Brythonic

“ Thus ‘menhir’ seems to be derived from the Welsh or Brythonic maen, ‘a stone,’ and hir, ‘long,’ and ‘dolmen’ from Breton taol, ‘table,’ and men, ‘a stone.’ [7] ‘Cromlech’ is also of Welsh or Brythonic origin, and is derived from crom, ‘bending’ or ‘bowed’ (hence ‘laid across’) , and llech, ‘a flat stone.’ The allée couverte is a dolmen on a large scale. ”

“ In Brythonic literature and mythology, magic and witchcraft with the same animistic character play as great or even a greater rôle than in Gaelic literature and mythology. This is especially true with respect to the Arthurian Legend, and to the Mabinogion, some of which tales are regarded by scholars as versions of Irish ones. Sir John Rhŷs and Professor J. Loth, who have been the chief translators of the Mabinogion, consider their chief literary machinery to be magic (see our chapter v) . ”

“ Should it be objected that the transformations, instanced above as Brythonic and Goidelic, were assumed only in the case of magicians and other professional or privileged persons, and that [624] we are not told what was held to happen in the case of the rank and file of humanity, it is enough to answer that neither do we know what the druids of Gaul held to be the fate of the common people of their communities. ”

“ In the Goidelic group qu appears as c, thus Irish cethir, “four”; in the Brythonic group it is changed into p, as in Welsh pedwar, “four.” Gaulish, which was supplanted in France by Latin, had p, as in petor-ritum, “four-wheeled car,” and is thus allied to the Brythonic group; but it is believed that remains of a continental Celtic qu- dialect appear in such names as Sequani, and in some recently discovered inscriptions. The sounds of parent Aryan appeared in Primitive Celtic with the following modifications:—p disappeared, thus Aryan *peter, which gave Latin pater, Eng. ”

“ Further, he pointed out that the Q dialects, Goidelic, Latin and Ionic Greek, formed so to speak an outer ring, while Brythonic, Umbrian and standard Greek lay within them. He argued from this that these tongues had spread in two waves from a common centre, which he fixed in the mountain zone of Central Europe, and thence the Q tongues had spread by invasion, to be followed some few centuries later by a second invasion of P people, who had driven the Q people further from the original home. ”

“ Thus the second element of a compound word, even though written and accented as a separate word, has a soft initial, because in Brythonic the first element of a compound generally ended in a vowel, as in the name Maglo-cunos. The more important rules for initial mutation are the following: the soft mutation occurs in a feminine singular noun after the article, thus y fam, “the mother” (radical mam) ; in an adjective following a feminine singular noun, as in mam dda, “a good mother” (da, “good”) ”

“ One of the most fascinating problems in English popular literature is presented by the admirable body of ballad poetry recorded during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, partly in the southern but mainly in the northern portion of the English-speaking area of Britain. The language is English, the population among which the ballads were chiefly developed even if it did not originate them, partly Low-German, partly Scandinavian, superimposed upon a Celtic basis, Gaelic in parts, but mainly Brythonic, with a substratum of Pictish and other unknown elements. ”

“ This naturally leads one to think that some of them escaped to places on the coast, such as Dyfed, and that some made for the opposite coast of Ireland, and that, by the time when the Cúchulainn stories came to be edited as we have them, the people in question were known to the redactors of those stories only by the Brythonic form of their name, which underlies that of Setanta Beg, or the Little Setantian. Those of them who found a home on the coast of Cardigan Bay may have brought with them a version of the inundation story with Seithennin, son of Seithyn, as the principal figure in it. ”

“ Stokes, who states that the inscription I allude to in the text was discovered at Orgon, in the Bouches du Rhône. The Brythonic word for thunder is taran, masculine in Breton and feminine in Welsh. This taran does not correspond declensionally to Taranis, but it may either to taranus of the U declension, or else to forms of the declension, such as taranos (masc.) or taranon (neut.) , with which the Goidelic ones agree, namely, Irish torunn, 'thunder;' Sc. Gaelic torrunn, the same. These last languages had also toirn, or tairn, of a different declension, of which more anon. ”

