthful.  And they were not more weary than when first they came, neither did they, any of them, know the time they had been there.  And it was as pleasant to them having the head with them as if Bran had been with them himself.

‘But one day said Heilyn, the son of Gwyn: “Evil betide me if I do not open the door to know if that is true which is said concerning it.”  So he opened the door and looked towards Cornwall and Aber Henvelen.  And when they had looked, they were as conscious of all the evils they had ever sustained, and of all the friends and companions they had lost, and of all the misery that had befallen them, as if all had happened in that very spot; and especially of the fate of their lord.  And because of their perturbation they could not rest, but journeyed forth with the head towards London.  And they buried the head in the White Mount.’

Arthur afterwards, in his pride and self-confidence, disinterred the head, and this was one of ‘the three unhappy disclosures of the island of Britain.’

There is evidently mixed here, with the newer legend, a detritus, as the geologists would say, of something far older; and the secret of Wales and its genius is not truly reached until this detritus, instead of being called recent because it is found in contact with what is recent, is disengaged, and is made to tell its own story.

But when we show him things of this kind in the Welsh remains, Mr. Nash has an answer for us.  ‘Oh,’ he says, ‘all this is merely a machinery of necromancers and magic, such as has probably been possessed by all people in all ages, more or less abundantly.  How similar are the creations of the human mind in times and places the most remote!  We see in this similarity only an evidence of the existence of a common stock of ideas, variously developed according to the formative pressure of external circumstances.  The materials of these tales are not peculiar to the Welsh.’  And then Mr. Nash points out, with much learning and ingenuity, how certain incidents of these tales have their counterparts in Irish, in Scandinavian, in Oriental romance.  He says, fairly enough, that the assertions of Taliesin, in the famous Hanes Taliesin, or History of Taliesin, that he was present with Noah in the Ark, at the Tower of Babel, and with Alexander of Macedon, ‘we may ascribe to the poetic fancy of the Christian priest of the thirteenth century, who brought this romance into its present form.  We may compare these statements of the universal presence of the wonder-working magician with those of the gleeman who recites the Anglo-Saxon metrical tale called the Traveller’s Song.’  No doubt, lands the most distant can be shown to have a common property in many marvellous stories.  This is one of the most interesting discoveries of modern science; but modern science is equally interested in knowing how the genius of each people has differentiated, so to speak, this common property of theirs; in tracking out, in each case, that special ‘variety of development,’ which, to use Mr. Nash’s own words, ‘the formative pressure of external circumstances’ has occasioned; and not the formative pressure from without only, but also the formative pressure from within.  It is this which he who deals with the Welsh remains in a philosophic spirit wants to know.  Where is the force, for scientific purposes, of telling us that certain incidents by which Welsh poetry has been supposed to indicate a surviving tradition of the doctrine of transmigration, are found in Irish poetry also, when Irish poetry has, like Welsh, its roots in that Celtism which is said to have held this doctrine of transmigration so strongly?  Where is even the great force, for scientific purposes, of proving, if it were possible to prove, that the extant remains of Welsh poetry contain not one plain declaration of Druidical, Pagan, pre-Christian doctrine, if one has in the extant remains of Breton poetry such texts as this from the prophecy of Gwenchlan: ‘Three times must we all die, before we come to our final repose’? or as the cry of the eagles, in the same poem, of fierce thirst for Christian blood, a cry in which the poet evidently gives vent to his own hatred? since the solidarity, to use that convenient French word, of Breton and Welsh poetry is so complete, that the ideas of the one may be almost certainly assumed not to have been wanting to those of the other.  The question is, when Taliesin says, in the Battle of the Trees: ‘I have been in many shapes before I attained a congenial form.  I have been a narrow blade of a sword, I have been a drop in the air, I have been a shining star, I have been a word in a book, I have been a book in the beginning, I have been a light in a lantern a year and a half, I have been a bridge for passing over three-score rivers; I have journeyed as an eagle, I have been a boat on the sea, I have been a director in battle, I have been a sword in the hand, I have been a shield in fight, I have been the string of a harp, I have been enchanted for a year in the foam of water.  There is nothing in which I have not been,’ - the question is, have these ‘statements of the universal presence of the wonder-working magician’ nothing which distinguishes them from ‘similar creations of the human mind in times and places the most remote;’ have they not an inwardness, a severity of form, a solemnity of tone, which indicates the still reverberating echo of a profound doctrine and discipline, such as was Druidism?  Suppose we compare Taliesin, as Mr. Nash invites us, with the gleeman of the Anglo-Saxon Traveller’s Song.  Take the specimen of this song which Mr. Nash himself quotes: ‘I have been with the Israelites and with the Essyringi, with the Hebrews and with the Indians and with the Egyptians; I have been with the Medes and with the Persians and with the Myrgings.’  It is very well to parallel with this extract Taliesin’s: ‘I carried the banner before Alexander; I was in Canaan when Absalom was slain; I was on the horse’s crupper of Elias and Enoch; I was on the high cross of the merciful son of God; I was the chief overseer at the building of the tower of Nimrod; I was with my King in the manger of the ass; I supported Moses through the waters of Jordan; I have been in the buttery in the land of the Trinity; it is not known what is the nature of its meat and its fish.’  It is very well to say that these assertions ‘we may fairly ascribe to the poetic fancy of a Christian priest of the thirteenth century.’  Certainly we may; the last of Taliesin’s assertions more especially; though one must remark at the same time that the Welshman shows much more fire and imagination than the Anglo-Saxon.  But Taliesin adds, after his: ‘I was in Canaan when Absalom was slain,’ ‘I was in the hall of Don before Gwydion was born;’ he adds, after: ‘I was chief overseer at the building of the tower of Nimrod,’ ‘I have been three times resident in the castle of Arianrod;’ he adds, after: ‘I was at the cross with Mary Magdalene,’ ‘I obtained my inspiration from the cauldron of Ceridwen.’  And finally, after the mediæval touch of the visit to the buttery in the land of the Trinity, he goes off at score: ‘I have been instructed in the whole system of the universe; I shall be till the day of judgment on the face of the earth.  I have been in an uneasy chair above Caer Sidin, and the whirling round without motion between three elements.  Is it not the wonder of the world that cannot be discovered?’  And so he ends the poem.  But here is the Celtic, the essential part of the poem: it is here that the ‘formative pressure’ has been really in operation; and here surely is paganism and mythology enough, which the Christian priest of the thirteenth century can have had nothing to do with.  It is unscientific, no doubt, to interpret this part as Edward Davies and Mr. Herbert do; but it is unscientific also to get rid of it as Mr. Nash does.  Wales and the Welsh genius are not to be known without this part; and the true critic is he who can best disengage its real significance.

