THE CELTIC INSPIRATION.
- - (TO THE EDITOR OP TEL "SPEHrdTOR.1
8113,--I have read with the greatest interest Mr. Stephen Gwynn's letter on "The Celtic Inspiration" in the Spectator Of March 2nd. The peculiar Celtic inspiration, or the Celtic
spirit, in poetry is something so vague and hard to define, it is so misty and intangible, that when we feel its influence most we can hardly be sure that we have come in touch with, or have grasped, anything that really exists. Mr. Gwynn deals only with one branch of the Celtic peoples, the Irish. But the Celtic inspiration, or the Celtic glamour, is found in other branches of the race. It is both peculiar to and common to all Celtic peoples. The Celts are deeply religious; they mostly, cling devotedly to Roman Catholicism, they would be named among the most Christian races of Western Europe, and yet that which marks the Celtic inspiration is a special form of Nature-worship mingling with, or existing side by side with, their Christianity. They feel so deeply the influ- ences of Nature and of natural environment, its terrors and its beauties appeal to them so vividly, that they cannot but love, or dread, or worship, as each aspect of it appeals to them by turns. But it is all vague and shadowy, like a dream which haunts us involuntarily, and that we cannot get rid of. Leon Gautier in his notice of the Breton poet Briseux remarks ;— "Ii est infiniment plus Breton que chretien." "Lee Bretons' [the name of a poem] sont un etrange et deplorable assem- blage de superstitions paiennes et de legendes chretiennes." " Il fait concourir entre eux le vieux paganisme et le christianisme Breton, donnant d'une main egalement empressee la palme poetique 1 la verite ou d l'eiTeur." Fifty years ago, when in Scotland discussion arose between Episco- palians and Presbyterians, and the latter maintained that Scotland had kept the Christian faith in purity ever since it had received it, the Episcopalians would reply, half jokingly, that it might well be so ; for that up to the end of the eighteenth century and later the real religion of the High- landers and Western Islanders was still paganism. Spanish Galicia is another Celtic country full of the Celtic spirit, and we find the same phenomenon :—
"NI madrifia, si me mono " N , god.mother, if I die
non m'enterren en sagrado Don't let them bury me in the eaaterretune en campo verde Church-yard,
onde pacer Tad o gado ; let them bury me in the green Bald
! Hanme de muter amores where the cattle go to graze;
Qu'i un mal desesperado L" I must the of love
Which Is an ill /acurable I " Thus sings a love-lorn maid in Gallegan folk-lore song, the vague yearning for Nature overpowering even the desire for Christian burial. In what other race should we find this kind of subjection to the witchery of Nature ? But other races have been Nature-worshippers ; other peoples have felt as keenly as the Celts do the beauty and the terrors of Nature. The Greeks did so; but they were able to translate, as it were, the beauty of Nature into human form, they anthropomorphised all its loveliness, and majesty, and terror; they clad it with the higher beauty and intelligence of superhuman, almost supersensuous, humanity, and worshipped that. So, too, it was with most of the great Oriental religions, faulty fore- sbadowings and intimations as it were of the Incarnation. Nature-worship became to them a religion, palpable, intelligible, visible. But to the Celt the feeling for Nature halts half-way ; it is not now, or within the time of any Celtic poetry that we know of, a real religion for them ; it is too vague and intangible for that; witness the whole cycle of so-called Ossianic verse. It is but a magic, the shadow cast by a religion as it passes away ; the thin smoke-wreath that remains when the warm bright flame is extinct. The gals of Scandinavian mythology, Odin, Baldur, Thor, and Lok, are more definite and real to us than the half-historical heroes of Celtic tradition, Elnan, Deirdre, and the rest. Thus it is that Mr. Gwynn almost necessarily speaks of "magic," of "the Gaelic habit of introducing magical powers." A religion which has passed away frequently survives as magic under its successor. It is a shadow, not a substance, but it darkens and fills up all the background ; it still influences the inner hidden life. May not this, conjoined with the inability of the Celtic race to express or externalise their Nature-worship in anthropomorphic forma, as did the Greeks and others,—may not this be the secret of what is called the Celtic spirit, or inspiration ? Megalithic monuments, avenues, and concentric circles may have had a profound symbolism, but it is hardly definite. It never crystallised into anthropomorphic forms; it remained always in solution. Hence its permanence and continued vitality; its still mingling of paganism with Christianity, yet with a true holding of the latter. It is hard to combat or destroy what is intangible. A great Celtic poet may arise ; but this, which differentiates the Celtic spirit and
inspiration from that of other races,—this, though it quickens sensibility, has never touched humanity like the poetry of Hellas and of Rome, of Dante, of Shakespeare, or of Goethe.
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