Alfred de Vigny - "Cinq Mars, v4"

F. Hopkinson Smith - "Peter: A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero"

Charlotte M. Yonge - "The Pigeon Pie"

John Masefield - "Jim Davis"

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Books: Literary and Philosophical Essays

V >> Various >> Literary and Philosophical Essays




Such is the literature of which M. de la Villemarque has attempted
to unite the most ancient and authentic monuments in his "Breton
Bards of the Sixth Century." 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. [Footnote:
This interesting collection ought not, however, to be accepted
unreservedly; and the absolute confidence with which it has been
quoted is not without its inconveniences. We believe that when M. de
la Villemarque comments on the fragments which, to his eternal
honour, he has been the first to bring to light, his criticism is
far from being proof against all reproach, and that several of the
historical allusions which he considers that he finds in them are
hypotheses more ingenious than solid. The past is too great, and has
come down to us in too fragmentary a manner, for such coincidences
to be probable. Popular celebrities are rarely those of history, and
when the rumours of distant centuries come to us by two channels,
one popular, the other historical, it is a rare thing for these two
forms of tradition to be fully in accord with one another. M. de la
Villemarque is also too ready to suppose that the people repeats for
centuries songs that it only half understands. When a song ceases to
be intelligible, it is nearly always altered by the people, with the
end of approximating it to the sounds farmliar and significant to
their ears. Is it not also to be feared that in this case the
editor, in entire good faith, may lend some slight inflection to the
text, so as to find in it the sense that he desires, or has in his
mind?]

The theme of the poetry of the bards of the sixth century is simple
and exclusively heroic; it ever deals with the great motives of
patriotism and glory. There is a total absence of all tender
feeling, no trace of love, no well-marked religious idea, but only a
vague and naturalistic mysticism,--a survival of Druidic teaching,--
and a moral philosophy wholly expressed in Triads, similar to that
taught in the half-bardic, half-Christian schools of St. Cadoc and
St. Iltud. The singularly artificial and highly wrought form of the
style suggests the existence of a system of learned instruction
possessing long traditions. A more pronounced shade, and there would
be a danger of falling into a pedantic and mannered rhetoric. The
bardic literature, by its lengthened existence through the whole of
the Middle Ages, did not escape this danger. It ended by being no
more than a somewhat insipid collection of unoriginalities in style,
and conventional metaphors. [Footnote: A Welsh scholar, Mr.
Stephens, in his History of Cymric Literature (Llandovery, 1849),
has demonstrated these successive transformations very well.]

The opposition between bardism and Christianity reveals itself in
the pieces translated by M. de la Villemarque by many features of
original and pathetic interest. The strife which rent the soul of
the old poets, their antipathy to the grey men of the monastery,
their sad and painful conversion, are to be found in their songs.
The sweetness and tenacity of the Breton character can alone explain
how a heterodoxy so openly avowed as this maintained its position in
face of the dominant Christianity, and how holy men, Kolumkill for
example, took upon themselves the defence of the bards against the
kings who desired to stamp them out. The strife was the longer in
its duration, in that Christianity among the Celtic peoples never
employed force against rival religions, and, at the worst, left to
the vanquished the liberty of ill humour. Belief in prophets,
indestructible among these peoples, created, in despite of faith the
Anti-Christian type of Merlin, and caused his acceptance by the
whole of Europe. Gildas and the orthodox Bretons were ceaseless in
their thunderings against the prophets, and opposed to them Elias
and Samuel, two bards who only foretold good; even in the twelfth
century Giraldus Cambrensis saw a prophet in the town of Caerleon.

Thanks to this toleration bardism lasted into the heart of the
Middle Ages, under the form of a secret doctrine, with a
conventional language, and symbols almost wholly borrowed from the
solar divinity of Arthur. This may be termed Neo-Druidism, a kind of
Druidism subtilised and reformed on the model of Christianity, which
may be seen growing more and more obscure and mysterious, until the
moment of its total disappearance. A curious fragment belonging to
this school, the dialogue between Arthur and Eliwlod, has
transmitted to us the latest sighs of this latest protestation of
expiring naturalism. Under the form of an eagle Eliwlod introduces
the divinity to the sentiment of resignation, of subjection, and of
humility, with which Christianity combated pagan pride. Hero-worship
recoils step by step before the great formula, which Christianity
ceases not to repeat to the Celtic races to sever them from their
memories: There is none greater than God. Arthur allows himself to
be persuaded to abdicate from his divinity, and ends by reciting the
Pater.

