THE CELTIC ELEMENT IN LITERATURE
I
ERNEST RENAN described what he held to be Celtic characteristics
in _The Poetry of the Celtic Races_.
I
ERNEST RENAN described what he held to be Celtic characteristics
in _The Poetry of the Celtic Races_.
Yeats
The theatre of Art, when it comes to exist, must therefore
discover grave and decorative gestures, such as delighted Rossetti and
Madox Brown, and grave and decorative scenery, that will be forgotten
the moment an actor has said 'It is dawn,' or 'It is raining,' or
'The wind is shaking the trees'; and dresses of so little irrelevant
magnificence that the mortal actors and actresses may change without
much labour into the immortal people of romance. The theatre began in
ritual, and it cannot come to its greatness again without recalling
words to their ancient sovereignty.
It will take a generation, and perhaps generations, to restore the
theatre of Art; for one must get one's actors, and perhaps one's
scenery, from the theatre of commerce, until new actors and new
painters have come to help one; and until many failures and imperfect
successes have made a new tradition, and perfected in detail the ideal
that is beginning to float before our eyes. If one could call one's
painters and one's actors from where one would, how easy it would be!
I know some painters, who have never painted scenery, who could paint
the scenery I want, but they have their own work to do; and in Ireland
I have heard a red-haired orator repeat some bad political verses with
a voice that went through one like flame, and made them seem the most
beautiful verses in the world; but he has no practical knowledge of the
stage, and probably despises it.
May, 1899.
II
Dionysius, the Areopagite, wrote that 'He has set the borders of
the nations according to His angels. ' It is these angels, each one
the genius of some race about to be unfolded, that are the founders
of intellectual traditions; and as lovers understand in their first
glance all that is to befall them, and as poets and musicians see the
whole work in its first impulse, so races prophesy at their awakening
whatever the generations that are to prolong their traditions shall
accomplish in detail. It is only at the awakening--as in ancient Greece,
or in Elizabethan England, or in contemporary Scandinavia--that great
numbers of men understand that a right understanding of life and of
destiny is more important than amusement. In London, where all the
intellectual traditions gather to die, men hate a play if they are told
it is literature, for they will not endure a spiritual superiority; but
in Athens, where so many intellectual traditions were born, Euripides
once changed hostility to enthusiasm by asking his playgoers whether
it was his business to teach them, or their business to teach him.
New races understand instinctively, because the future cries in their
ears, that the old revelations are insufficient, and that all life
is revelation beginning in miracle and enthusiasm, and dying out as
it unfolds itself in what we have mistaken for progress. It is one of
our illusions, as I think, that education, the softening of manners,
the perfecting of law--countless images of a fading light--can create
nobleness and beauty, and that life moves slowly and evenly towards
some perfection. Progress is miracle, and it is sudden, because
miracles are the work of an all-powerful energy, and nature in herself
has no power except to die and to forget. If one studies one's own
mind, one comes to think with Blake, that 'every time less than a
pulsation of the artery is equal to six thousand years, for in this
period the poet's work is done; and all the great events of time start
forth and are conceived in such a period, within a pulsation of the
artery. '
February, 1900.
THE CELTIC ELEMENT IN LITERATURE
I
ERNEST RENAN described what he held to be Celtic characteristics
in _The Poetry of the Celtic Races_. I must repeat the well-known
sentences: 'No race communed so intimately as the Celtic race with the
lower creation, or believed it to have so big a share of moral life. '
The Celtic race had 'a realistic naturalism,' 'a love of nature for
herself, a vivid feeling for her magic, commingled with the melancholy
a man knows when he is face to face with her, and thinks he hears her
communing with him about his origin and his destiny. ' 'It has worn
itself out in mistaking dreams for realities,' and 'compared with the
classical imagination the Celtic imagination is indeed the infinite
contrasted with the finite. ' 'Its history is one long lament, it
still recalls its exiles, its flights across the seas. ' 'If at times
it seems to be cheerful, its tear is not slow to glisten behind the
smile. Its songs of joy end as elegies; there is nothing to equal the
delightful sadness of its national melodies. ' Matthew Arnold, in _The
Study of Celtic Literature_, has accepted this passion for nature, this
imaginativeness, this melancholy, as Celtic characteristics, but has
described them more elaborately. The Celtic passion for nature comes
almost more from a sense of her 'mystery' than of her 'beauty,' and it
adds 'charm and magic' to nature, and the Celtic imaginativeness and
melancholy are alike 'a passionate, turbulent, indomitable reaction
against the despotism of fact. ' The Celt is not melancholy, as Faust or
Werther are melancholy, from 'a perfectly definite motive,' but because
of something about him 'unaccountable, defiant and titanic. ' How well
one knows these sentences, better even than Renan's, and how well one
knows the passages of prose and verse which he uses to prove that
wherever English literature has the qualities these sentences describe,
it has them from a Celtic source. Though I do not think any of us who
write about Ireland have built any argument upon them, it is well to
consider them a little, and see where they are helpful and where they
are hurtful. If we do not, we may go mad some day, and the enemy root
up our rose-garden and plant a cabbage-garden instead. Perhaps we must
restate a little, Renan's and Arnold's argument.
