has accomplished nothing. In the comparatively petty art of ornamentation, in rings, brooches, crosiers, relic-cases, and so on, he has done just enough to show his delicacy of taste, his happy temperament; but the grand difficulties of painting and sculpture, the prolonged dealings of spirit with matter, he has never had patience for. Take the more spiritual arts of music and poetry. All which emotion alone can do in music the Celt has done; the very soul of emotion breathes in the Scotch and Irish airs; but with all this power of musical feeling, what has the Celt, so eager for emotion that he has not patience for science, effected in music, to be compared with what the less emotional German, steadily developing his musical feeling with the science of a Sebastian. Bach or a Beethoven, has effected? In poetry, again,-poetry which the Celt has so passionately, so nobly loved; poetry where emotion counts for so much, but where reason, too, reason, measure, sanity, also count for so much, -the Celt has shown genius, indeed, splendid genius ; but even here his faults have clung to him, and have hindered him from producing great works such as other nations with a genius for poetry,—the Greeks, say, or the Italians, have produced. The Celt has not produced great poetical works, he has only produced poetry with an air of greatness investing it all, and sometimes giving, moreover, to short pieces, or to passages, lines, and snatches of long pieces, singular beauty and power. And The Celtic Genius. 29 yet he loved poetry so much that he grudged no pains to it; but the true art, the architectonicé which shapes great works, such as the 'Agamemnon' or the 'Divine Comedy,' comes only after a steady, deep-searching survey, a firm conception of the facts of human life, which the Celt has not patience for. So he runs off into technic, where he employs the utmost elaboration, and attains astonishing skill; but in the contents of his poetry you have only so much interpretation of the world as the first dash of a quick, strong perception, and then sentiment, infinite sentiment, can bring you. Here, too, his want of sanity and steadfastness has kept the Celt back from the highest success. If his rebellion against fact has thus lamed the Celt even in spiritual work, how much more must it have lamed him in the world of business and politics! The skilful and resolute appliance of means to ends which is needed both to make progress in material civilisation, and also to form powerful states, is just what the Celt has least turn for. He is sensual, or at least sensuous; loves bright colours, company, and pleasure; and here he is like the Greek and Latin races. But compare the talent the Greek and Latin (or Latinised) races have shown for gratifying their senses, for procuring an outward life rich, luxurious, splendid, with the Celt's failure to reach any material civilisation sound and satisfying, and not out at elbows, poor, slovenly, and half-barbarous. The sensuousness of the Greek made Sybaris and Corinth, the sensuousness of the Latin made Rome and Baix, the sensuousness of the Latinised Frenchman makes Paris; the sensuousness of the Celt proper has made Ireland. Even in his ideal heroic times, his gay and sensuous nature cannot carry him, in the appliances of his favourite life of sociability and pleasure, beyond the gross and creeping Saxon whom he despises ; the regent Breas, we are told in the 'Battle of Moytura of the Fomorians,' became unpopular because 'the knives of his people were not greased at his table, nor did their breath smell of ale at the banquet.' In its grossness and barbarousness is not that Saxon, as Saxon as it can be? just what the Latinised Norman, sensuous and sociable like the Celt, but with the talent to make this bent of his serve to a practical embellishment of his mode of living, found so disgusting in the Saxon. And as in material civilisation he has been ineffectual, so has the Celt been ineffectual in politics. This colossal, impetuous, adventurous wanderer, the Titan of the early world, who in primitive times fills so large a place on earth's scene, dwindles and dwindles as history goes on, and at last is shrunk to what we now see hirn. For ages and ages the world has been constantly slipping, ever more and more, out of the Celt's grasp. They went forth to the war,' Ossian says most truly, but they always fell-Study of Celtic Literature. 1 Natural Magic. 31 NATURAL MAGIC. THE Celt's quick feeling for what is noble and distinguished gave to his poetry style ; his indomitable personality gave it pride and passion; his sensibility and nervous exaltation gave it a better gift still, the gift of rendering with wonderful felicity the magical charm of nature. The forest solitude, the bubbling spring, the wild flowers, are everywhere in romance. They have a mysterious life and grace there; they are nature's own children, and utter her secret in a way which makes them something quite different from the woods, waters, and plants of Greek and Latin poetry. Now, of this delicate natural magic Celtic romance is so pre-eminent a mistress, that it seems impossible to believe the power did not come into romance from the Celts.1 Magic is just the word for it,— the magic of nature; not merely the beauty of nature,— that the Greeks and Latins had; not merely an honest smack of the soil, a faithful realism, that the Germans had; but the intimate life of nature, her weird power and her fairy charm. As the Saxon names of places, with the pleasant wholesome smack of the soil in them, -Weathersfield, Thaxted, Shalford, are to the Celtic - 1 Rhyme, the most striking characteristic of our modern poetry as distinguished from that of the ancients, and a main source, to our poetry, of its magic and charm, of what we call its romantic elment,-rhyme itself, all the weight of evidence tends to show, comes into our poetry from the Celts. names of places, with their penetrating, lofty beauty,Velindra, Tyntagel, Caernarvon,-so is the homely real ism of German and Norse nature to the fairy-like loveliness of Celtic nature. Gwydion wants a wife for his pupil: 'Well,' says Math, 'we will seek, I and thou, by charms and illusions, to form a wife for him out of flowers. So 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 baptised her, and gave her the name of Flower-Aspect.' Celtic romance is full of exquisite touches like that, showing the delicacy of the Celt's feeling in these matters, and how deeply nature lets him come into her secrets.Study of Celtic Literature. HOW POETRY INTERPRETS. POETRY interprets in two ways; it interprets by expressing with magical felicity the physiognomy and movement of the outward world, and it interprets by expressing with inspired conviction the ideas and laws of the inward world of man's moral and spiritual nature. In other words, poetry is interpretative both by having natural magic in it, and by having moral profundity. In both ways it illuminates man ; it gives to him a satisfying sense of reality; it reconciles him with himself and the univers |