I know of no more curious spectacle than this revolt of the manly
sentiments of hero-worship against the feminine feeling which flowed
so largely into the new faith. What, in fact, exasperates the old
representatives of Celtic society are the exclusive triumph of the
pacific spirit and the men, clad in linen and chanting psalms, whose
voice is sad, who preach asceticism, and know the heroes no more.
[Footnote: The antipathy to Christianity attributed by the Armorican
people to the dwarfs and korigans belongs in like measure to
traditions of the opposition encountered by the Gospel in its
beginnings. The korigans in fact are, for the Breton peasant, great
princesses who would not accept Christianity when the apostles came
to Brittany. They hate the clergy and the churches, the bells of
which make them take to flight. The Virgin above all is their great
enemy; she it is who has hounded them forth from their fountains,
and on Saturday, the day consecrated to her, whosoever beholds them
combing their hair or counting their treasures is sure to perish.
(Villemarque, Chants populaires, Introduction.)] We know the use
that Ireland has made of this theme, in the dialogues which she
loves to imagine between the representatives of her profane and
religious life, Ossian and St. Patrick. [Footnote: See Miss Brooke's
Reliques of Irish Poetry, Dublin, 1789, pp. 37 et seq., PP. 75 et
seq.] Ossian regrets the adventures, the chase, the blast of the
horn, and the kings of old time. "If they were here," he says to St.
Patrick, "thou should'st not thus be scouring the country with the
psalm-singing flock." Patrick seeks to calm him by soft words, and
sometimes carries his condescension so far as to listen to his long
histories, which appear to interest the saint but slightly. "Thou
hast heard my story," says the old bard in conclusion; "albeit my
memory groweth weak, and I am devoured with care, yet I desire to
continue still to sing the deeds of yore, and to live upon ancient
glories. Now am I stricken with years, my life is frozen within me,
and all my joys are fleeting away. No more can my hand grasp the
sword, nor mine arm hold the lance in rest. Among priests my last
sad hour lengtheneth out, and psalms take now the place of songs of
victory." "Let thy songs rest," says Patrick, "and dare not to
compare thy Finn to the King of Kings, whose might knoweth no
bounds: bend thy knees before Him, and know Him for thy Lord." It
was indeed necessary to surrender, and the legend relates how the
old bard ended his days in the cloister, among the priests whom he
had so often used rudely, in the midst of these chants that he knew
not. Ossian was too good an Irishman for any one to make up his mind
to damn him utterly. Merlin himself had to cede to the new spell. He
was, it is said, converted by St. Columba; and the popular voice in
the ballads repeats to him unceasingly this sweet and touching
appeal: "Merlin, Merlin, be converted; there is no divinity save
that of God."

VI.

We should form an altogether inadequate idea of the physiognomy of
the Celtic races, were we not to study them under what is perhaps
the most singular aspect of their development--that is to say, their
ecclesiastical antiquities and their saints. Leaving on one side the
temporary repulsion which Christian mildness had to conquer in the
classes of society which saw their influence diminished by the new
order of things, it can be truly said, that the gentleness of
manners and the exquisite sensibility of the Celtic races, in
conjunction with the absence of a formerly existing religion of
strong organisation, predestined them to Christianity. Christianity
in fact, addressing itself by preference to the more humble feelings
in human nature, met here with admirably prepared disciples; no race
has so delicately understood the charm of littleness, none has
placed the simple creature, the innocent, nearer God. The ease with
which the new religion took possession of these peoples is also
remarkable. Brittany and Ireland between them scarce count two or
three martyrs; they are reduced to venerating as such those of their
compatriots who were slain in the Anglo-Saxon and Danish invasions.
Here comes to light the profound difference dividing the Celtic from
the Teutonic race. The Teutons only received Christianity tardily
and in spite of themselves, by scheming or by force, after a
sanguinary resistance, and with terrible throes, Christianity was in
fact on several sides repugnant to their nature; and one understands
the regrets of pure Teutonists who, to this day, reproach the new
faith with having corrupted their sturdy ancestors.

Such was not the case with the Celtic peoples; that gentle little
race was naturally Christian. Far from changing them, and taking
away some of their qualities, Christianity finished and perfected
them. Compare the legends relating to the introduction of
Christianity into the two countries, the Kristni Saga for instance,
and the delightful legends of Lucius and St. Patrick. What a
difference we find! In Iceland the first apostles are pirates,
converted by some chance, now saying mass, now massacring their
enemies, now resuming their former profession of sea-rovers;
everything is done in accord with expediency, and without any
serious faith.

