stage at which the imaginative literary artist began to work on them. Or perhaps it would be truer to say that the imaginative reconstruction of mythology, turning gods into heroes, had already been carried far before even the oldest extant versions of Cymric or Gaelic myth. While the Northmen remembered their gods clearly, and thought of them as gods with a home and a proper life of their own, the Welsh and Irish more and more forgot their divinity, and turned their gods into princes or heroes of Ulster and Connaught, Gwynedd and Dyved. Like Carlyle with the Edda, so with the Celtic mythology a casual observer appears to have summed up the case. Matthew Arnold's remarks in his Lectures on Celtic Literature are allowed to stand, by the Celtic scholars who know most about the subject, as a true and satisfactory judgment. "The very first thing that strikes one in reading the Mabinogion is how evidently the medieval story-teller is pillaging an antiquity of which he does not fully possess the secret: he is like a peasant building his hut on the site of Halicarnassus or Ephesus; he builds, but what he builds is full of materials of which he knows not the history, or knows by a glimmering tradition merely-stones 'not of this building,' but of an older architecture, greater, cunninger, more majestical. In the medieval stories of no Latin or Teutonic people does this strike one as in those of the Welsh." The Celtic mythology has been restored and explained by Professor John Rhys in his Lectures on Celtic Heathendom and in The Arthurian Legend. The first of these books, with its many citations of Welsh and Irish stories, exhibits the confusion and unreason of those ancient monuments of human fancy, which are at first so little attractive to the reasonable and enlightened reader. What can one make of a people whose hero (once a god, it is thought) is called “The Distorted of Ireland," because "when his mind was evil he would draw in one of his eyes so far into his head that a tame crane could not peck it, and shoot out the other one till it grew as big as a cauldron to boil a heifer in," not to speak of twisting round the calves of his legs till they were where the shins ought to be, or absorbing all his hair into his body, with a blood-drop to mark the place of each particular hair, and other variations.1 Probably no nation ever surpassed the Celts in enjoyment of this kind of distortion. If other people over the face of the earth can produce extravagant and grotesque beliefs in sufficient variety, none take them in the same way as the Celts. The Northmen have their own humorous stories of the adventures of the gods; the Celts go far beyond them in the revel of fancy supplied from primeval sources, extravagant fables, which are only not monstrous because the reciters see the fun of them. There is an exultant reckless humour in the story of Cuchulinn, a full consciousness of its impossible and outrageous qualities. This is part of the history of Celtic literature, which 1 Cf. Rhŷs, Celtic Heathendom, p. 438; The Sickbed of Cuchulinn, The Feast of Bricriu (Irische Texte, i. 207, 265), &c. also has another side, as in the Northern mythology likewise there is both comedy and tragedy, on the one hand Thor's adventures, on the other the Dream of Balder. In the literary use of myth among the Celts a graver and more beautiful kind of imagination reveals itself in contrast to the riot of distortion; not always, indeed not often, in contradiction to it; for the Aristophanic blending of beauty with enormous laughter seems to be natural to the Celtic genius, at any rate in their ancient literature; that is their glory. They knew the eternal tragic questions and problems, the strain of hopeless courage and divided duties, as well as the people of the Teutonic race. Cuchulinn's destiny makes him meet his best friend and his son in combat; and the oppositions of loyalty and private affection are tragic motives well understood in the Irish tales. Perhaps the finest mood of the Celtic mythology is chosen in another kind of story. If the imagination of the Northern mythologists was dominated by the thought of the fall of the gods, "the day when Odin meets with the wolf," the Celts have given their hearts to the enchanted ground, to the faery magic, in many stories of adventures in the underworld, and voyages westward to an island paradise.1 Where Babylonians, Greeks, and Finns have journeyed, on the seas beyond the earthly coasts, the Irish have no exclusive right. But they have thought 1 This subject has been illustrated most conveniently and intelligibly by Mr Alfred Nutt in the essays following Dr Kuno Meyer's edition of the Voyage of Bran. Nos manet oceanus. more constantly of such things than other people, and have made more of them in their songs and stories. To no people has the sea appealed in the same way, with such a magical attraction. The Legend of St Brandan, derived from the older Voyage of Maelduin, came to be known everywhere throughout Europe, and quickened the senses of the Mediterranean people with a breath of the Atlantic winds and tides. St Brandan stirred the thoughts of the less enthusiastic and better balanced Latin minds, and one gift among the many given by Ireland to the Continent of Europe was the spell of the Ocean, the dream of a glory beyond the value of mortal things— "On that vast shore washed by the furthest sea.' But apart from this influence on the world through St Brandan, which is after all an accidental result, there remain the achievements of Irish imagination in stories and poems that had no influence at all in foreign regions, but are none the less wonderful and honourable: such, for instance, as the prose and verse of the Voyage of Bran. For the Celts in their mythological literature are not merely the channels of primitive tradition; and there is nothing that proves their genius more truly than their imaginative treatment of old barbarous things. The spirit and suggestion of an old myth works upon their minds and takes new form; myth with them becomes romance. The importance of the Celtic fairy tales in medieval literature is proved by a thousand references to "the matter of Britain" in French and English books, and in all the other languages besides— "Thise olde gentil Bretons in hir dayes and Breton lays are vouched as authorities for many romantic stories besides that of The Franklin's Tale. The personages of them are often, as in this one of Chaucer's, unassociated with any mythic or heroic cycle; it is not necessary that the hero should be already well known like Tristram or Gawain. Much of the "matter of Britain" is as vague in its history as the fairy tales that begin anywhere, with no facts at all about the king's son, or the three brothers, or the man's daughter and her step-sister. Some of it, however, is under the dominion of great names. Arthur. The history of King Arthur, in whatever way interpreted, is a fabric in which all possible strands of myth and heroic tradition have been plaited together: quite unlike the simple stories that begin "Once upon a time," with no historical associations. and no solemnity. Arthur becomes many different things in different ages. In Nennius, about the year 800, Arthur is the commander of the British, dux bellorum, against the Saxons; he fought the twelve great battles, the last of them at Mount Badon, when nine hundred and sixty men of the heathen host fell before one onset of Arthur, et nemo prostravit eos nisi ipse solus. He fell along with Medraut at the battle of Camlan in 537, according to Annales Cambria.1 He has this 1 MS. tenth century. |