“ In any case, we can see with interest how this so-called English population now echo Brythonic beliefs which they appear to have adopted in Gower, possibly sympathetically through race kinship; and the following testimony offered by Miss Sarah Jenkins, postmistress of Llanmadoc, will enable us to do so:—
Dancing with Fairies.—‘A man, whose Christian name was William, was enticed by the fairy folk to enter their dance, as he was on his way to the Swansea market in the early morning. They kept him dancing some time, and then said to him before they let him go, “Will dance well ”

“ It stared, it glared back at him with that challenge; it put to him the two alternatives: should he just push it open or not? Oh to have this consciousness was to think—and to think, Brydon knew, as he stood there, was, with the lapsing moments, not to have acted! Not to have acted—that was the misery and the pang—was even still not to act; was in fact all to feel the thing in another, in a new and terrible way. How long did he pause and how long did he debate? There was presently nothing to measure it; for his vibration had already changed—as just by the effect of its intensity. ”

“ So Brydon, before him, took him in; with every fact of him now, in the higher light, hard and acute—his planted stillness, his vivid truth, his grizzled bent head and white masking hands, his queer actuality of evening-dress, of dangling double eye-glass, of gleaming silk lappet and white linen, of pearl button and gold watch-guard and polished shoe. No portrait by a great modern master could have presented him with more intensity, thrust him out of his frame with more art, as if there had been "treatment," of the consummate sort, in his every shade and salience. ”

“ Brydon was to know afterwards, was to recall and make out, the particular thing he had believed during the rest of his descent. He saw, in its great grey glimmering margin, the central vagueness diminish, and he felt it to be taking the very form toward which, for so many days, the passion of his curiosity had yearned. It gloomed, it loomed, it was something, it was somebody, the prodigy of a personal presence.
Rigid and conscious, spectral yet human, a man of his own substance and stature waited there to measure himself with his power to dismay. ”

“ Bryant. The first is the fidelity with which it paints natural scenery, and the second, the pensive and profound, yet Christian philosophy which pervades its spirit. As we have remarked in another place, no man ever lived whose sensibility was more susceptible than Mr. Bryant’s. Not only is his eye open to Nature, but every fibre of his being seems to be tremblingly alive to its presence. ”

“ Here nature, as herself the Life, is simply an hypostasis of the racial imagination in which Bryant so largely shared, just like his intimate personifications of her phenomena, her flowers, her winds, and waters; it is not a philosophic idea, but a primitive instinct. “Nature’s teachings” for men are simply the ideas that suggest themselves to Bryant himself (not inevitably to everyone) when he observes what goes on, or what is before him:
The faintest steak that on a petal lies May speak instruction to initiate eyes. ”

“ That Bryant could write agreeable narrative verse, ‘The Children of the Snow’ and ‘Sella’ bear witness. That he is at his best in meditative poems, lofty characterizations of Nature, grand visions of Life and Death, is proved by hundreds of felicitous verses which have become an inalienable part of our young literature.
He never really excelled the work of his youth. Bryant will always be known as the author of ‘Thanatopsis.’ This great vision of Death is his stateliest poem and his best, the most felicitous of phrase and the loftiest in imagery. ”

“ But what was wondrous was that the applause, for the felt fact, was so eager, since, if it was his other self he was running to earth, this ineffable identity was thus in the last resort not unworthy of him. It bristled there—somewhere near at hand, however unseen still—as the hunted thing, even as the trodden worm of the adage must at last bristle; and Brydon at this instant tasted probably of a sensation more complex than had ever before found itself consistent with sanity. ”

“ Bryant wonderfully visualized and unified the vast scope of the racial movement and the range of natural phenomena. His “broad surveys,” as they have been called, are more than surveys: they are large acts of the combining imagination, presenting the significance, not merely the catalogue. These acts take us home to the most inveterate habit of his poet-mind. As method or device they seem to suggest a simple prescription for writing poetry; superficially, after one has met them again and yet again in Bryant, one might call them easy to do, because easy to understand. ”

