Celt

“ At the dawn of recorded history, we find the Celt already occupying a vast area of Western Europe, and exercising a wide ascendancy. We know of no period during which he is not in possession; we find him always in the stream of history, never in the fountain. From low down the Danube, along by the ridges of the Alps, we discern his tribes entrenched; and the topography of Western and Middle Europe, in so far as its river names and mountain names are concerned, rests on a Celtic basis, and is unintelligible, unless from Celtic roots, even in regions from which the Celtic race has long retired. ”

“ That is just the expansive, eager Celtic nature; the head in the air, snuffing and snorting; a proud look and a high stomach, as the Psalmist says, but without any such settled savage temper as the Psalmist seems to impute by those words. For good and for bad, the Celtic genius is more airy and unsubstantial, goes less near the ground, than the German. The Celt is often called sensual; but it is not so much the vulgar satisfactions of sense that attract him as emotion and excitement ”

“ It is the practice to speak of the dark-complexioned people of France, Great Britain and Ireland as “black Celts,” although the ancient writers never applied the term “Celt” to any dark-complexioned person. To them great stature, fair hair, and blue or grey eyes were the characteristics of the Celt. The philologists have added to the confusion by classing as “Celtic” the speeches of the dark-complexioned races of the west of Scotland and the west of Ireland. But, though usage has made it convenient in this work to employ the term, “Celtic” cannot be properly applied to what is really “Gaelic.” ”

“ What is called ‘the Celtic Renascence’ is simply a fresh development of creative energy coloured by nationality, and moulded by inherited forces, a development diverted from the common way by accident of race and temperament. The Celtic writer is the writer the temper of whose mind is more ancient, more primitive, and in a sense more natural than that of his compatriot in whom the Teutonic strain prevails. The Celt is always remembering; the Anglo Saxon has little patience which lies far behind or far beyond his own hour. ”

“ This points to a certain mixture and strife of elements in the Englishman; to the clashing of a Celtic quickness of perception with a Germanic instinct for going steadily along close to the ground. The Celt, as we have seen, has not at all, in spite of his quick perception, the Latin talent for dealing with the fact, dexterously managing it and making himself master of it ”

“ In a word, the Celtic genius is broadly divisible, even at this day, into two great sections: the Goidelic and the Brythonic or Cymric—let us say, is represented by the Welsh Celt and the Gaelic Celt. Those readers or students who approach the literature of either, ancient or modern, but particularly the latter, and expect to find identity both of sentiment and in method of expression, will ultimately be as disappointed as one who should, with the same idea, approach Spanish and Portuguese, or Dutch and German, or Provençal and French. ”

“ The physical differences which are evident, when we compare the ancient Celt known to the Greeks and Romans with the present inhabitants of Celtic Gaul, may be explained by the consideration that the hordes who invaded ancient Greece and Italy were on the move, and therefore of comparatively pure race, while the modern Celt is the result of the conquerors dwelling side by side with the conquered, in the same country, for an unknown number of centuries. ”

“ The Celtic genius, on the other hand, may claim to be itself magnetic, not dependent on vivification from without, and this I take it is one main reason why we may affirm that the qualities of the Celt are of a different type from those of the Saxon, that they bear another image and superscription, a special mint mark of their own among the mental endowments of the nations of the earth. ”

“ The main characteristics indeed of the Celt are all hers disinter- estedness, melancholy, wildness, a way ward force and passion, for ever wooed by sounds and sights to which other natures are insensible by murmurs from the earth, by colours in the sky, by tones and accents of the soul, that speak to the Celtic sense as to no other. ' We shall never build the Parthenon,' said Renan of his own Breton race ; ' marble is not for us ; but we know how to grip the heart and the soul ; we have an art of piercing that belongs to us alone ”

“ The nation at large had a vast store of folk-poetry, full of all the poetical characteristics of the Celt, and it was this very poetry, despised as it was, that became ultimately the groundwork of the new literature. ”

