)]
It has frequently been observed that the majority of popular beliefs
still extant in our different provinces are of Celtic origin.
It has frequently been observed that the majority of popular beliefs
still extant in our different provinces are of Celtic origin.
Literary and Philosophical Essays- French, German and Italian by Immanuel Kant
Read the strange Mabinogi of
Peredur, or its French imitation Parceval le Gallois; its pages are,
as it were, dewy with feminine sentiment. Woman appears therein as a
kind of vague vision, an intermediary between man and the
supernatural world. I am acquainted with no literature that offers
anything analogous to this. Compare Guinevere or Iseult with those
Scandinavian furies Gudrun and Chrimhilde, and you will avow that
woman such as chivalry conceived her, an ideal of sweetness and
loveliness set up as the supreme end of life, is a creation neither
classical, nor Christian, nor Teutonic, but in reality Celtic.
Imaginative power is nearly always proportionate to concentration of
feeling, and lack of the external development of life. The limited
nature of Greek and Italian imagination is due to the easy
expansiveness of the peoples of the South, with whom the soul,
wholly spread abroad, reflects but little within itself. Compared
with the classical imagination, the Celtic imagination is indeed the
infinite contrasted with the finite. In the fine Mabinogi of the
Dream of Maxem Wledig, the Emperor Maximus beholds in a dream a
young maiden so beautiful, that on waking he declares he cannot live
without her. For several years his envoys scour the world in search
of her; at last she is discovered in Brittany. So is it with the
Celtic race; it has worn itself out in taking dreams for realities,
and in pursuing its splendid visions. The essential element in the
Celt's poetic life is the adventure--that is to say, the pursuit of
the unknown, an endless quest after an object ever flying from
desire. It was of this that St. Brandan dreamed, that Peredur sought
with his mystic chivalry, that Knight Owen asked of his subterranean
journeyings. This race desires the infinite, it thirsts for it, and
pursues it at all costs, beyond the tomb, beyond hell itself. The
characteristic failing of the Breton peoples, the tendency to
drunkenness--a failing which, according to the traditions of the
sixth century, was the cause of their disasters--is due to this
invincible need of illusion. Do not say that it is an appetite for
gross enjoyment; never has there been a people more sober and more
alien to all sensuality. No, the Bretons sought in mead what Owen,
St. Brandan, and Peredur sought in their own way,--the vision of the
invisible world. To this day in Ireland drunkenness forms a part of
all Saint's Day festivals--that is to say, the festivals which best
have retained their national and popular aspect.
Thence arises the profound sense of the future and of the eternal
destinies of his race, which has ever borne up the Cymry, and kept
him young still beside his conquerors who have grown old. Thence
that dogma of the resurrection of the heroes, which appears to have
been one of those that Christianity found most difficulty in rooting
out. Thence Celtic Messianism, that belief in a future avenger who
shall restore Cambria, and deliver her out of the hands of her
oppressors, like the mysterious Leminok promised by Merlin, the Lez-
Breiz of the Armoricans, the Arthur of the Welsh. [Footnote: M.
Augustin Thierry has finely remarked that the renown attaching to
Welsh prophecies in the Middle Ages was due to their steadfastness
in affirming the future of their race. (Histoire de la Conquete
d'Angleterre. )] The hand that arose from the mere, when the sword of
Arthur fell therein, that seized it, and brandished it thrice, is
the hope of the Celtic races. It is thus that little peoples dowered
with imagination revenge themselves on their conquerors. Feeling
themselves to be strong inwardly and weak outwardly, they protest,
they exult; and such a strife unloosing their might, renders them
capable of miracles. Nearly all great appeals to the supernatural
are due to peoples hoping against all hope. Who shall say what in
our own times has fermented in the bosom of the most stubborn, the
most powerless of nationalities--Poland? Israel in humiliation
dreamed of the spiritual conquest of the world, and the dream has
come to pass.
II
At a first glance the literature of Wales is divided into three
perfectly distinct distinct branches: the bardic or lyric, which
shines forth in splendour in the sixth century by the works of
Taliessin, of Aneurin, and of Liware'h Hen, and continues through an
uninterrupted series of imitations up to modern times; the
Mabinogion, or literature of romance, fixed towards the twelfth
century, but linking themselves in the groundwork of their ideas
with the remotest ages of the Celtic genius; finally, an
ecclesiastical and legendary literature, impressed with a distinct
stamp of its own. These three literatures seem to have existed side
by side, almost without knowledge of one another. The bards, proud
of their solemn rhetoric, held in disdain the popular tales, the
form of which they considered careless; on the other hand, both
bards and romancers appear to have had few relations with the
clergy; and one at times might be tempted to suppose that they
ignored the existence of Christianity. To our thinking it is in the
Mabinogion that the true expression of the Celtic genius is to be
sought; and it is surprising that so curious a literature, the
source of nearly all the romantic creations of Europe, should have
remained unknown until our own days. The cause is doubtless to be
ascribed to the dispersed state of the Welsh manuscripts, pursued
till last century by the English, as seditious books compromising
those who possessed them. Often too they fell into hands of ignorant
owners whose caprice or ill-will sufficed to keep them from critical
research.