In Ireland and Brittany grace operates through women, by I know not
what charm of purity and sweetness. The revolt of the Teutons was
never effectually stifled; never did they forget the forced
baptisms, and the sword-supported Carlovingian missionaries, until
the day when Teutonism took its revenge, and Luther through seven
centuries gave answer to Witikind. On the other hand, the Celts
were, even in the third century, perfect Christians. To the Teutons
Christianity was for long nothing but a Roman institution, imposed
from without. They entered the Church only to trouble it; and it was
not without very great difficulty that they succeeded in forming a
national clergy. To the Celts, on the contrary, Christianity did not
come from Rome; they had their native clergy, their own peculiar
usages, their faith at first hand. It cannot, in fact, be doubted
that in apostolic times Christianity was preached in Brittany; and
several historians, not without justification, have considered that
it was borne there by Judaistic Christians, or by disciples of the
school of St. John. Everywhere else Christianity found, as a first
substratum, Greek or Roman civilisation. Here it found a virgin soil
of a nature analogous to its own, and naturally prepared to receive
it.

Few forms of Christianity have offered an ideal of Christian
perfection so pure as the Celtic Church of the sixth, seventh, and
eighth centuries. Nowhere, perhaps, has God been better worshipped
in spirit than in those great monastic communities of Hy, or of
Iona, of Bangor, of Clonard, or of Lindisfarne. One of the most
distinguished developments of Christianity--doubtless too
distinguished for the popular and practical mission which the Church
had to undertake--Pelagianism, arose from it. The true and refined
morality, the simplicity, and the wealth of invention which give
distinction to the legends of the Breton and Irish saints are indeed
admirable. No race adopted Christianity with so much originality,
or, while subjecting itself to the common faith, kept its national
characteristics more persistently. In religion, as in all else, the
Bretons sought isolation, and did not willingly fraternise with the
rest of the world. Strong in their moral superiority, persuaded that
they possessed the veritable canon of faith and religion, having
received their Christianity from an apostolic and wholly primitive
preaching, they experienced no need of feeling themselves in
communion with Christian societies less noble than their own. Thence
arose that long struggle of the Breton churches against Roman
pretensions, which is so admirably narrated by M. Augustin Thierry,
[Footnote: In his History of the Conquest. The objections raised by
M. Varin and some other scholars to M. Thierry's narrative only
affect some secondary details, which were rectified in the edition
published after the illustrious historian's death.] thence those
inflexible characters of Columba and the monks of Iona, defending
their usages and institutions against the whole Church, thence
finally the false position of the Celtic peoples in Catholicism,
when that mighty force, grown more and more aggressive, had drawn
them together from all quarters, and compelled their absorption in
itself. Having no Catholic past, they found themselves unclassed on
their entrance into the great family, and were never able to succeed
in creating for themselves an Archbishopric. All their efforts and
all their innocent deceits to attribute that title to the Churches
of Dol and St. Davids were wrecked on the overwhelming divergence of
their past; their bishops had to resign themselves to being obscure
suffragans of Tours and Canterbury.

It remains to be said that, even in our own days, the powerful
originality of Celtic Christianity is far from being effaced. The
Bretons of France, although they have felt the consequences of the
revolutions undergone by Catholicism on the Continent, are, at the
present hour, one of the populations in which religious feeling has
retained most independence. The new devotions find no favour with
it; the people are faithful to the old beliefs and the old saints;
the psalms of religion have for them an ineffable harmony. In the
same way, Ireland keeps, in her more remote districts, quite unique
forms of worship from those of the rest of the world, to which
nothing in other parts of Christendom can be compared. The influence
of modern Catholicism, elsewhere so destructive of national usages,
has had here a wholly contrary effect, the clergy having found it
incumbent on them to seek a vantage ground against Protestantism, in
attachment to local practices and the customs of the past.