“ Bryant stands alone. His range is not great, nor his genius fertile. But his poetry is purely the language of his inmost nature, and the simple lovely garb in which his thoughts are arranged, a direct gift from the Muse. He has written nothing that is not excellent, and the atmosphere of his verse refreshes and composes the mind, like leaving the highway to enter some green, lovely, fragrant wood. ”

“ Bryant was, indeed, in a measure, a scholar of Wordsworth's school, and his place among American poets corresponds roughly, though not precisely, to Wordsworth's among English poets. With no humor, with somewhat restricted sympathies, with little flexibility or openness to new impressions, but gifted with a high, austere imagination, Bryant became the meditative poet of nature. His best poems are those in which he draws lessons from nature, or sings of its calming, purifying, and bracing influences upon the human soul. ”

“ Downing and his wife read to me by turns passages from their most esteemed American poets. The books I afterwards carry with me up into my chamber; in this way I have become acquainted with Bryant, Lowell, and Emerson, all of them representatives, in however dissimilar a manner, of the life of the New World. Bryant sings especially of its natural life, of its woods, its prairies, its peculiar natural scenes and phenomena—and his song breathes the quiet fresh inspiration of natural life. One feels the sap circulating through the growth of the tree, and the leaves shooting forth. ”

“ As a fact, Bryant’s one abiding idea about nature is that she is a profound influence on the human spirit, chastening, soothing, encouraging, ennobling—how, he does not say; but the fact he knows from experience, and mankind knows it with him, and has known it from long before the morning when the sorrowful, chafed soul of Achilles walked apart by the shore of the many-sounding sea. ”

“ It is partly for this, perhaps, that the most Puritan of our poets is also the most Greek. Bryant’s limitations, then, are intimately engaged in the peculiar distinction of his work; and it is ungracious, as well as superficial, to quarrel with them.
§ 4. His Ideas. Bryant’s ideas, stated in bald prose, are elementary,—common property of simple minds. His metaphysics was predominantly that of the Old Testament: God is the Creator and His works and His purposes are good. ”

“ But nothing could be farther from the didactic mood in which "communion with the various forms" of nature casts the Puritanic soul of Bryant, than the mood in which this German-blooded, Kentucky-born poet, who keeps throughout his song the sense of a perpetual and inalienable youth, with a spirit as pagan as that which breathes from Greek sculpture—but happily not more pagan. ”

“ These ideas are sometimes merely analogies, where in effect the flower (be it the gentian) , or the bird (be it the waterfowl) , is the first term in a simile on man’s moral life; in this phase Bryant’s thought of nature differs from that of Homer, the Psalmist, Jesus, or any sage or seer, Pagan or Christian, only in the appositeness, more or less, of the illustrative symbol. It implies no more a philosophy of nature than similes drawn from the action of a locomotive or a motor-boat would imply a philosophy of machinery. ”

“ The active brain that had stood Bryce in good stead while he spun his meshes and devised his schemes was more active than ever that early summer morning. It was a ten-mile ride through woods and valleys to Saxonsteade, and there were sights and beauties of nature on either side of him which any other man would have lingered to admire and most men would have been influenced by. ”

“ A man stood outside—an elderly, slight-figured, quiet-looking man, who looked at Bryce with a half-deprecating, half-nervous air; the air of a man who was shy in manner and evidently fearful of seeming to intrude. Bryce's quick, observant eyes took him in at a glance, noting a much worn and lined face, thin grey hair and tired eyes ”

“ On many positive grounds, therefore, Bryant’s324 title to fame rests; he was one of Nature’s men, he shed moral health, he uttered the ideals of a great race in a transitional epoch. His temperament, in making his poetic product small, gave him yet another hostage against oblivion. The poet who, having so many claims to the consideration of posterity, can also plead brevity, need not worry himself about what is called literary immortality. Bryant’s typical and best work is comprised in a dozen poems, the longest not exceeding 140 lines. ”