CHAPTER VIII LANDSCAPE IN CELTIC AND GAELIC POETRY WE now quit, for English poetry, transmarine Europe; neither space nor knowledge suffice to examine the poetical literatures of France or Germany, Spain or Portugal. So far as I am aware, the Renaissance conventionalities largely rule them until, or near, the nineteenth century. From this date, French, German, and Italian poetry at least are more or less assimilated in landscape treatment to our own. Goethe, Heine, Lamartine, Leopardi, are here names which may suggest how wide and how attractive the field is, and also how much beyond my present compass. Yet it must be allowed that any influence-if any-these literatures have held over English Nature poetry is singularly slight. For the landscape of painting and of poetry in its fullness, in its imaginative quality, may be claimed specially as our own. Field and forest, moisture and mist and greenery, bring it within the range of pictorial art in a degree not, I think, found elsewhere through continental Europe. But, above all, that Roman love of the country and of country life has reproduced itself among Englishmen with a unique and abiding power: and this reacts upon and inspires song. Let us therefore turn hence forth to England. Great almost as the contrast between the classical and the Hebrew poetry, is that between the late Italian and the primitive and mediaeval Celtic between Tasso in the sixteenth century and Taliesin in the seventh. The special qualities of the Celtic genius in poetry were set forth by Matthew Arnold with a true poet's insight and grace, and in specifying them I cannot do better than follow, in some degree, my distinguished predecessor at Oxford. It is, I think, impossible to avoid agreeing with him that Celtic verse, compared with the classical and the English, fails alike in constructive faculty, in architectonic power, in sense of proportion, and in width of range. No sign seems to exist that either the Gael or the Cymry ever created a true Epic poem. To France, Germany, England, the Arthurian legends owe, so far as it exists, their poetic unity.1 The "penetrating passion and 66 melancholy," as Arnold names it, of the Celt, found its natural, its inevitable expression in the Lyric: that poetical form which has ever been consecrated, though not confined, to the relief of personal feeling, the overflow of the oppressed, the yearning, or the exultant heart. To that passion the race added a singular insight and happiness in rendering the magical charm, the inner intimate life of Nature, the world of fairy which atmospheres the material world. This gift, this mode of ideality we may name it, is something beyond the simple beauty perceived with such delicate clearness by the Greek, the dignity and the sentiment by which the Roman was penetrated. And all was moulded by the Celtic bards into an admirable and rarely failing perfection of style, which we can only think of as an innate gift of the race from the seventh century onward. Arnold's bold but hazardous deduction is well known; that the Celtic blood, beyond question largely interfused with the English, throughout all Western England at least, has given our poetry much of its characteristic, its most subtle, magical, and passionate notes. This is a dangerously attractive doctrine; it 1 Macpherson's attempt to give Epic form to the fragmentary Gaelic lays which it must be fully admitted were known to him, was the reason that, when his once famous Ossian appeared, justified critics like Johnson in holding it a forgery. No scholars, we must remember, at that date had seriously examined the traditionary songs of the Gael. Hence also that real vein of sad solemnity, that pathetic cry, that sublimity of wild moor and mountain, which underlie the decorative disguise thrown over them by Macpherson, were unfelt by his English contemporaries, with the single but emphatic exception of Gray. Across the Channel these true Ossianic qualities were better recognised-the modernisms, palpable to us, being naturally less perceptible in France or Germany. has reached a rapid acceptance, falling in with that search after Origines which is so popular-in many ways I will venture to add, so misleading-in our day. Yet it seems to me, thus far at any rate, rather assumed upon plausible general grounds as a great underlying influence, than proven in and by the detailed instances which Arnold has brought forward. Whether this scepticism, however, be justified or not, in our islands, almost solely, Celtic poetry yet lives; on this account, and not less for its own merits, the Celtic landscape, so far as I can make it intelligible through the translations which I shall borrow, demands a place in our essay. 