I say, then, what we want is to know the Celt and his genius; not to exalt him or to abase him, but to know him.  And for this a disinterested, positive, and constructive criticism is needed.  Neither his friends nor his enemies have yet given us much of this.  His friends have given us materials for criticism, and for these we ought to be grateful; his enemies have given us negative criticism, and for this, too, up to a certain point, we may be grateful; but the criticism we really want neither of them has yet given us.

Philology, however, that science which in our time has had so many successes, has not been abandoned by her good fortune in touching the Celt; philology has brought, almost for the first time in their lives, the Celt and sound criticism together.  The Celtic grammar of Zeuss, whose death is so grievous a loss to science, offers a splendid specimen of that patient, disinterested way of treating objects of knowledge, which is the best and most attractive characteristic of Germany.  Zeuss proceeds neither as a Celt-lover nor as a Celt-hater; not the slightest trace of a wish to glorify Teutonism or to abase Celtism, appears in his book.  The only desire apparent there, is the desire to know his object, the language of the Celtic peoples, as it really is.  In this he stands as a model to Celtic students; and it has been given to him, as a reward for his sound method, to establish certain points which are henceforth cardinal points, landmarks, in all the discussion of Celtic matters, and which no one had so established before.  People talked at random of Celtic writings of this or that age; Zeuss has definitely fixed the age of what we actually have of these writings.  To take the Cymric group of languages: our earliest Cornish document is a vocabulary of the thirteenth century; our earliest Breton document is a short description of an estate in a deed of the ninth century; our earliest Welsh documents are Welsh glosses of the eighth century to Eutychus, the grammarian, and Ovid’s Art of Love, and the verses found by Edward Lhuyd in the Juvencus manuscript at Cambridge.  The mention of this Juvencus fragment, by-the-by, suggests the difference there is between an interested and a disinterested critical habit.  Mr. Nash deals with this fragment; but, in spite of all his great acuteness and learning, because he has a bias, because he does not bring to these matters the disinterested spirit they need, he is capable of getting rid, quite unwarrantably, of a particular word in the fragment which does not suit him; his dealing with the verses is an advocate’s dealing, not a critic’s.  Of this sort of thing Zeuss is incapable.

