Oscar Wilde - "Lady Windermere's Fan"

John Lothrop Motley - "The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1566"

Francis Parkman, Jr. - "Pioneers Of France In The New World"

John Lothrop Motley - "The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1576"

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Books: Literary and Philosophical Essays

V >> Various >> Literary and Philosophical Essays




In fact, be it Horace or another who is the author preferred, who
reflects our thoughts in all the wealth of their maturity, of some
one of those excellent and antique minds shall we request an
interview at every moment; of some one of them shall we ask a
friendship which never deceives, which could not fail us; to some
one of them shall we appeal for that sensation of serenity and
amenity (we have often need of it) which reconciles us with mankind
and with ourselves.




THE POETRY OF THE CELTIC RACES

BY ERNEST RENAN


TRANSLATED BY W. G. HUTCHISON




INTRODUCTORY NOTE

Ernest Renan was born in 1823, at Treguier in Brittany. He was
educated for the priesthood, but never took orders, turning at first
to teaching. He continued his studies in religion and philology,
and, after traveling in Syria on a government commission, he
returned to Paris and became professor of Hebrew in the College de
France, from which he was suspended for a time on account of
protests against his heretical teachings. He died in 1892.

Renan's activity divides itself into two parts. The first culminated
in his two great works on the "Origins of Christianity" and on the
"History of Israel." As to the scientific value of these books there
is difference of opinion, as was to be expected in a treatment of
such subjects to the exclusion of the miraculous. But the delicacy
and vividness of his portraits of the great personalities of Hebrew
history, and the acuteness of his analysis of national psychology,
are not to be denied.

The other part of his work is more miscellaneous, but most of it is
in some sense philosophical or autobiographical. Believing
profoundly in scientific method, Renan was unable to find in science
a basis for either ethics or metaphysics, and ended in a skepticism
often ironical, yet not untinged with mysticism.

"He was an amazing writer," says M. Faguet, "and disconcerted
criticism by the impossibility of explaining his methods of
procedure; he was luminous, supple, naturally pliant and yielding;
beneath his apparently effeminate grace an extraordinary strength of
character would suddenly make itself felt; he had, more than any
nineteenth-century writer, the quality of charm; he exercised a
caressing innuence which enveloped, and finally conquered, the
reader."

In no kind of writing was Renan's command of style more notable than
in the description of scenery; and in his pictures of his native
Brittany in the essay on "The Poetry of the Celtic Races," as well
as in his analysis of national qualities, two of his most
characteristic powers are admirably displayed.




THE POETRY OF THE CELTIC RACES

Every one who travels through the Armorican peninsula experiences a
change of the most abrupt description, as soon as he leaves behind
the district most closely bordering upon the continent, in which the
cheerful but commonplace type of face of Normandy and Maine is
continually in evidence, and passes into the true Brittany, that
which merits its name by language and race. A cold wind arises full
of a vague sadness, and carries the soul to other thoughts; the
tree-tops are bare and twisted; the heath with its monotony of tint
stretches away into the distance; at every step the granite
protrudes from a soil too scanty to cover it; a sea that is almost
always sombre girdles the horizon with eternal moaning. The same
contrast is manifest in the people: to Norman vulgarity, to a plump
and prosperous population, happy to live, full of its own interests,
egoistical as are all these who make a habit of enjoyment, succeeds
a timid and reserved race living altogether within itself, heavy in
appearance but capable of profound feeling, and of an adorable
delicacy in its religious instincts. A like change is apparent, I am
told, in passing from England into Wales, from the Lowlands of
Scotland, English by language and manners, into the Gaelic
Highlands; and too, though with a perceptible difference, when one
buries oneself in the districts of Ireland where the race has
remained pure from all admixture of alien blood. It seems like
entering on the subterranean strata of another world, and one
experiences in some measure the impression given us by Dante, when
he leads us from one circle of his Inferno to another.