It is the picture of these Christian institutions, quite distinct
from those of the remainder of the West, of this sometimes strange
worship, of these legends of the saints marked with so distinct a
seal of nationality, that lends an interest to the ecclesiastical
antiquities of Ireland, of Wales, and of Armorican Brittany. No
hagiology has remained more exclusively natural than that of the
Celtic peoples; until the twelfth century those peoples admitted
very few alien saints into their martyrology. None, too, includes so
many naturalistic elements. Celtic Paganism offered so little
resistance to the new religion, that the Church did not hold itself
constrained to put in force against it the rigour with which
elsewhere it pursued the slightest traces of mythology. The
conscientious essay by W. Rees on the "Saints of Wales", and that by
the Rev. John Williams, an extremely learned ecclesiastic of the
diocese of St. Asaph, on the "Ecclesiastical Antiquities of the
Cymry", suffice to make one understand the immense value which a
complete and intelligent history of the Celtic Churches, before
their absorption in the Roman Church, would possess. To these might
be added the learned work of Dom Lobineau on the Saints of Brittany,
re-issued in our days by the Abbe Tresvaux, had not the half-
criticism of the Benedictine, much worse than a total absence of
criticism, altered those naive legends and cut away from them, under
the pretext of good sense and religious reverence, that which to us
gives them interest and charm.

Ireland above all would offer a religious physiognomy quite peculiar
to itself, which would appear singularly original, were history in a
position to reveal it in its entirety. When we consider the legions
of Irish saints who in the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries
inundated the Continent and arrived from their isle bearing with
them their stubborn spirit, their attachment to their own usages,
their subtle and realistic turn of mind, and see the Scots (such was
the name given to the Irish) doing duty, until the twelfth century,
as instructors in grammar and literature to all the West, we cannot
doubt that Ireland, in the first half of the Middle Ages, was the
scene of a singular religious movement. Studious philologists and
daring philosophers, the Hibernian monks were above all
indefatigable copyists; and it was in part owing to them that the
work of the pen became a holy task. Columba, secretly warned that
his last hour is at hand, finishes the page of the psalter which he
has commenced, writes at the foot that he bequeaths the continuation
to his successor, and then goes into the church to die. Nowhere was
monastic life to find such docile subjects. Credulous as a child,
timid, indolent, inclined to submit and obey, the Irishman alone was
capable of lending himself to that complete self-abdication in the
hands of the abbot, which we find so deeply marked in the historical
and legendary memorials of the Irish Church. One easily recognises
the land where, in our own days, the priest, without provoking the
slightest scandal, can, on a Sunday before quitting the altar, give
the orders for his dinner in a very audible manner, and announce the
farm where he intends to go and dine, and where he will hear his
flock in confession. In the presence of a people which lived by
imagination and the senses alone, the Church did not consider itself
under the necessity of dealing severely with the caprices of
religious fantasy. It permitted the free action of the popular
instinct; and from this freedom emerged what is perhaps of all cults
the most mythological and most analogous to the mysteries of
antiquity, presented in Christian annals, a cult attached to certain
places, and almost exclusively consisting in certain acts held to be
sacramental.

Without contradiction the legend of St. Brandan is the most singular
product of this combination of Celtic naturalism with Christian
spiritualism. The taste of the Hibernian monks for making maritime
pilgrimages through the archipelago of the Scottish and Irish seas,
everywhere dotted with monasteries, [Footnote: The Irish saints
literally covered the Western seas. A very considerable number of
the saints of Brittany, St. Tenenan, St. Renan, etc., were emigrants
from Ireland. The Breton legends of St. Malo, St. David, and of St.
Pol of Leon are replete with similar stories of voyages to the
distant isles of the West.] and the memory of yet more distant
voyages in Polar seas, furnished the framework of this curious
composition, so rich in local impressions. From Pliny (IV. xxx. 3)
we learn that, even in his time, the Bretons loved to venture their
lives upon the high seas, in search of unknown isles. M. Letronne
has proved that in 795, sixty-five years consequently before the
Danes, Irish monks landed in Iceland and established themselves on
the coast. In this island the Danes found Irish books and bells; and
the names of certain localities still bear witness to the sojourn of
those monks, who were known by the name of Papae (fathers). In the
Faroe Isles, in the Orkneys, and the Shetlands, indeed in all parts
of the Northern seas, the Scandinavians found themselves preceded by
those Papas, whose habits contrasted so strangely with their own.
[Footnote: On this point see the careful researches of Humboldt in
his History of the Geography of the New Continent, vol. ii.] Did
they not have a glimpse too of that great land, the vague memory of
which seems to pursue them, and which Columbus was to discover,
following the traces of their dreams? It is only known that the
existence of an island, traversed by a great river and situated to
the west of Ireland, was, on the faith of the Irish, a dogma for
mediaeval geographers.