2 From the seventh century I have said-for to that early date, as Sharon Turner (1803) and Skene1 more recently have shown, above the reach of reasonable doubt-we must ascribe certain of those rhapsodies, wild and strange as the yet older hymns of the Vedas, which have reached us from Taliesin, Aneurin, and Llywarch the Old. These are mingled indeed, as they have come down to us, with later poems, sheltering under those great mystic names, and doubtless, though in a degree which now defies analysis, modernised in the earliest MSS. that preserve them: the Black Book of Caermarthen, and the Red Book of Hergest (now in Jesus College Library), compiled in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries-names themselves how mystical and remote to our ears! But these primitive poems contain few references to Nature. A long list of native trees, indeed, is given by Taliesin in the Battle of Godeu, when Arthur was defeated by Medraut; but they seem to be only symbolical of the warriors engaged. In the poems assigned upon fair grounds to Llywarch Hen, it is that Nature plays a notable part. These singular lyrics are written in triplet form, beginning often with a brief glimpse of some landscape feature, and sometimes adding to it a moral or personal reflection, visibly connected or not, with the first lines. Curious that this should be similar 3 1 The Four Ancient Books of Wales, W. F. Skene (1868). 2 In the Hengwrt Collection belonging to Mr. Wynne of Peniarth: written 1154-89. 3 This metaphor reappears in those strange and beautiful idyllic stanzas, some of which seem to belong to the early centuries, the Afallenau. to the fashion of the Italian peasant songs of to-day, as recently collected, or as introduced by Browning in his brilliant Fra Filippo Lippi. A few of these triplets may be quoted. My first is from a chill winter scene, by Llywarch, twice again dealt with by him in other songs. I follow Skene's literal version— Cold is the place of the lake before the winter storm : Lucky is he who sees the [fire]wood in the chest. Cold is the bed of fish in the shelter of a sheet of ice; The bees are in confinement this very day; Cold and dewless is the earth to-day. . . Long the night, bare the moor, hoary the cliff; Rough the seas; there will be rain to-day. So again Rain without, the fern is drench'd; White the gravel of the sea; there is spray on the margin; Rain without, my hair is drench'd; Full of complaint is the feeble; steep the cliff; Pale white is the sea; salt is the brine. These lines are full of the wintry dismal North, whether of Scotland or of Wales. More cheering, more like southern England are the following: Bright are the ash-tops; tall and white will they be The languid heart, longing is her complaint. . Bright are the willow tops; playful the fish In the lake; the wind whistles over the tops of the branches; 1 Driven to land by the wind. H Bright the tops of the broom; let the lover arrange meetings; Very yellow are the cluster'd branches; Shallow ford; the contented is apt to enjoy sleep. And so forth; Bright, he sings, are the tops of the apple-tree, of the clover, hazel, reed, oak, hawthorn, meadow-sweet. To what recurrent play of human fancy, what passion or thought drawn forth by flower and tree, to what similar strain, as if of ancestral blood, are these identities between the seventh century and the nineteenth, between Wales and Tuscany, once Celtic, due? To the devotees of folk-lore or heredity I gladly remit the perilous-often the vain-task of conjecture. But Llywarch has left also a very striking song addressed to his crutch, when himself old and feeble, which Arnold selected as an example of the Celt's characteristic sadness— "struggling, fierce, passionate." Deeply passionate, deeply sad it assuredly is; but to me it has rather the note of Job; nay, the note of the broken heart from the beginning-a despair beyond struggle and revolt. O Staff! is it not the time of harvest, When the fern is brown, and the reeds are yellow? Have I not once hated what I now love! O Staff! is not this winter, When men are clamorous over what they drink? Is not my bedside void of visitors to greet me! . . . O Staff! is it not the spring, When the cuckoos are brownish, when the foam is bright? O Staff! thou hardy branch ... That bearest with me-God protect thee! Wretched was the fate decreed to Llywarch Long pain without deliverance from his load of trouble. I have spoken of these poems as Celtic rather than Welsh, because there is no reasonable doubt that they are true fragments from the literature of the great Celtic kingdom of the |