The test which Zeuss used for establishing the age of these documents is a scientific test, the test of orthography and of declensional and syntactical forms.  These matters are far out of my province, but what is clear, sound, and simple, has a natural attraction for us all, and one feels a pleasure in repeating it.  It is the grand sign of age, Zeuss says, in Welsh and Irish words, when what the grammarians call the ‘destitutio tenuium’ has not yet taken place; when the sharp consonants have not yet been changed into flat, p or t into b or d; when, for instance, map, a son, has not yet become mab; coet a wood, coed; ocet, a harrow, oged.  This is a clear, scientific test to apply, and a test of which the accuracy can be verified; I do not say that Zeuss was the first person who knew this test or applied it, but I say that he is the first person who in dealing with Celtic matters has invariably proceeded by means of this and similar scientific tests; the first person, therefore, the body of whose work has a scientific, stable character; and so he stands as a model to all Celtic inquirers.

His influence has already been most happy; and as I have enlarged on a certain failure in criticism of Eugene O’Curry’s, - whose business, after all, was the description and classification of materials rather than criticism, - let me show, by another example from Eugene O’Curry, this good influence of Zeuss upon Celtic studies.  Eugene O’Curry wants to establish that compositions of an older date than the twelfth century existed in Ireland in the twelfth century, and thus he proceeds.  He takes one of the great extant Irish manuscripts, the Leabhar na h’Uidhre; or, Book of the Dun Cow.  The compiler of this book was, he says, a certain Maelmuiri, a member of the religious house of Cluainmacnois.  This he establishes from a passage in the manuscript itself: ‘This is a trial of his pen here, by Maelmuiri, son of the son of Conn na m’Bocht.’  The date of Maelmuiri he establishes from a passage in the Annals of the Four Masters, under the year 1106: ‘Maelmuiri, son of the son of Conn na m’Bocht, was killed in the middle of the great stone church of Cluainmacnois, by a party of robbers.’  Thus he gets the date of the Book of the Dun Cow.  This book contains an elegy on the death of St. Columb.  Now, even before 1106, the language of this elegy was so old as to require a gloss to make it intelligible, for it is accompanied by a gloss written between the lines.  This gloss quotes, for the explanation of obsolete words, a number of more ancient compositions; and these compositions, therefore, must, at the beginning of the twelfth century, have been still in existence.  Nothing can be sounder; every step is proved, and fairly proved, as one goes along.  O’Curry thus affords a good specimen of the sane mode of proceeding so much wanted in Celtic researches, and so little practised by Edward Davies and his brethren; and to found this sane method, Zeuss, by the example he sets in his own department of philology, has mainly contributed.