The story went that, towards the middle of the sixth century, a monk
called Barontus, on his return from voyaging upon the sea, came and
craved hospitality at the monastery of Clonfert. Brandan the abbot
besought him to give pleasure to the brothers by narrating the
marvels of God that he had seen on the high seas. Barontus revealed
to them the existence of an island surrounded by fogs, where he had
left his disciple Mernoc; it is the Land of Promise that God keeps
for his saints. Brandan with seventeen of his monks desired to go in
quest of this mysterious land. They set forth in a leather boat,
bearing with them as their sole provision a utensil of butter,
wherewith to grease the hides of their craft. For seven years they
lived thus in their boat, abandoning to God sail and rudder, and
only stopping on their course to celebrate the feasts of Christmas
and Easter on the back of the king of fishes, Jasconius. Every step
of this monastic Odyssey is a miracle, on every isle is a monastery,
where the wonders of a fantastical universe respond to the
extravagances of a wholly ideal life. Here is the Isle of Sheep,
where these animals govern themselves according to their own laws;
elsewhere the Paradise of Birds, where the winged race lives after
the fashion of monks, singing matins and lauds at the canonical
hours. Brandan and his companions celebrate mass here with the
birds, and remain with them for fifty days, nourishing themselves
with nothing but the singing of their hosts. Elsewhere there is the
Isle of Delight, the ideal of monastic life in the midst of the
seas. Here no material necessity makes itself felt; the lamps light
of themselves for the offices of religion, and never burn out, for
they shine with a spiritual light. An absolute stillness reigns in
the island; every one knows precisely the hour of his death; one
feels neither cold, nor heat, nor sadness, nor sickness of body or
soul. All this has endured since the days of St. Patrick, who so
ordained it. The Land of Promise is more marvellous still; there an
eternal day reigns; all the plants have flowers, all the trees bear
fruits. Some privileged men alone have visited it. On their return a
perfume is perceived to come from them, which their garments keep
for forty days.

In the midst of these dreams there appears with a surprising
fidelity to truth the feeling for the picturesque in Polar voyages,-
-the transparency of the sea, the aspect of bergs and islands of ice
melting in the sun, the volcanic phenomena of Iceland, the sporting
of whales, the characteristic appearance of the Norwegian fiords,
the sudden fogs, the sea calm as milk, the green isles crowned with
grass which grows down to the very verge of the waves. This
fantastical nature created expressly for another humanity, this
strange topography at once glowing with fiction and speaking of
truth, make the poem of St. Brandan one of the most extraordinary
creations of the human mind, and perhaps the completest expression
of the Celtic ideal. All is lovely, pure, and innocent; never has a
gaze so benevolent and so gentle been cast upon the earth; there is
not a single cruel idea, not a trace of frailty or repentance. It is
the world seen through the crystal of a stainless conscience, one
might almost say a human nature, as Pelagius wished it, that has
never sinned. The very animals participate in this universal
mildness. Evil appears under the form of monsters wandering on the
deep, or of Cyclops confined in volcanic islands; but God causes
them to destroy one another, and does not permit them to do hurt to
the good.

We have just seen how, around the legend of a monk the Irish
imagination grouped a whole cycle of physical and maritime myths.
The Purgatory of St. Patrick became the framework of another series
of fables, embodying the Celtic ideas concerning the other life and
its different conditions. [Footnote: See Thomas Wright's excellent
dissertation, Saint Patrick's Purgatory (London, 1844), and
Calderon's The Well of Saint Patrick.] Perhaps the profoundest
instinct of the Celtic peoples is their desire to penetrate the
unknown. With the sea before them, they wish to know what lies
beyond; they dream of a Promised Land. In the face of the unknown
that lies beyond the tomb, they dream of that great journey which
the pen of Dante has celebrated. The legend tells how, while St.
Patrick was preaching about Paradise and Hell to the Irish, they
confessed that they would feel more assured of the reality of these
places, if he would allow one of them to descend there, and then
come back with information St. Patrick consented. A pit was dug, by
which an Irishman set out upon the subterranean journey. Others
wished to attempt the journey after him. With the consent of the
abbot of the neighbouring monastery, they descended into the shaft,
they passed through the torments of Hell and Purgatory, and then
each told of what he had seen. Some did not emerge again; those who
did laughed no more, and were henceforth unable to join in any
gaiety. Knight Owen made a descent in 1153, and gave a narrative of
his travels which had a prodigious success.