No More Learning

' '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. All
old literatures are full of these or of like imaginations, and all
the poets of races, who have not lost this way of looking at things,
could have said of themselves, as the poet of the _Kalevala_ said of
himself, 'I have learned my songs from the music of many birds, and
from the music of many waters. ' When a mother in the _Kalevala_ weeps
for a daughter, who was drowned flying from an old suitor, she weeps so
greatly that her tears become three rivers, and cast up three rocks,
on which grow three birch-trees, where three cuckoos sit and sing,
the one 'love, love,' the one 'suitor, suitor,' the one 'consolation,
consolation.
' And the makers of the Sagas made the squirrel run up and
down the sacred ash-tree carrying words of hatred from the eagle to the
worm, and from the worm to the eagle; although they had less of the old
way than the makers of the _Kalevala_, for they lived in a more crowded
and complicated world, and were learning the abstract meditation which
lures men from visible beauty, and were unlearning, it may be, the
impassioned meditation which brings men beyond the edge of trance and
makes trees, and beasts, and dead things talk with human voices.

The old Irish and the old Welsh, though they had less of the old way
than the makers of the _Kalevala_, had more of it than the makers of
the Sagas, and it is this that distinguishes the examples Matthew
Arnold quotes of their 'natural magic,' of their sense of 'the
mystery' more than of 'the beauty' of nature. When Matthew Arnold wrote
it was not easy to know as much as we know now of folk song and folk
belief, and I do not think he understood that our 'natural magic' is
but the ancient religion of the world, the ancient worship of nature
and that troubled ecstasy before her, that certainty of all beautiful
places being haunted, which it brought into men's minds. The ancient
religion is in that passage of the _Mabinogion_ about the making of
'Flower Aspect. ' Gwydion and Math made her 'by charms and illusions'
'out of flowers. ' 'They took the blossoms of the oak, and the blossoms
of the broom, and the blossoms of the meadowsweet, and produced from
them a maiden the fairest and most graceful that man ever saw; and
they baptized her, and called her Flower Aspect'; and one finds it in
the not less beautiful passage about the burning Tree, that has half
its beauty from calling up a fancy of leaves so living and beautiful,
they can be of no less living and beautiful a thing than flame: 'They
saw a tall tree by the side of the river, one half of which was in
flames from the root to the top, and the other half was green and in
full leaf. ' And one finds it very certainly in the quotations he makes
from English poets to prove a Celtic influence in English poetry; in
Keats's 'magic casements opening on the foam of perilous seas in faery
lands forlorn'; in his 'moving waters at their priest-like task of
pure ablution round earth's human shore'; in Shakespeare's 'floor of
heaven,' 'inlaid with patens of bright gold'; and in his Dido standing
'on the wild sea banks,' 'a willow in her hand,' and waving it in the
ritual of the old worship of nature and the spirits of nature, to wave
'her love to come again to Carthage. ' And his other examples have the
delight and wonder of devout worshippers among the haunts of their
divinities. Is there not such delight and wonder in the description of
Olwen in the _Mabinogion_: 'More yellow was her hair than the flower
of the broom, and her skin was whiter than the foam of the wave,
and fairer were her hands and her fingers than the blossoms of the
wood-anemone amidst the spray of the meadow fountains. ' And is there
not such delight and wonder in--

'Meet we on hill, in dale, forest, or mead,
By paved fountain or by rushy brook,
Or on the beached margent of the sea'?

If men had never dreamed that fair women could be made out of flowers,
or rise up out of meadow fountains and paved fountains, neither passage
could have been written. Certainly the descriptions of nature made in
what Matthew Arnold calls 'the faithful way,' or in what he calls 'the
Greek way,' would have lost nothing if all the meadow fountains or
paved fountains were meadow fountains and paved fountains and nothing
more. When Keats wrote, in the Greek way, which adds lightness and
brightness to nature--

'What little town by river or sea-shore
Or mountain built with quiet citadel,
Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn';

when Shakespeare wrote in the Greek way--

'I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows';

when Virgil wrote in the Greek way--

'Muscosi fontes et somno mollior herba,'

and

'Pallentes violas et summa papavera carpens
Narcissum et florem jungit bene olentis anethi';

they looked at nature without ecstasy, but with the affection a man
feels for the garden where he has walked daily and thought pleasant
thoughts. They looked at nature in the modern way, the way of people
who are poetical, but are more interested in one another than in a
nature which has faded to be but friendly and pleasant, the way of
people who have forgotten the ancient religion.


III

Men who lived in a world where anything might flow and change, and
become any other thing; and among great gods whose passions were in
the flaming sunset, and in the thunder and the thunder-shower, had
not our thoughts of weight and measure. They worshipped nature and
the abundance of nature, and had always, as it seems, for a supreme
ritual that tumultuous dance among the hills or in the depths of the
woods, where unearthly ecstasy fell upon the dancers, until they seemed
the gods or the godlike beasts, and felt their souls overtopping the
moon; and, as some think, imagined for the first time in the world the
blessed country of the gods and of the happy dead.