Sufficient attention is not given to the peculiarity of this fact of
an ancient race living, until our days and almost under our eyes,
its own life in some obscure islands and peninsulas in the West,
more and more affected, it is true, by external influences, but
still faithful to its own tongue, to its own memories, to its own
customs, and to its own genius. Especially is it forgotten that this
little people, now concentrated on the very confines of the world,
in the midst of rocks and mountains whence its enemies have been
powerless to force it, is in possession of a literature which, in
the Middle Ages, exercised an immense influence, changed the current
of European civilisation, and imposed its poetical motives on nearly
the whole of Christendom. Yet it is only necessary to open the
authentic monuments of the Gaelic genius to be convinced that the
race which created them has had its own original manner of feeling
and thinking, that nowhere has the eternal illusion clad itself in
more seductive hues, and that in the great chorus of humanity no
race equals this for penetrative notes that go to the very heart.
Alas! it too is doomed to disappear, this emerald set in the Western
seas. Arthur will return no more from his isle of faery, and St.
Patrick was right when he said to Ossian, "The heroes that thou
weepest are dead; can they be born again?" It is high time to note,
before they shall have passed away, the divine tones thus expiring
on the horizon before the growing tumult of uniform civilisation.
Were criticism to set itself the task of calling back these distant
echoes, and of giving a voice to races that are no more, would not
that suffice to absolve it from the reproach, unreasonably and too
frequently brought against it, of being only negative?

Good works now exist which facilitate the task of him who undertakes
the study of these interesting literatures. Wales, above all, is
distinguished by scientific and literary activity, not always
accompanied, it is true, by a very rigorous critical spirit, but
deserving the highest praise. There, researches which would bring
honour to the most active centres of learning in Europe are the work
of enthusiastic amateurs. A peasant called Owen Jones published in
1801-7, under the name of the Myvyrian Archaiology of Wales, the
precious collection which is to this day the arsenal of Cymric
antiquities. A number of erudite and zealous workers, Aneurin Owen,
Thomas Price of Crickhowell, William Rees, and John Jones, following
in the footsteps of the Myvyrian peasant, set themselves to finish
his work, and to profit from the treasures which he had collected. A
woman of distinction, Lady Charlotte Guest, charged herself with the
task of acquainting Europe with the collection of the Mabinogion,
[Footnote: The Mabinogion, from the Llyfr Coch O Hergest and other
ancient Welsh Manuscripts, with an English Translation and Notes. By
Lady Charlotte Guest. London and Llandovery, 1837-49. The word
Mabinogi (in the plural Mabinogion) designates a form of romantic
narrative peculiar to Wales. The origin and primitive meaning of
this word are very uncertain, and Lady Guest's right to apply it to
the whole of the narratives which she has published is open to
doubt.] the pearl of Gaelic literature, the completest expression of
the Cymric genius. This magnificent work, executed in twelve years
with the luxury that the wealthy English amateur knows how to use in
his publications, will one day attest how full of life the
consciousness of the Celtic races remained in the present century.
Only indeed the sincerest patriotism could inspire a woman to
undertake and achieve so vast a literary monument. Scotland and
Ireland have in like measure been enriched by a host of studies of
their ancient history. Lastly, our own Brittany, though all too
rarely studied with the philological and critical rigour now exacted
in works of erudition, has furnished Celtic antiquities with her
share of worthy research. Does it not suffice to cite M. de la
Villemarque, whose name will be henceforth associated among us with
these studies, and whose services are so incontestable, that
criticism need have no fear of depreciating him in the eyes of a
public which has accepted him with so much warmth and sympathy?

I.

If the excellence of races is to be appreciated by the purity of
their blood and the inviolability of their national character, it
must needs be admitted that none can vie in nobility with the still
surviving remains of the Celtic race. [Footnote: To avoid all
misunderstanding, I ought to point out that by the word Celtic I
designate here, not the whole of the great race which, at a remote
epoch, formed the population of nearly the whole of Western Europe,
but simply the four groups which, in our days, still merit this
name, as opposed to the Teutons and to the Neo-Latin peoples. These
four groups are: (i) The inhabitants of Wales or Cambria, and the
peninsula of Cornwall, bearing even now the ancient name of Cymry;
(2) the Bretons bretonnants, or dwellers in French Brittany speaking
Bas-Breton, who represent an emigration of the Cymry from Wales; (3)
the Gaels of the North of Scotland speaking Gaelic; (4) the Irish,
although a very profound line of demarcation separates Ireland from
the rest of the Celtic family. [It is also necessary to point out
that Renan in this essay applies the name Breton both to the Bretons
proper, i. e. the inhabitants of Brittany, and to the British
members of the Celtic race.--Translator's Note.]]