“ Every Celt of these islands or in the Gaeldom beyond the sea, and every Celt-lover among the English-speaking nations, should regard it as one of the duties of the race to put its traditions on record in the few years that now remain before they will cease for ever to be living in the hearts and memories of the humbler members of the race. ”

“ Even the extravagance and exaggeration of the sentimental Celtic nature has often something romantic and attractive about it, something which has a sort of smack of misdirected good. The Celt, undisciplinable, anarchical, and turbulent by nature, but out of affection and admiration giving himself body and soul to some leader, that is not a promising political temperament, it is just the opposite of the Anglo-Saxon temperament, disciplinable and steadily obedient within certain limits, but retaining an inalienable part of freedom and self-dependence ”

“ Let them consider that they are inextricably bound up with us, and that, if the suggestions in the following pages have any truth, we English, alien and uncongenial to our Celtic partners as we may have hitherto shown ourselves, have notwithstanding, beyond perhaps any other nation, a thousand latent springs of possible sympathy with them. Let them consider that new ideas and forces are stirring in England, that day by day these new ideas and forces gain in power, and that almost every one of them is the friend of the Celt and not his enemy. ”

“ The great earth-mother and her varied offspring ever come to view in Celtic religion under many names, and the features even of the other-world could not be dissociated for the Celt from those of his mother-earth. ”

“ THE TROUT STREAM
"An Earth-born coolness
Coloured with the sky." 13But it is probably true that when one has said that the typical Celt is seldom an Imperialist, a great landowner, a brewer, a cabinet minister, or (in Wales, at least) a member of the Salvation Army, one has exhausted the list of his weaknesses; and that not greatly wanting to be one of these things, he has endeared himself to those to-day who have set their hearts on gold and applause and have not gained them, and those few others who never sought them. ”

“ Those who have dealt with them, have gone to work, in general, either as warm Celt-lovers or as warm Celt-haters, and not as disinterested students of an important matter of science. One party seems to set out with the determination to find everything in Celtism and its remains ”

“ Certainly the lively plaids of the Highlander and his bagpipes show love for much color and exuberant gush of sound; and we all understand that the Celtic Irishman has an appetite for a shindy which demonstrates a rather lively emotional nature.
Beginning of English Learning.
But over that ancient England covered with its alternating fens and forests, and grimy Saxon hamlets, and Celtic companies of huts, there streams presently a new civilizing influence. ”

“ Celtic tradition is not only rich and varied beyond all others in this respect, it often thus secures its chief artistic effects. The talismans of Celtic romance, the fairy branch of Cormac, the Ga-bulg of Cuchullain, the sounding-hammer of Fionn, the treasures of the Boar Trwyth after which Prince Kilhwch sought, the glaives of light of the living folk-tale, have one and all a weird, fantastic, half-human existence, which haunts and thrills the imagination. ”

“ The temperament of the Celt kept him close to nature, and he never quite dropped the primitive elements of his religion. Moreover, the early influence of female cults of female spirits and goddesses remained to the end as another predominant factor. ”

“ I would remind my reader that Donal was a Celt, with a nature open to every fancy of love or awe—one of the same breed with the foolish Galatians, and like them ready to be bewitched; but bearing a heart that welcomed the light with glad rebound—loved the lovely, nor loved it only, but turned towards it with desire to become like it. Fergus too was a Celt in the main, but was spoiled by the paltry ambition of being distinguished. He was not in love with loveliness, but in love with praise. ”

“ Not only are relics of La Tène culture found in Ireland, but the oldest Irish epics celebrate tall, fair-haired, grey-eyed heroes, armed and clad in Gallic fashion, who had come from the continent. The Celts in Italy, in the Balkan, in France and in Britain, overspread the Indo-European peoples, who differed from themselves but slightly in speech. The Celts represented Indo-European q by p, whilst the Greeks, Illyrians, Thracians, Ligurians, and aborigines of France, Britain and Ireland represented it by k, c or qu. The Umbrian-Sabellian tribes had the same phonetic peculiarity as the Celts. ”