The Mabinogion have been preserved for us in two principal
documents--one of the thirteenth century from the library of
Hengurt, belonging to the Vaughan family; the other dating from the
fourteenth century, known under the name of the Red Book of Hergest,
and now in Jesus College, Oxford. No doubt it was some such
collection that charmed the weary hours of the hapless Leolin in the
Tower of London, and was burned after his condemnation, with the
other Welsh books which had been the companions of his captivity.
Lady Charlotte Guest has based her edition on the Oxford manuscript;
it cannot be sufficiently regretted that paltry considerations have
caused her to be refused the use of the earlier manuscript, of which
the later appears to be only a copy. Regrets are redoubled when one
knows that several Welsh texts, which were seen and copied fifty
years ago, have now disappeared. It is in the presence of facts such
as these that one comes to believe that revolutions--in general so
destructive of the works of the past--are favourable to the
preservation of literary monuments, by compelling their
concentration in great centres, where their existence, as well as
their publicity, is assured.
The general tone of the Mabinogion is rather romantic than epic.
Life is treated naively and not too emphatically. The hero's
individuality is limitless. We have free and noble natures acting in
all their spontaneity. Each man appears as a kind of demi-god
characterised by a supernatural gift. This gift is nearly always
connected with some miraculous object, which in some measure is the
personal seal of him who possesses it. The inferior classes, which
this people of heroes necessarily supposes beneath it, scarcely show
themselves, except in the exercise of some trade, for practising
which they are held in high esteem. The somewhat complicated
products of human industry are regarded as living beings, and in
their manner endowed with magical properties. A multiplicity of
celebrated objects have proper names, such as the drinking-cup, the
lance, the sword, and the shield of Arthur; the chess-board of
Gwendolen, on which the black pieces played of their own accord
against the white; the horn of Bran Galed, where one found whatever
liquor one desired; the chariot of Morgan, which directed itself to
the place to which one wished to go; the pot of Tyrnog, which would
not cook when meat for a coward was put into it; the grindstone of
Tudwal, which would only sharpen brave men's swords; the coat of
Padarn, which none save a noble could don; and the mantle of Tegan,
which no woman could put upon herself were she not above reproach.
[Footnote: Here may be recognised the origin of trial by court
mantle, one of the most interesting episodes in Lancelot of the
Lake. ] The animal is conceived in a still more individual way; it
has a proper name, personal qualities, and a role which it develops
at its own will and with full consciousness. The same hero appears
as at once man and animal, without it being possible to trace the
line of demarcation between the two natures.
The tale of Kilhwch and Olwen, the most extraordinary of the
Mabinogion, deals with Arthur's struggle against the wild-boar king
Twrch Trwyth, who with his seven cubs holds in check all the heroes
of the Round Table. The adventures of the three hundred ravens of
Kerverhenn similarly form the subject of the Dream of Rhonabwy. The
idea of moral merit and demerit is almost wholly absent from all
these compositions. There are wicked beings who insult ladies, who
tyrannise over their neighbours, who only find pleasure in evil
because such is their nature; but it does not appear that they incur
wrath on that account. Arthur's knights pursue them, not as
criminals but as mischievous fellows. All other beings are perfectly
good and just, but more or less richly gifted. This is the dream of
an amiable and gentle race which looks upon evil as being the work
of destiny, and not a product of the human conscience. All nature is
enchanted, and fruitful as imagination itself in indefinitely varied
creations. Christianity rarely discloses itself; although at times
its proximity can be felt, it alters in no respect the purely
natural surroundings in which everything takes place. A bishop
figures at table beside Arthur, but his function is strictly limited
to blessing the dishes. The Irish saints, who at one time present
themselves to give their benediction to Arthur and receive favours
at his hands, are portrayed as a race of men vaguely known and
difficult to understand. No mediaeval literature held itself further
removed from all monastic influence. We evidently must suppose that
the Welsh bards and story-tellers lived in a state of great
isolation from the clergy, and had their culture and traditions
quite apart.