Never has a human family lived more apart from the world, and been
purer from all alien admixture. Confined by conquest within
forgotten islands and peninsulas, it has reared an impassable
barrier against external influences; it has drawn all from itself;
it has lived solely on its own capital. From this ersues that
powerful individuality, that hatred of the foreigner, which even in
our own days has formed the essential feature of the Celtic peoples.
Roman civilisation scarcely reached them, and left among them but
few traces. The Teutonic invasion drove them back, but did not
penetrate them. At the present hour they are still constant in
resistance to an invasion dangerous in an altogether different way,-
-that of modern civilisation, destructive as it is of local
variations and national types. Ireland in particular (and herein we
perhaps have the secret of her irremediable weakness) is the only
country in Europe where the native can produce the titles of his
descent, and designate with certainty, even in the darkness of
prehistoric ages, the race from which he has sprung.

It is in this secluded life, in this defiance of all that comes from
without, that we must search for the explanation of the chief
features of the Celtic character. It has all the failings, and all
the good qualities, of the solitary man; at once proud and timid,
strong in feeling and feeble in action, at home free and unreserved,
to the outside world awkward and embarrassed. It distrusts the
foreigner, because it sees in him a being more refined than itself,
who abuses its simplicity. Indifferent to the admiration of others,
it asks only one thing, that it should be left to itself. It is
before all else a domestic race, fitted for family life and fireside
joys. In no other race has the bond of blood been stronger, or has
it created more duties, or attached man to his fellow with so much
breadth and depth. Every social institution of the Celtic peoples
was in the beginning only an extension of the family. A common
tradition attests, to this very day, that nowhere has the trace of
this great institution of relationship been better preserved than in
Brittany. There is a widely-spread belief in that country, that
blood speaks, and that two relatives, unknown one to the other, in
any part of the world wheresoever it may be, recognise each other by
the secret and mysterious emotion which they feel in each other's
presence. Respect for the dead rests on the same principle. Nowhere
has reverence for the dead been greater than among the Briton
peoples; nowhere have so many memories and prayers clustered about
the tomb. This is because life is not for these people a personal
adventure, undertaken by each man on his own account, and at his own
risks and perils; it is a link in a long chain, a gift received and
handed on, a debt paid and a duty done.

It is easily discernible how little fitted were natures so strongly
concentrated to furnish one of those brilliant developments, which
imposes the momentary ascendency of a people on the world; and that,
no doubt, is why the part played externally by the Cymric race has
always been a secondary one. Destitute of the means of expansion,
alien to all idea of aggression and conquest, little desirous of
making its thought prevail outside itself, it has only known how to
retire so far as space has permitted, and then, at bay in its last
place of retreat, to make an invincible resistance to its enemies.
Its very fidelity has been a useless devotion. Stubborn of
submission and ever behind the age, it is faithful to its conquerors
when its conquerors are no longer faithful to themselves. It was the
last to defend its religious independence against Rome--and it has
become the staunchest stronghold of Catholicism; it was the last in
France to defend its political independence against the king--and it
has given to the world the last royalists.

Thus the Celtic race has worn itself out in resistance to its time,
and in the defence of desperate causes. It does not seem as though
in any epoch it had any aptitude for political life. The spirit of
family stifled within it all attempts at more extended organisation.
Moreover, it does not appear that the peoples which form it are by
themselves susceptible of progress. To them life appears as a fixed
condition, which man has no power to alter. Endowed with little
initiative, too much inclined to look upon themselves as minors and
in tutelage, they are quick to believe in destiny and resign
themselves to it. Seeing how little audacious they are against God,
one would scarcely believe this race to be the daughter of Japhet.

Thence ensues its sadness. Take the songs of its bards of the sixth
century; they weep more defeats than they sing victories. Its
history is itself only one long lament; it still recalls its exiles,
its flights across the seas. If at times it seems to be cheerful, a
tear is not slow to glisten behind its smile; it does not know that
strange forgetfulness of human conditions and destinies which is
called gaiety. Its songs of joy end as elegies; there is nothing to
equal the delicious sadness of its national melodies. One might call
them emanations from on high which, falling drop by drop upon the
soul, pass through it like memories of another world. Never have men
feasted so long upon these solitary delights of the spirit, these
poetic memories which simultaneously intercross all the sensations
of life, so vague, so deep, so penetrative, that one might die from
them, without being able to say whether it was from bitterness or
sweetness.