Science’s reconciling power, too, on which I have already touched, philology, in her Celtic researches, again and again illustrates.  Races and languages have been absurdly joined, and unity has been often rashly assumed at stages where one was far, very far, from having yet really reached unity.  Science has and will long have to be a divider and a separatist, breaking arbitrary and fanciful connections, and dissipating dreams of a premature and impossible unity.  Still, science, - true science, - recognises in the bottom of her soul a law of ultimate fusion, of conciliation.  To reach this, but to reach it legitimately, she tends.  She draws, for instance, towards the same idea which fills her elder and diviner sister, poetry, - the idea of the substantial unity of man; though she draws towards it by roads of her own.  But continually she is showing us affinity where we imagined there was isolation.  What school-boy of us has not rummaged his Greek dictionary in vain for a satisfactory account of that old name for the Peloponnese, the Apian Land? and within the limits of Greek itself there is none.  But the Scythian name for earth ‘apia,’ watery, water-issued, meaning first isle and then land - this name, which we find in ‘avia,’ Scandinavia, and in ‘ey’ for Alderney, not only explains the Apian Land of Sophocles for us, but points the way to a whole world of relationships of which we knew nothing.  The Scythians themselves again, - obscure, far-separated Mongolian people as they used to appear to us, - when we find that they are essentially Teutonic and Indo-European, their very name the same word as the common Latin word ‘scutum,’ the shielded people, what a surprise they give us!  And then, before we have recovered from this surprise we learn that the name of their father and god, Targitavus, carries us I know not how much further into familiar company.  This divinity, Shining with the targe, the Greek Hercules, the Sun, contains in the second half of his name, tavus, ‘shining,’ a wonderful cement to hold times and nations together.  Tavus, ‘shining,’ from ‘tava’ - in Sanscrit, as well as Scythian, ‘to burn’ or ‘shine,’ - is Divus, dies, Zeus, Θεος, Dêva, and I know not how much more; and Taviti, the bright and burnt, fire, the place of fire, the hearth, the centre of the family, becomes the family itself, just as our word family, the Latin familia, is from thymelé, the sacred centre of fire.  The hearth comes to mean home.  Then from home it comes to mean the group of homes, the tribe; from the tribe the entire nation; and in this sense of nation or people, the word appears in Gothic, Norse, Celtic, and Persian, as well as in Scythian; the Theuthisks, Deutschen, Tudesques, are the men of one theuth, nation, or people; and of this our name Germans itself is, perhaps, only the Roman translation, meaning the men of one germ or stock.  The Celtic divinity, Teutates, has his name from the Celtic teuta, people; taviti, fire, appearing here in its secondary and derived sense of people, just as it does in its own Scythian language in Targitavus’s second name, Tavit-varus, Teutaros, the protector of the people.  Another Celtic divinity, the Hesus of Lucan, finds his brother in the Gaisos, the sword, symbolising the god of battles of the Teutonic Scythians. {66}  And after philology has thus related to each other the Celt and the Teuton, she takes another branch of the Indo-European family, the Sclaves, and shows us them as having the same name with the German Suevi, the solar people; the common ground here, too, being that grand point of union, the sun, fire.  So, also, we find Mr. Meyer, whose Celtic studies I just now mentioned, harping again and again on the connection even in Europe, if you go back far enough, between Celt and German.  So, after all we have heard, and truly heard, of the diversity between all things Semitic and all things Indo-European, there is now an Italian philologist at work upon the relationship between Sanscrit and Hebrew.

Both in small and great things, philology, dealing with Celtic matters, has exemplified this tending of science towards unity.  Who has not been puzzled by the relation of the Scots with Ireland - that vetus et major Scotia, as Colgan calls it?  Who does not feel what pleasure Zeuss brings us when he suggests that Gael, the name for the Irish Celt, and Scot, are at bottom the same word, both having their origin in a word meaning wind, and both signifying the violent stormy people? {68}  Who does not feel his mind agreeably cleared about our friends the Fenians, when he learns that the root of their name, fen, ‘white,’ appears in the hero Fingal; in Gwynned, the Welsh name for North Wales in the Roman Venedotia; in Vannes in Brittany; in Venice?  The very name of Ireland, some say, comes from the famous Sanscrit word Arya, the land of the Aryans, or noble men; although the weight of opinion seems to be in favour of connecting it rather with another Sanscrit word, avara, occidental, the western land or isle of the west. {69}  But, at any rate, who that has been brought up to think the Celts utter aliens from us and our culture, can come without a start of sympathy upon such words as heol (sol), or buaist (fuisti)? or upon such a sentence as this, ‘Peris Duw dui funnaun’ (‘God prepared two fountains’)?  Or when Mr. Whitley Stokes, one of the very ablest scholars formed in Zeuss’s school, a born philologist, - he now occupies, alas! a post under the Government of India, instead of a chair of philology at home, and makes one think mournfully of Montesquieu’s saying, that had he been an Englishman he should never have produced his great work, but have caught the contagion of practical life, and devoted himself to what is called ‘rising in the world,’ when Mr. Whitley Stokes, in his edition of Cormac’s Glossary, holds up the Irish word traith, the sea, and makes us remark that, though the names Triton, Amphitrite, and those of corresponding Indian and Zend divinities, point to the meaning sea, yet it is only Irish which actually supplies the vocable, how delightfully that brings Ireland into the Indo-European concert!  What a wholesome buffet it gives to Lord Lyndhurst’s alienation doctrines!