The charm of the Mabinogion principally resides in the amiable
serenity of the Celtic mind, neither sad nor gay, ever in suspense
between a smile and a tear. We have in them the simple recital of a
child, unwitting of any distinction between the noble and the
common; there is something of that softly animated world, of that
calm and tranquil ideal to which Ariosto's stanzas transport us. The
chatter of the later mediaeval French and German imitators can give
no idea of this charming manner of narration. The skilful Chretien
de Troyes himself remains in this respect far below the Welsh story-
tellers, and as for Wolfram of Eschenbach, it must be avowed that
the joy of the first discovery has carried German critics too far in
the exaggeration of his merits. He loses himself in interminable
descriptions, and almost completely ignores the art of his recital.
What strikes one at a first glance in the imaginative compositions
of the Celtic races, above all when they are contrasted with those
of the Teutonic races, is the extreme mildness of manners pervading
them. There are none of those frightful vengeances which fill the
Edda and the Niebelungen. Compare the Teutonic with the Gaelic
hero,--Beowulf with Peredur, for example. What a difference there
is! In the one all the horror of disgusting and blood-embrued
barbarism, the drunkenness of carnage, the disinterested taste, if I
may say so, for destruction and death; in the other a profound sense
of justice, a great height of personal pride it is true, but also a
great capacity for devotion, an exquisite loyalty. The tyrannical
man, the monster, the Black Man, find a place here like the
Lestrigons and the Cyclops of Homer only to inspire horror by
contrast with softer manners; they are almost what the wicked man is
in the naive imagination of a child brought up by a mother in the
ideas of a gentle and pious morality. The primitive man of Teutonism
is revolting by his purposeless brutality, by a love of evil that
only gives him skill and strength in the service of hatred and
injury. The Cymric hero on the other hand, even in his wildest
flights, seems possessed by habits of kindness and a warm sympathy
with the weakv. Sympathy indeed is one of the deepest feelings among
the Celtic peoples. Even Judas is not denied a share of their pity.
St. Brandan found him upon a rock in the midst of the Polar seas;
once a week he passes a day there to refresh himself from the fires
of hell. A cloak that he had given to a beggar is hung before him,
and tempers his sufferings.
If Wales has a right to be proud of her Mabinogion, she has not less
to felicitate herself in having found a translator truly worthy of
interpreting them. For the proper understanding of these original
beauties there was needed a delicate appreciation of Welsh
narration, and an intelligence of the naive order, qualities of
which an erudite translator would with difficulty have been capable.
To render these gracious imaginings of a people so eminently dowered
with feminine tact, the pen of a woman was necessary. Simple,
animated, without effort and without vulgarity, Lady Guest's
translation is a faithful mirror of the original Cymric. Even
supposing that, as regards philology, the labours of this noble
Welsh lady be destined to receive improvement, that does not prevent
her book from for ever remaining a work of erudition and highly
distinguished taste. [Footnote: M. de la Villemarque published in
1843 under the title of Cantes populaires des anciens Bretons, a
French translation of the narratives that Guest had already
presented in English at that time. ]
The Mabinogion, or at least the writings which Lady Guest thought
she ought to include under this common name, divide themselves into
two perfectly distinct classes--some connected exclusively with the
two peninsulas of Wales and Cornwall, and relating to the heroic
personality of Arthur; the others alien to Arthur, having for their
scene not only the parts of England that have remained Cymric, but
the whole of Great Britain, and leading us back by the persons and
traditions mentioned in them to the later years of the Roman
occupation. The second class, of greater antiquity than the first,
at least on the ground of subject, is also distinguished by a much
more mythological character, a bolder use of the miraculous, an
enigmatical form, a style full of alliteration and plays upon words.
Of this number are the tales of Pwyll, of Bramwen, of Manawyddan, of
Math the son of Mathonwy, the Dream of the Emperor Maximus, the
story of Llud and Llewelys, and the legend of Taliessin. To the
Arthurian cycle belong the narratives of Owen, of Geraint, of
Peredur, of Kilhwch and Olwen, and the Dream of Rhonabwy. It is also
to be remarked that the two last-named narratives have a
particularly antique character. In them Arthur dwells in Cornwall,
and not as in the others at Caerleon on the Usk. In them he appears
with an individual character, hunting and taking a personal part in
warfare, while in the more modern tales he is only an emperor all-
powerful and impassive, a truly sluggard hero, around whom a pleiad
of active heroes groups itself. The Mabinogi of Kilhwch and Olwen,
by its entirely primitive aspect, by the part played in it by the
wild-boar in conformity to the spirit of Celtic mythology, by the
wholly supernatural and magical character of the narration, by
innumerable allusions the sense of which escapes us, forms a cycle
by itself. It represents for us the Cymric conception in all its
purity, before it had been modified by the introduction of any
foreign element. Without attempting here to analyse this curious
poem, I should like by some extracts to make its antique aspect and
high originality apparent.