The infinite delicacy of feeling which characterises the Celtic race
is closely allied to its need of concentration. Natures that are
little capable of expansion are nearly always those that feel most
deeply, for the deeper the feeling, the less it tends to express
itself. Thence we have that charming shamefastness, that veiled and
exquisite sobriety, equally far removed from the sentimental
rhetoric too familiar to the Latin races, and the reflective
simplicity of Germany, which are so admirably displayed in the
ballads published by M. de la Villemarque. The apparent reserve of
the Celtic peoples, often taken for coldness, is due to this inward
timidity which makes them believe that a feeling loses half its
value if it be expressed; and that the heart ought to have no other
spectator than itself.

If it be permitted us to assign sex to nations as to individuals, we
should have to say without hesitance that the Celtic race,
especially with regard to its Cymric or Breton branch, is an
essentially feminine race. No human family, I believe, has carried
so much mystery into love. No other has conceived with more delicacy
the ideal of woman, or been more fully dominated by it. It is a sort
of intoxication, a madness, a vertigo. Read the strange Mabinogi of
Peredur, or its French imitation Parceval le Gallois; its pages are,
as it were, dewy with feminine sentiment. Woman appears therein as a
kind of vague vision, an intermediary between man and the
supernatural world. I am acquainted with no literature that offers
anything analogous to this. Compare Guinevere or Iseult with those
Scandinavian furies Gudrun and Chrimhilde, and you will avow that
woman such as chivalry conceived her, an ideal of sweetness and
loveliness set up as the supreme end of life, is a creation neither
classical, nor Christian, nor Teutonic, but in reality Celtic.

Imaginative power is nearly always proportionate to concentration of
feeling, and lack of the external development of life. The limited
nature of Greek and Italian imagination is due to the easy
expansiveness of the peoples of the South, with whom the soul,
wholly spread abroad, reflects but little within itself. Compared
with the classical imagination, the Celtic imagination is indeed the
infinite contrasted with the finite. In the fine Mabinogi of the
Dream of Maxem Wledig, the Emperor Maximus beholds in a dream a
young maiden so beautiful, that on waking he declares he cannot live
without her. For several years his envoys scour the world in search
of her; at last she is discovered in Brittany. So is it with the
Celtic race; it has worn itself out in taking dreams for realities,
and in pursuing its splendid visions. The essential element in the
Celt's poetic life is the adventure--that is to say, the pursuit of
the unknown, an endless quest after an object ever flying from
desire. It was of this that St. Brandan dreamed, that Peredur sought
with his mystic chivalry, that Knight Owen asked of his subterranean
journeyings. This race desires the infinite, it thirsts for it, and
pursues it at all costs, beyond the tomb, beyond hell itself. The
characteristic failing of the Breton peoples, the tendency to
drunkenness--a failing which, according to the traditions of the
sixth century, was the cause of their disasters--is due to this
invincible need of illusion. Do not say that it is an appetite for
gross enjoyment; never has there been a people more sober and more
alien to all sensuality. No, the Bretons sought in mead what Owen,
St. Brandan, and Peredur sought in their own way,--the vision of the
invisible world. To this day in Ireland drunkenness forms a part of
all Saint's Day festivals--that is to say, the festivals which best
have retained their national and popular aspect.

Thence arises the profound sense of the future and of the eternal
destinies of his race, which has ever borne up the Cymry, and kept
him young still beside his conquerors who have grown old. Thence
that dogma of the resurrection of the heroes, which appears to have
been one of those that Christianity found most difficulty in rooting
out. Thence Celtic Messianism, that belief in a future avenger who
shall restore Cambria, and deliver her out of the hands of her
oppressors, like the mysterious Leminok promised by Merlin, the Lez-
Breiz of the Armoricans, the Arthur of the Welsh. [Footnote: M.
Augustin Thierry has finely remarked that the renown attaching to
Welsh prophecies in the Middle Ages was due to their steadfastness
in affirming the future of their race. (Histoire de la Conquete
d'Angleterre.)] The hand that arose from the mere, when the sword of
Arthur fell therein, that seized it, and brandished it thrice, is
the hope of the Celtic races. It is thus that little peoples dowered
with imagination revenge themselves on their conquerors. Feeling
themselves to be strong inwardly and weak outwardly, they protest,
they exult; and such a strife unloosing their might, renders them
capable of miracles. Nearly all great appeals to the supernatural
are due to peoples hoping against all hope. Who shall say what in
our own times has fermented in the bosom of the most stubborn, the
most powerless of nationalities--Poland? Israel in humiliation
dreamed of the spiritual conquest of the world, and the dream has
come to pass.