To go a little further.  Of the two great Celtic divisions of language, the Gaelic and the Cymric, the Gaelic, say the philologists, is more related to the younger, more synthetic, group of languages, Sanscrit, Greek, Zend, Latin and Teutonic; the Cymric to the older, more analytic Turanian group.  Of the more synthetic Aryan group, again, Zend and Teutonic are, in their turn, looser and more analytic than Sanscrit and Greek, more in sympathy with the Turanian group and with Celtic.  What possibilities of affinity and influence are here hinted at; what lines of inquiry, worth exploring, at any rate, suggest themselves to one’s mind.  By the forms of its language a nation expresses its very self.  Our language is the loosest, the most analytic, of all European languages.  And we, then, what are we? what is England?  I will not answer, A vast obscure Cymric basis with a vast visible Teutonic superstructure; but I will say that that answer sometimes suggests itself, at any rate, - sometimes knocks at our mind’s door for admission; and we begin to cast about and see whether it is to be let in.

But the forms of its language are not our only key to a people; what it says in its language, its literature, is the great key, and we must get back to literature.  The literature of the Celtic peoples has not yet had its Zeuss, and greatly it wants him.  We need a Zeuss to apply to Celtic literature, to all its vexed questions of dates, authenticity, and significance, the criticism, the sane method, the disinterested endeavour to get at the real facts, which Zeuss has shown in dealing with Celtic language.  Science is good in itself, and therefore Celtic literature, - the Celt-haters having failed to prove it a bubble, - Celtic literature is interesting, merely as an object of knowledge.  But it reinforces and redoubles our interest in Celtic literature if we find that here, too, science exercises the reconciling, the uniting influence of which I have said so much; if we find here, more than anywhere else, traces of kinship, and the most essential sort of kinship, spiritual kinship, between us and the Celt, of which we had never dreamed.  I settle nothing, and can settle nothing; I have not the special knowledge needed for that.  I have no pretension to do more than to try and awaken interest; to seize on hints, to point out indications, which, to any one with a feeling for literature, suggest themselves; to stimulate other inquirers.  I must surely be without the bias which has so often rendered Welsh and Irish students extravagant; why, my very name expresses that peculiar Semitico-Saxon mixture which makes the typical Englishman; I can have no ends to serve in finding in Celtic literature more than is there.  What is there, is for me the only question.


III.


