Celtic studies

“ Appreciated as his genius has been by all the cultivated nations of Europe, it is by the nation in whom the impressible Celtic nature has been refined and strengthened by the discipline of Latin studies that his pre-eminence has been most generally acknowledged. ”

“ That the book giving the impetus to this tardy recognition of the importance of studies which, for us British, should take precedence of classical mythology, has been annotated by Alfred Nutt, and, as we are glad to know, left by him in so forward a state as to warrant its issue, thus enriched, is perhaps the happiest legacy that so eminent a Celtic scholar and apostle of the Celtic revival could have bequeathed. ”

“ It was known that they retained the original characteristics of the Celtic race, its fervency of religious faith, its melancholy, its sensitiveness to the mysterious influences of nature, its passion and its loyalty, and that many of its customs and habits of life were distinct survivals of mediævalism, and utterly anomalous to the spirit of modern civilization. ”

“ Thirdly, whatever opinion be held respecting the connection of the North French romances and Celtic tradition, connection of some kind must be admitted. Now the study of Celtic tradition is only beginning to be placed upon a firm basis, and the stores of Celtic myth and legend are only beginning to be thrown open to the non-Celtic scholar. Were there in existence a Celtic parallel to Grimm's great work on German Mythology, the views for which the writer contends would have been, in all likelihood, admitted ere now, and there would have been no necessity for this work at all. ”

“ But if the reverse be true the probabilities are at once in favour of the Christian legendary element being the intruding one, and the chief aim of the Celtic partisan will be to disengage the present versions of the Quest from the traces left upon them by the Early History, and to accumulate as many parallels as possible between the residuum and admittedly genuine Celtic tradition. It by no means follows, however, that the acceptance of the second hypothesis involves the acceptance of the Celtic origin of the Grail. ”

“ Wales has recognised the service that our learned compatriot has thus rendered to Celtic studies. We confess, however, to much preferring to the "Bards" the "Popular Songs of Brittany." It is in the latter that M. de la Villemarque has best served Celtic studies, by revealing to us a delightful literature, in which, more clearly than anywhere else, are apparent these features of gentleness, fidelity, resignation, and timid reserve which form the character of the Breton peoples. ”

“ When the diplomatic evidence is accessible in a trustworthy form; when the romances have received all the light that can be shed upon them from Celtic history, philology, and mythology, the future student will have a comparatively easy task. One of the writer's chief objects has been to excite an interest in these romances among those who are able to examine the Celtic elements in them far more efficiently than he could do. ”

“ What M. Alexandre Bertrand says of Celtic civilisation, namely, that neither the Ligurians, nor the Phœnicians, nor the Greeks, nor the Iberians collaborated in that educational work, may with some reservations in favour of the two latter nations be accepted as true of the Celtic religion.
From Julius Cæsar some useful information is to be gained respecting the religion of the Celts of his own day. He states that they had many gods, the chief of whom, in Gaul at least, answered to the Roman Mercury, patron of arts and crafts. ”

“ What the French call the science des origines, the science of origins,—a science which is at the bottom of all real knowledge of the actual world, and which is every day growing in interest and importance—is very incomplete without a thorough critical account of the Celts, and their genius, language, and literature. This science has still great progress to make, but its progress, made even within the recollection of those of us who are in middle life, has already affected our common notions about the Celtic race ”

“ Her sons, carrying Christianity and a new humanism over Great Britain and the Continent, became the teachers of whole nations, the counsellors of kings and emperors. For once, if but for a century or two, the Celtic spirit dominated a large part of the Western world, and Celtic ideals imparted a new life to a decadent civilisation until they succumbed, not altogether to the benefit of mankind, before a mightier system—that of Rome. ”

“ 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. ”

“ This brings us to say a word on the kindred theme of the religious sentiment of the Celtic race, their inborn reverential feeling, one of their most prominent and honourable characteristics. Like the romantic sentiment we have just been considering, which has drawn the Celtic mind toward the mystery of Nature, it is a plant rooted and grounded in the same soil, nurtured by the dews of the same Idealism. ”

“ Ah, those old, drystone walls dividing the fields—pale and granite-blenched! Ah, the dark, sombre grass, the naked sky! the forlorn horses in the wintry morning! Strange is a Celtic landscape, far more moving, disturbing than the lovely glamor of Italy and Greece. Before the curtains of history lifted, one feels the world was like this—this Celtic bareness and sombreness and air. But perhaps it is not Celtic at all: Iberian. Nothing is more unsatisfactory than our conception of what is Celtic and what is not Celtic. ”

“ After having exercised all the godly and worldly chivalries, sought with Pérédur the Holy Graal and the Beautiful, dreamed with Saint Brandan of mystical Atlantides, who knows what the Celtic genius would produce in the domain of the intelligence if it should embolden itself to make its entrance into the world, and if it subjected its rich and profound nature to the conditions of modern thought? Few races have had a poetical infancy as complete as the Celtic—mythology, lyricism, epic, romanesque imagination, religious enthusiasm, nothing have they lacked. ”