II

At a first glance the literature of Wales is divided into three
perfectly distinct distinct branches: the bardic or lyric, which
shines forth in splendour in the sixth century by the works of
Taliessin, of Aneurin, and of Liware'h Hen, and continues through an
uninterrupted series of imitations up to modern times; the
Mabinogion, or literature of romance, fixed towards the twelfth
century, but linking themselves in the groundwork of their ideas
with the remotest ages of the Celtic genius; finally, an
ecclesiastical and legendary literature, impressed with a distinct
stamp of its own. These three literatures seem to have existed side
by side, almost without knowledge of one another. The bards, proud
of their solemn rhetoric, held in disdain the popular tales, the
form of which they considered careless; on the other hand, both
bards and romancers appear to have had few relations with the
clergy; and one at times might be tempted to suppose that they
ignored the existence of Christianity. To our thinking it is in the
Mabinogion that the true expression of the Celtic genius is to be
sought; and it is surprising that so curious a literature, the
source of nearly all the romantic creations of Europe, should have
remained unknown until our own days. The cause is doubtless to be
ascribed to the dispersed state of the Welsh manuscripts, pursued
till last century by the English, as seditious books compromising
those who possessed them. Often too they fell into hands of ignorant
owners whose caprice or ill-will sufficed to keep them from critical
research.

The Mabinogion have been preserved for us in two principal
documents--one of the thirteenth century from the library of
Hengurt, belonging to the Vaughan family; the other dating from the
fourteenth century, known under the name of the Red Book of Hergest,
and now in Jesus College, Oxford. No doubt it was some such
collection that charmed the weary hours of the hapless Leolin in the
Tower of London, and was burned after his condemnation, with the
other Welsh books which had been the companions of his captivity.
Lady Charlotte Guest has based her edition on the Oxford manuscript;
it cannot be sufficiently regretted that paltry considerations have
caused her to be refused the use of the earlier manuscript, of which
the later appears to be only a copy. Regrets are redoubled when one
knows that several Welsh texts, which were seen and copied fifty
years ago, have now disappeared. It is in the presence of facts such
as these that one comes to believe that revolutions--in general so
destructive of the works of the past--are favourable to the
preservation of literary monuments, by compelling their
concentration in great centres, where their existence, as well as
their publicity, is assured.

The general tone of the Mabinogion is rather romantic than epic.
Life is treated naively and not too emphatically. The hero's
individuality is limitless. We have free and noble natures acting in
all their spontaneity. Each man appears as a kind of demi-god
characterised by a supernatural gift. This gift is nearly always
connected with some miraculous object, which in some measure is the
personal seal of him who possesses it. The inferior classes, which
this people of heroes necessarily supposes beneath it, scarcely show
themselves, except in the exercise of some trade, for practising
which they are held in high esteem. The somewhat complicated
products of human industry are regarded as living beings, and in
their manner endowed with magical properties. A multiplicity of
celebrated objects have proper names, such as the drinking-cup, the
lance, the sword, and the shield of Arthur; the chess-board of
Gwendolen, on which the black pieces played of their own accord
against the white; the horn of Bran Galed, where one found whatever
liquor one desired; the chariot of Morgan, which directed itself to
the place to which one wished to go; the pot of Tyrnog, which would
not cook when meat for a coward was put into it; the grindstone of
Tudwal, which would only sharpen brave men's swords; the coat of
Padarn, which none save a noble could don; and the mantle of Tegan,
which no woman could put upon herself were she not above reproach.
[Footnote: Here may be recognised the origin of trial by court
mantle, one of the most interesting episodes in Lancelot of the
Lake.] The animal is conceived in a still more individual way; it
has a proper name, personal qualities, and a role which it develops
at its own will and with full consciousness. The same hero appears
as at once man and animal, without it being possible to trace the
line of demarcation between the two natures.