We have seen how philology carries us towards ideas of affinity of race which are new to us.  But it is evident that this affinity, even if proved, can be no very potent affair, unless it goes beyond the stage at which we have hitherto observed it.  Affinity between races still, so to speak, in their mother’s womb, counts for something, indeed, but cannot count for very much.  So long as Celt and Teuton are in their embryo rudimentary state, or, at least, no such great while out of their cradle, still engaged in their wanderings, changes of place and struggle for development, so long as they have not yet crystallised into solid nations, they may touch and mix in passing, and yet very little come of it.  It is when the embryo has grown and solidified into a distinct nation, into the Gaul or German of history, when it has finally acquired the characters which make the Gaul of history what he is, the German of history what he is, that contact and mixture are important, and may leave a long train of effects; for Celt and Teuton by this time have their formed, marked, national, ineffaceable qualities to oppose or to communicate.  The contact of the German of the Continent with the Celt was in the pre-historic times, and the definite German type, as we know it, was fixed later, and from the time when it became fixed was not influenced by the Celtic type.  But here in our country, in historic times, long after the Celtic embryo had crystallised into the Celt proper, long after the Germanic embryo had crystallised into the German proper, there was an important contact between the two peoples; the Saxons invaded the Britons and settled themselves in the Britons’ country.  Well, then, here was a contact which one might expect would leave its traces; if the Saxons got the upper hand, as we all know they did, and made our country be England and us be English, there must yet, one would think, be some trace of the Saxon having met the Briton; there must be some Celtic vein or other running through us.  Many people say there is nothing at all of the kind, absolutely nothing; the Saturday Review treats these matters of ethnology with great power and learning, and the Saturday Review says we are ‘a nation into which a Norman element, like a much smaller Celtic element, was so completely absorbed that it is vain to seek after Norman or Celtic elements in any modern Englishman.’  And the other day at Zurich I read a long essay on English literature by one of the professors there, in which the writer observed, as a remarkable thing, that while other countries conquered by the Germans, - France, for instance, and Italy, - had ousted all German influence from their genius and literature, there were two countries, not originally Germanic, but conquered by the Germans, England and German Switzerland, of which the genius and the literature were purely and unmixedly German; and this he laid down as a position which nobody would dream of challenging.

I say it is strange that this should be so, and we in particular have reason for inquiring whether it really is so; because though, as I have said, even as a matter of science the Celt has a claim to be known, and we have an interest in knowing him, yet this interest is wonderfully enhanced if we find him to have actually a part in us.  The question is to be tried by external and by internal evidence; the language and the physical type of our race afford certain data for trying it, and other data are afforded by our literature, genius, and spiritual production generally.  Data of this second kind belong to the province of the literary critic; data of the first kind to the province of the philologist and of the physiologist.

The province of the philologist and of the physiologist is not mine; but this whole question as to the mixture of Celt with Saxon in us has been so little explored, people have been so prone to settle it off-hand according to their prepossessions, that even on the philological and physiological side of it I must say a few words in passing.  Surely it must strike with surprise any one who thinks of it, to find that without any immense inpouring of a whole people, that by mere expeditions of invaders having to come over the sea, and in no greater numbers than the Saxons, so far as we can make out, actually came, the old occupants of this island, the Celtic Britons, should have been completely annihilated, or even so completely absorbed that it is vain to seek after Celtic elements in the existing English race.  Of deliberate wholesale extermination of the Celtic race, all of them who could not fly to Wales or Scotland, we hear nothing; and without some such extermination one would suppose that a great mass of them must have remained in the country, their lot the obscure and, so to speak, underground lot of a subject race, but yet insensibly getting mixed with their conquerors, and their blood entering into the composition of a new people, in which the stock of the conquerors counts for most, but the stock of the conquered, too, counts for something.  How little the triumph of the conqueror’s laws, manners, and language, proves the extinction of the old race, we may see by looking at France; Gaul was Latinised in language, manners, and laws, and yet her people remained essentially Celtic.  The Germanisation of Britain went far deeper than the Latinisation of France, and not only laws, manners, and language, but the main current of the blood became Germanic; but how, without some process of radica extirpation, of which, as I say, there is no evidence, can there have failed to subsist in Britain, as in Gaul, a Celtic current too?  The indications of this in our language have never yet been thoroughly searched out; the Celtic names of places prove nothing, of course, as to the point here in question; they come from the pre-historic times, the times before the nations, Germanic or Celtic, had crystallised, and they are everywhere, as the impetuous Celt was formerly everywhere, - in the Alps, the Apennines, the Cevennes, the Rhine, the Po, as well as in the Thames, the Humber, Cumberland, London.  But it is said that the words of Celtic origin for things having to do with every-day peaceful life, - the life of a settled nation, - words like basket (to take an instance which all the world knows) form a much larger body in our language than is commonly supposed; it is said that a number of our raciest, most idiomatic, popular words - for example, bam, kick, whop, twaddle, fudge, hitch, muggy, - are Celtic.  These assertions require to be carefully examined, and it by no means follows that because an English word is found in Celtic, therefore we get it from thence; but they have not yet had the attention which, as illustrating through language this matter of the subsistence and intermingling in our nation of a Celtic part, they merit.