“ But, alas, a stronger law than that which man can make or unmake, or nations can resolve, is slowly disintegrating the subsoil wherefrom the roots of the Celtic speech draw the sole nurture which can give it the beauty and fragrance of life.
Some idea of the vastness of the mass of the as yet untranslated Celtic literature may be had from the notes in books by Dr Douglas Hyde, J. F. Campbell, Alfred Nutt, and other specialists. ”

“ But, at any rate, let us consider that of the shrunken and diminished remains of this great primitive race, all, with one insignificant exception, belongs to the English empire; only Brittany is not ours; we have Ireland, the Scotch Highlands, Wales, the Isle of Man, Cornwall. They are a part of ourselves, we are deeply interested in knowing them, they are deeply interested in being known by us; and yet in the great and rich universities of this great and rich country there is no chair of Celtic, there is no study or teaching of Celtic matters; those who want them must go abroad for them. ”

“ Yet, without claiming such superlative potency for the Celtic intellect and character, we may feel confident that it has a distinctive differentia of its own which makes it worthy of our homage, worthy, therefore, of our efforts to preserve it, a peculiar aroma attaching to it, a sparkling, yet tender old-world weirdness which the world ought not willingly to let die. ”

“ It is thus from Anglo-Saxon, and not from Gaelic or Cymric, that the language we speak to-day comes.
Yet our Celtic forefathers have given something to our literature which perhaps we could never have had from English alone. The Celtic literature is full of wonder, it is full of a tender magic and makes us feel the fairy charm of nature, although it has not the strength, the downrightness, we might say, of the English. It has been said that every poet has somewhere in him a Celtic strain. ”

“ It is important, therefore, if we are to have before us all the factors which enter into the problem, that we should inquire what people were here before the first Celts arrived, and that we should make ourselves to some extent familiar with all the different races and cultures which preceded the Celtic invaders. ”

“ I believe that the fairy creed, this ancient source of inspiration, of symbolic interpretation of man's relation to nature, is not yet dried up, and that English literature, with its mixed strain of Teutonic and Celtic blood, with its share in the mythologies of both these races, and in especial with its claim to the sole body of mythology and romance, the Celtic, which grew up wholly unaffected by classic culture, is destined to drink deeply of it in the future as in the past, and to find in it the material for new creations of undying beauty. ”

“ Carolingian culture not only in the specific field of literature but in the broader sense afforded a medium for the spread of Celtic, Byzantine and Germanic genius. The Celtic portion of the poetry in the early monastic cycles has already been described in connection with the Old Hymnal. Prior to the eighth century, a transfer of Celtic scholarship to the continent began to take place. The missionaries, Columbanus, Gall, Foilan, Disibod and others, came first, during the seventh and eighth centuries. ”

“ It is because the Celtic tongues, whether qu or p, are spoken chiefly by people of this small brunette type, that it is frequently called the Celtic race, and yet all the evidence of ancient authorities goes to show that 2,000 or 2,500 years ago the Celts were looked upon as a tall, fair people. ”

“ Restricted by conquest to forgotten isles and peninsulas, the Celtic race has habitually striven to oppose an impassable barrier to all alien influences. It has ever trusted in itself, and in itself alone, and has drawn its mental and spiritual nurture from its own resources.
Hence that powerful individuality, that hatred of the stranger, which up to our day has formed the essential characteristic of the Celtic peoples. The civilisation of Rome hardly reached them, and left among them but few traces. The Germanic invasion flowed back on them, but it did not affect them at all. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The great difficulty in understanding the evolution of Celtic art lies in the fact that although the Celts never seem to have invented any new ideas, they possessed an extraordinary aptitude for picking up ideas from the different peoples with whom war or commerce brought them into contact. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Not in Germany, not in Italy, not in Provence, not in Spain, did these stories of knightly loyalty and uttermost honour and devotion take their rise. It was in Northern France, where Franks and Normans were in contact with the large Celtic remnants of the Bretons. In all these legends there speaks the Celtic voice, rememberable and distinguishable everywhere by its prevailing melancholy, its devotion to a cause, be that cause right or wrong, be it strong or weak. ”

“ May it be suggested that, just as the Celtic element of our race has supplied so much of value towards the enrichment of our literature, even so Celtic institutions, hitherto of small account as compared with those derived from our Teutonic forefathers, may contribute somewhat towards the completed fabric of our law? ”

“ Study it in Wales, in Man, in the Scottish Highlands, in Ireland, in Cornwall, in France, and you will find that while it is Celtic everywhere, everywhere it is different;2096 that everywhere it has become what it is because it is compounded, in different degrees, not only of Celtic, not only of pre-Celtic and pre-Aryan, but also of post-Celtic elements. ”