II
Once every people in the world believed that trees were divine, and
could take a human or grotesque shape and dance among the shadows; and
that deer, and ravens and foxes, and wolves and bears, and clouds and
pools, almost all things under the sun and moon, and the sun and moon,
were not less divine and changeable. They saw in the rainbow the still
bent bow of a god thrown down in his negligence; they heard in the
thunder the sound of his beaten water-jar, or the tumult of his chariot
wheels; and when a sudden flight of wild duck, or of crows, passed
over their heads, they thought they were gazing at the dead hastening
to their rest; while they dreamed of so great a mystery in little
things that they believed the waving of a hand, or of a sacred bough,
enough to trouble far-off hearts, or hood the moon with darkness.
discover grave and decorative gestures, such as delighted Rossetti and
Madox Brown, and grave and decorative scenery, that will be forgotten
the moment an actor has said 'It is dawn,' or 'It is raining,' or
'The wind is shaking the trees'; and dresses of so little irrelevant
magnificence that the mortal actors and actresses may change without
much labour into the immortal people of romance. The theatre began in
ritual, and it cannot come to its greatness again without recalling
words to their ancient sovereignty.
It will take a generation, and perhaps generations, to restore the
theatre of Art; for one must get one's actors, and perhaps one's
scenery, from the theatre of commerce, until new actors and new
painters have come to help one; and until many failures and imperfect
successes have made a new tradition, and perfected in detail the ideal
that is beginning to float before our eyes. If one could call one's
painters and one's actors from where one would, how easy it would be!
I know some painters, who have never painted scenery, who could paint
the scenery I want, but they have their own work to do; and in Ireland
I have heard a red-haired orator repeat some bad political verses with
a voice that went through one like flame, and made them seem the most
beautiful verses in the world; but he has no practical knowledge of the
stage, and probably despises it.
May, 1899.
II
Dionysius, the Areopagite, wrote that 'He has set the borders of
the nations according to His angels. ' It is these angels, each one
the genius of some race about to be unfolded, that are the founders
of intellectual traditions; and as lovers understand in their first
glance all that is to befall them, and as poets and musicians see the
whole work in its first impulse, so races prophesy at their awakening
whatever the generations that are to prolong their traditions shall
accomplish in detail. It is only at the awakening--as in ancient Greece,
or in Elizabethan England, or in contemporary Scandinavia--that great
numbers of men understand that a right understanding of life and of
destiny is more important than amusement. In London, where all the
intellectual traditions gather to die, men hate a play if they are told
it is literature, for they will not endure a spiritual superiority; but
in Athens, where so many intellectual traditions were born, Euripides
once changed hostility to enthusiasm by asking his playgoers whether
it was his business to teach them, or their business to teach him.
New races understand instinctively, because the future cries in their
ears, that the old revelations are insufficient, and that all life
is revelation beginning in miracle and enthusiasm, and dying out as
it unfolds itself in what we have mistaken for progress. It is one of
our illusions, as I think, that education, the softening of manners,
the perfecting of law--countless images of a fading light--can create
nobleness and beauty, and that life moves slowly and evenly towards
some perfection. Progress is miracle, and it is sudden, because
miracles are the work of an all-powerful energy, and nature in herself
has no power except to die and to forget. If one studies one's own
mind, one comes to think with Blake, that 'every time less than a
pulsation of the artery is equal to six thousand years, for in this
period the poet's work is done; and all the great events of time start
forth and are conceived in such a period, within a pulsation of the
artery. '
February, 1900.
THE CELTIC ELEMENT IN LITERATURE
I
ERNEST RENAN described what he held to be Celtic characteristics
in _The Poetry of the Celtic Races_. I must repeat the well-known
sentences: 'No race communed so intimately as the Celtic race with the
lower creation, or believed it to have so big a share of moral life. '
The Celtic race had 'a realistic naturalism,' 'a love of nature for
herself, a vivid feeling for her magic, commingled with the melancholy
a man knows when he is face to face with her, and thinks he hears her
communing with him about his origin and his destiny. ' 'It has worn
itself out in mistaking dreams for realities,' and 'compared with the
classical imagination the Celtic imagination is indeed the infinite
contrasted with the finite. ' 'Its history is one long lament, it
still recalls its exiles, its flights across the seas. ' 'If at times
it seems to be cheerful, its tear is not slow to glisten behind the
smile. Its songs of joy end as elegies; there is nothing to equal the
delightful sadness of its national melodies. ' Matthew Arnold, in _The
Study of Celtic Literature_, has accepted this passion for nature, this
imaginativeness, this melancholy, as Celtic characteristics, but has
described them more elaborately. The Celtic passion for nature comes
almost more from a sense of her 'mystery' than of her 'beauty,' and it
adds 'charm and magic' to nature, and the Celtic imaginativeness and
melancholy are alike 'a passionate, turbulent, indomitable reaction
against the despotism of fact. ' The Celt is not melancholy, as Faust or
Werther are melancholy, from 'a perfectly definite motive,' but because
of something about him 'unaccountable, defiant and titanic. ' How well
one knows these sentences, better even than Renan's, and how well one
knows the passages of prose and verse which he uses to prove that
wherever English literature has the qualities these sentences describe,
it has them from a Celtic source. Though I do not think any of us who
write about Ireland have built any argument upon them, it is well to
consider them a little, and see where they are helpful and where they
are hurtful. If we do not, we may go mad some day, and the enemy root
up our rose-garden and plant a cabbage-garden instead. Perhaps we must
restate a little, Renan's and Arnold's argument.
II
Once every people in the world believed that trees were divine, and
could take a human or grotesque shape and dance among the shadows; and
that deer, and ravens and foxes, and wolves and bears, and clouds and
pools, almost all things under the sun and moon, and the sun and moon,
were not less divine and changeable. They saw in the rainbow the still
bent bow of a god thrown down in his negligence; they heard in the
thunder the sound of his beaten water-jar, or the tumult of his chariot
wheels; and when a sudden flight of wild duck, or of crows, passed
over their heads, they thought they were gazing at the dead hastening
to their rest; while they dreamed of so great a mystery in little
things that they believed the waving of a hand, or of a sacred bough,
enough to trouble far-off hearts, or hood the moon with darkness.
