Celtic Literature | Page 9

what it HAS done, let it ask
us to attend to that, as a matter of science and history; not to what it
will be or will do, as a matter of modern politics. It cannot count
appreciably now as a material power; but, perhaps, if it can get itself
thoroughly known as an object of science, it may count for a good
deal,--far more than we Saxons, most of us, imagine,--as a spiritual
power.
The bent of our time is towards science, towards knowing things as
they are; so the Celt's claims towards having his genius and its works
fairly treated, as objects of scientific investigation, the Saxon can
hardly reject, when these claims are urged simply on their own merits,
and are not mixed up with extraneous pretensions which jeopardise
them. What the French call the science des origines, the science of

origins,--a science which is at the bottom of all real knowledge of the
actual world, and which is every day growing in interest and
importance--is very incomplete without a thorough critical account of
the Celts, and their genius, language, and literature. This science has
still great progress to make, but its progress, made even within the
recollection of those of us who are in middle life, has already affected
our common notions about the Celtic race; and this change, too, shows
how science, the knowing things as they are, may even have salutary
practical consequences. I remember, when I was young, I was taught to
think of Celt as separated by an impassable gulf from Teuton; {14} my
father, in particular, was never weary of contrasting them; he insisted
much oftener on the separation between us and them than on the
separation between us and any other race in the world; in the same way
Lord Lyndhurst, in words long famous, called the Irish 'aliens in speech,
in religion, in blood.' This naturally created a profound sense of
estrangement; it doubled the estrangement which political and religious
differences already made between us and the Irish: it seemed to make
this estrangement immense, incurable, fatal. It begot a strange
reluctance, as any one may see by reading the preface to the great
text-book for Welsh poetry, the Myvyrian Archaeology, published at
the beginning of this century, to further,--nay, allow,--even among
quiet, peaceable people like the Welsh, the publication of the
documents of their ancient literature, the monuments of the Cymric
genius; such was the sense of repulsion, the sense of incompatibilty, of
radical antagonism, making it seem dangerous to us to let such
opposites to ourselves have speech and utterance. Certainly the
Jew,--the Jew of ancient times, at least,--then seemed a thousand
degrees nearer than the Celt to us. Puritanism had so assimilated Bible
ideas and phraseology; names like Ebenezer, and notions like that of
hewing Agag in pieces, came so natural to us, that the sense of affinity
between the Teutonic and the Hebrew nature was quite strong; a steady,
middleclass Anglo-Saxon much more imagined himself Ehud's cousin
than Ossian's. But meanwhile, the pregnant and striking ideas of the
ethnologists about the true natural grouping of the human race, the
doctrine of a great Indo-European unity, comprising Hindoos, Persians,
Greeks, Latins, Celts, Teutons, Slavonians, on the one hand, and, on the
other hand, of a Semitic unity and of a Mongolian unity, separated by

profound distinguishing marks from the Indo-European unity and from
one another, was slowly acquiring consistency and popularising itself.
So strong and real could the sense of sympathy or antipathy, grounded
upon real identity or diversity in race, grow in men of culture, that we
read of a genuine Teuton,--Wilhelm von Humboldt--finding, even in
the sphere of religion, that sphere where the might of Semitism has
been so overpowering, the food which most truly suited his spirit in the
productions not of the alien Semitic genius, but of the genius of Greece
or India, the Teutons born kinsfolk of the common Indo- European
family. 'Towards Semitism he felt himself,' we read, 'far less drawn;' he
had the consciousness of a certain antipathy in the depths of his nature
to this, and to its 'absorbing, tyrannous, terrorist religion,' as to the
opener, more flexible Indo-European genius, this religion appeared.
'The mere workings of the old man in him!' Semitism will readily reply;
and though one can hardly admit this short and easy method of settling
the matter, it must be owned that Humboldt's is an extreme case of
Indo-Europeanism, useful as letting us see what may be the power of
race and primitive constitution, but not likely, in the spiritual sphere, to
have many companion cases equalling it. Still, even in this sphere, the
tendency is in Humboldt's direction; the modern spirit tends more and
more to establish a sense of native diversity between our European