Nor have the physiological data which illustrate this matter had much more attention from us in England.  But in France, a physician, half English by blood though a Frenchman by home and language, Monsieur W. F. Edwards, brother to Monsieur Milne-Edwards, the well-known zoologist, published in 1839 a letter to Monsieur Amédée Thierry with this title: Des Caractères Physiologiques des Races Humaines considérés dans leurs Rapports avec l’Histoire.  The letter attracted great attention on the Continent; it fills not much more than a hundred pages, and they are a hundred pages which well deserve reading and re-reading.  Monsieur Thierry in his Histoire des Gaulois had divided the population of Gaul into certain groups, and the object of Monsieur Edwards was to try this division by physiology.  Groups of men have, he says, their physical type which distinguishes them, as well as their language; the traces of this physical type endure as the traces of language endure, and physiology is enabled to verify history by them.  Accordingly, he determines the physical type of each of the two great Celtic families, the Gaels and the Cymris, who are said to have been distributed in a certain order through Gaul, and then he tracks these types in the population of France at the present day, and so verifies the alleged original order of distribution.  In doing this, he makes excursions into neighbouring countries where the Gaels and the Cymris have been, and he declares that in England he finds abundant traces of the physical type which he has established as the Cymric, still subsisting in our population, and having descended from the old British possessors of our soil before the Saxon conquest.  But if we are to believe the current English opinion, says Monsieur Edwards, the stock of these old British possessors is clean gone.  On this opinion he makes the following comment:-

‘In the territory occupied by the Saxons, the Britons were no longer an independent nation, nor even a people with any civil existence at all.  For history, therefore, they were dead, above all for history as it was then written; but they had not perished; they still lived on, and undoubtedly in such numbers as the remains of a great nation, in spite of its disasters, might still be expected to keep.  That the Britons were destroyed or expelled from England, properly so called, is, as I have said, a popular opinion in that country.  It is founded on the exaggeration of the writers of history; but in these very writers, when we come to look closely at what they say, we find the confession that the remains of this people were reduced to a state of strict servitude.  Attached to the soil, they will have shared in that emancipation which during the course of the middle ages gradually restored to political life the mass of the population in the countries of Western Europe; recovering by slow degrees their rights without resuming their name, and rising gradually with the rise of industry, they will have got spread through all ranks of society.  The gradualness of this movement, and the obscurity which enwrapped its beginnings, allowed the contempt of the conqueror and the shame of the conquered to become fixed feelings; and so it turns out, that an Englishman who now thinks himself sprung from the Saxons or the Normans, is often in reality the descendant of the Britons.’

So physiology, as well as language, incomplete though the application of their tests to this matter has hitherto been, may lead us to hesitate before accepting the round assertion that it is vain to search for Celtic elements in any modern Englishman.  But it is not only by the tests of physiology and language that we can try this matter.  As there are for physiology physical marks, such as the square heads of the German, the round head of the Gael, the oval head of the Cymri, which determine the type of a people, so for criticism there are spiritual marks which determine the type, and make us speak of the Greek genius, the Teutonic genius, the Celtic genius, and so on.  Here is another test at our service; and this test, too, has never yet been thoroughly employed.  Foreign critics have indeed occasionally hazarded the idea that in English poetry there is a Celtic element traceable; and Mr. Morley, in his very readable as well as very useful book on the English writers before Chaucer, has a sentence which struck my attention when I read it, because it expresses an opinion which I, too, have long held.  Mr. Morley says: - ‘The main current of English literature cannot be disconnected from the lively Celtic wit in which it has one of its sources.  The Celts do not form an utterly distinct part of our mixed population.  But for early, frequent, and various contact with the race that in its half-barbarous days invented Ossian’s dialogues with St. Patrick, and that quickened afterwards the Northmen’s blood in France, Germanic England would not have produced a Shakspeare.’  But there Mr.