Celtic Literature Part 5

'And in the evening Peredur entered a valley, and at the head of the valley he came to a hermit's cell, and the hermit welcomed him gladly, and there he spent the night. And in the morning he arose, and when he went forth, behold, a shower of snow had fallen the night before, and a hawk had killed a wild-fowl in front of the cell. And the noise of the horse scared the hawk away, and a raven alighted upon the bird. And Peredur stood and compared the blackness of the raven, and the whiteness of the snow, and the redness of the blood, to the hair of the lady whom best he loved, which was blacker than the raven, and to her skin, which was whiter than the snow, and to her two cheeks, which were redder than the blood upon the snow appeared to be.'

And this, which is perhaps less striking, is not less beautiful:-

'And early in the day Geraint and Enid left the wood, and they came to an open country, with meadows on one hand and mowers mowing the meadows. And there was a river before them, and the horses bent down and drank the water. And they went up out of the river by a steep bank, and there they met a slender stripling with a satchel about his neck; and he had a small blue pitcher in his hand, and a bowl on the mouth of the pitcher.'

And here the landscape, up to this point so Greek in its clear beauty, is suddenly magicalised by the romance touch:-

'And 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.'

Magic is the word to insist upon,--a magically vivid and near interpretation of nature; since it is this which const.i.tutes the special charm and power of the effect I am calling attention to, and it is for this that the Celt's sensibility gives him a peculiar apt.i.tude. But the matter needs rather fine handling, and it is easy to make mistakes here in our criticism. In the first place, Europe tends constantly to become more and more one community, and we tend to become Europeans instead of merely Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans, Italians; so whatever apt.i.tude or felicity one people imparts into spiritual work, gets imitated by the others, and thus tends to become the common property of all. Therefore anything so beautiful and attractive as the natural magic I am speaking of, is sure, now-a- days, if it appears in the productions of the Celts, or of the English, or of the French, to appear in the productions of the Germans also, or in the productions of the Italians; but there will be a stamp of perfectness and inimitableness about it in the literatures where it is native, which it will not have in the literatures where it is not native. Novalis or Ruckert, for instance, have their eye fixed on nature, and have undoubtedly a feeling for natural magic; a rough-and-ready critic easily credits them and the Germans with the Celtic fineness of tact, the Celtic nearness to nature and her secret; but the question is whether the strokes in the German's picture of nature {136} have ever the indefinable delicacy, charm, and perfection of the Celt's touch in the pieces I just now quoted, or of Shakspeare's touch in his daffodil, Wordsworth's in his cuckoo, Keats's in his Autumn, Obermann's in his mountain birch-tree, or his Easter-daisy among the Swiss farms. To decide where the gift for natural magic originally lies, whether it is properly Celtic or Germanic, we must decide this question.

In the second place, there are many ways of handling nature, and we are here only concerned with one of them; but a rough-and-ready critic imagines that it is all the same so long as nature is handled at all, and fails to draw the needful distinction between modes of handling her. But these modes are many; I will mention four of them now: there is the conventional way of handling nature, there is the faithful way of handling nature, there is the Greek way of handling nature, there is the magical way of handling nature. In all these three last the eye is on the object, but with a difference; in the faithful way of handling nature, the eye is on the object, and that is all you can say; in the Greek, the eye is on the object, but lightness and brightness are added; in the magical, the eye is on the object, but charm and magic are added. In the conventional way of handling nature, the eye is not on the object; what that means we all know, we have only to think of our eighteenth-century poetry:-

As when the moon, refulgent lamp of night -

to call up any number of instances. Latin poetry supplies plenty of instances too; if we put this from Propertius's Hylas:-

. . . ma.n.u.s heroum . . .

Mollia composita litora fronde togit -

side by side with the line of Theocritus by which it was suggested:-

[Greek verse] -

we get at the same moment a good specimen both of the conventional and of the Greek way of handling nature. But from our own poetry we may get specimens of the Greek way of handling nature, as well as of the conventional: for instance, Keats's:-

What little town by river or seash.o.r.e, Or mountain-built with quiet citadel, Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn?

is Greek, as Greek as a thing from Homer or Theocritus; it is composed with the eye on the object, a radiancy and light clearness being added. German poetry abounds in specimens of the faithful way of handling nature; an excellent example is to be found in the stanzas called Zueignung, prefixed to Goethe's poems; the morning walk, the mist, the dew, the sun, are as faithful as they can be, they are given with the eye on the object, but there the merit of the work, as a handling of nature, stops; neither Greek radiance nor Celtic magic is added; the power of these is not what gives the poem in question its merit, but a power of quite another kind, a power of moral and spiritual emotion. But the power of Greek radiance Goethe could give to his handling of nature, and n.o.bly too, as any one who will read his Wanderer,--the poem in which a wanderer falls in with a peasant woman and her child by their hut, built out of the ruins of a temple near c.u.ma,--may see. Only the power of natural magic Goethe does not, I think, give; whereas Keats pa.s.ses at will from the Greek power to that power which is, as I say, Celtic; from his:-

What little town, by river or seash.o.r.e -

to his:-

White hawthorn and the pastoral eglantine, Fast-fading violets cover'd up in leaves -

or his:-

. . . magic cas.e.m.e.nts, opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in fairy lands forlorn -

in which the very same note is struck as in those extracts which I quoted from Celtic romance, and struck with authentic and unmistakeable power.

Shakspeare, in handling nature, touches this Celtic note so exquisitely, that perhaps one is inclined to be always looking for the Celtic note in him, and not to recognise his Greek note when it comes. But if one attends well to the difference between the two notes, and bears in mind, to guide one, such things as Virgil's 'moss-grown springs and gra.s.s softer than sleep:' -

Muscosi fontes et somno mollior herba -

as his charming flower-gatherer, who -

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

as his quinces and chestnuts:-

. . . cana legam tenera lanugine mala Castaneasque nuces . . .

then, I think, we shall be disposed to say that in Shakspeare's -

I know a bank where the wild thyme blows, Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows, Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine, With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine -

it is mainly a Greek note which is struck. Then, again in his:-

. . . look how the floor of heaven Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold!

we are at the very point of transition from the Greek note to the Celtic; there is the Greek clearness and brightness, with the Celtic aerialness and magic coming in. Then we have the sheer, inimitable Celtic note in pa.s.sages like this:-

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

or this, the last I will quote:-

The moon shines bright. In such a night as this, When the sweet wind did gently kiss the trees, And they did make no noise, in such a night Troilus, methinks, mounted the Trojan walls -

. . . in such a night Did Thisbe fearfully o'ertrip the dew -