“ Celtic Languages
Introduction.—The Celtic languages form one group of the Indo-European family of languages. As might be expected from their geographical distribution, they hold a position between the Italic and Teutonic groups. They are distinguished from these and other branches of the family by certain well-marked characteristics, the most notable of which are the loss of initial and inter-vocalic p, cf. Ir. athair with Lat. pater; Ir. lān, “full,” Welsh llawn, Breton leun, with Lat. plenus; Gaulish are-, “beside,” Ir. ar. Welsh, Breton ar, with Gr. περί, παρά ”

“ The history of the North, with its blood feuds and friendships, declares this at a glance; and it is well known that no race is more unwilling than the clansmen are to leave the shadows of their native glens. Tangible proof, besides, is easily found that sensitiveness to natural beauty is inherent in the character of the Celt. ”

“ The fate of the Celt in the Highlands has been far different. There he has found himself437 in a region of mountains too rugged and lofty for cultivation, save along their bases, and too continuous to permit easy access from one district to another, yet not sufficiently impassable to prevent the sudden irruption of some hostile clan of mountaineers, carrying with it slaughter and spoliation. Shut in among long, narrow, and deep glens, he has cultivated their strips of alluvium, but has too often found the thin stony soil to yield but a poor return for his labour. ”

“ The northern race has ever kept pressing down on the broad-skulled, brown-complexioned men of the Alps, and intermixing with them, and at times has swept right over the great mountain chain into the tempting regions of the south, producing such races as the Celto-Ligyes, Celtiberians, Celtillyrians, Celto-Thracians and Celto-Scythians. ”

“ Many races have imagined a happy Other-world, but no other race has so filled it with magic beauty, or so persistently recurred to it as the Celts. They stood on the cliffs which faced the west, and as the pageant of sunset passed before them, or as at midday the light shimmered on the far horizon and on shadowy islands, they gazed with wistful eyes as if to catch a glimpse of Elysium beyond the fountains of the deep and the halls of the setting sun. In all this we see the Celtic version of a primitive and instinctive human belief. ”

“ Some of them became the greater gods, while others assumed a darker character, perhaps because they were associated with sinister aspects of nature or with the dead. The Celts knew all these, and some still linger on in folk-belief. Fairy-like or semi-divine women seen by streams or fountains, or in forests, or living in lakes or rivers, are survivals of spirits and goddesses of river, lake, or earth; and they abound in Celtic folk-story as bonnes dames, dames blanches, fées, or the Irish Bé Find. ”

“ We are told so often and so insistently by persons who speak with authority that the Celts are an imaginative people that we come to regard it as an established fact, beyond controversy, as true, for instance, as that the blood of a dark-haired person is heavier than the blood of a blonde. It consequently came to me as a great surprise to find that a people so markedly Celtic as the Cornish were the most prosaic I had ever known. ”

“ You are met to-night as a Celtic Society, and that, too, as a Celtic Society in connection with the University—can it be justified? Has such an Association a right to exist, to make demands upon the students' time and attention, at a period when there is so much both to do and to know that needs to be done and to be known? It is a question not hastily to be answered, though some bold and crude spirits might at once volunteer an answer in the negative, consigning all things Gaelic, as they would all things Greek, to one limbo, a quiet euthanasia. ”

“ It may reflect a genuine Celtic tradition, going back to the time when the Celts were still a compact nation inhabiting a relatively small territory.
When we come to contemporary evidence of the political condition of the Celts, we find that everywhere on the continent and in Asia Minor, their form of government resembles that of the Roman Republic. There are no kings, and the power of the state is vested in a senate with certain high executive officers. The Celtic form of government in historical time was that of a patrician republic. ”