Kilhwch, the son of Kilydd, prince of Kelyddon, having heard some
one mention the name of Olwen, daughter of Yspaddaden Penkawr, falls
violently in love, without having ever seen her. He goes to find
Arthur, that he may ask for his aid in the difficult undertaking
which he meditates; in point of fact, he does not know in what
country the fair one of his affection dwells. Yspaddaden is besides
a frightful tyrant who suffers no man to go from his castle alive,
and whose death is linked by destiny to the marriage of his
daughter. [Footnote: The idea of making the death of the father the
condition of possession of the daughter is to be found in several
romances of the Breton cycle, in Lancelot for example. ] Arthur
grants Kilhwch some of his most valiant comrades in arms to assist
him in this enterprise. After wonderful adventures the knights
arrive at the castle of Yspaddaden, and succeed in seeing the young
maiden of Kilhwch's dream. Only after three days of persistent
struggle do they manage to obtain a response from Olwen's father,
who attaches his daughter's hand to conditions apparently impossible
of realisation. The performance of these trials makes a long chain
of adventures, the framework of a veritable romantic epic which has
come to us in a very fragmentary form. Of the thirty-eight
adventures imposed on Kilhwch the manuscript used by Lady Guest only
relates seven or eight. I choose at random one of these narratives,
which appears to me fitted to give an idea of the whole composition.
It deals with the finding of Mabon the son of Modron, who was
carried away from his mother three days after his birth, and whose
deliverance is one of the labours exacted of Kilhwch.
"His followers said unto Arthur, 'Lord, go thou home; thou canst not
proceed with thy host in quest of such small adventures as these. '
Then said Arthur, 'It were well for thee, Gwrhyr Gwalstawd
Ieithoedd, to go upon this quest, for thou knowest all languages,
and art familiar with those of the birds and the beasts. Thou,
Eidoel, oughtest likewise to go with my men in search of thy cousin.
And as for you, Kai and Bedwyr, I have hope of whatever adventure ye
are in quest of, that ye will achieve it. Achieve ye this adventure
for me. '"
They went forward until they came to the Ousel of Cilgwri. And
Gwrhyr adjured her for the sake of Heaven, saying, "Tell me if thou
knowest aught of Mabon the son of Modron, who was taken when three
nights old from between his mother and the wall. " And the Ousel
answered, "When I first came here there was a smith's anvil in this
place, and I was then a young bird; and from that time no work has
been done upon it, save the pecking of my beak every evening, and
now there is not so much as the size of a nut remaining thereof; yet
all the vengeance of Heaven be upon me, if during all that time I
have ever heard of the man for whom you enquire. Nevertheless I will
do that which is right, and that which it is fitting I should do for
an embassy from Arthur. There is a race of animals who were formed
before me, and I will be your guide to them. "
So they proceeded to the place where was the Stag of Redynvre. "Stag
of Redynvre, behold we are come to thee, an embassy from Arthur, for
we have not heard of any animal older than thou. Say, knowest thou
aught of Mabon the son of Modron, who was taken from his mother when
three nights old? " The Stag said, "When first I came hither there
was a plain all around me, without any trees save one oak sapling,
which grew up to be an oak with an hundred branches. And that oak
has since perished, so that now nothing remains of it but the
withered stump; and from that day to this I have been here, yet have
I never heard of the man for whom you enquire. Nevertheless, being
an embassy from Arthur, I will be your guide to the place where
there is an animal which was formed before I was. "
So they proceeded to the place where was the Owl of Cwm Cawlwyd.
"Owl of Cwm Cawlwyd, here is an embassy from Arthur; knowest thou
aught of Mabon the son of Modron, who was taken after three nights
from his mother? " "If I knew I would tell you. When first I came
hither, the wide valley you see was a wooded glen. And a race of men
came and rooted it up. And there grew there a second wood; and this
wood is the third. My wings, are they not withered stumps? Yet all
this time, even until to-day, I have never heard of the man for whom
you enquire. Nevertheless I will be the guide of Arthur's embassy
until you come to the place where is the oldest animal in the world,
and the one that has travelled most, the Eagle of Gwern Abwy. "
Gwrhyr said, "Eagle of Gwern Abwy, we have come to thee an embassy
from Arthur, to ask thee if thou knowest aught of Mabon the son of
Modron, who was taken from his mother when he was three nights old. "
The Eagle said, "I have been here for a great space of time, and
when I first came hither there was a rock here, from the top of
which I pecked at the stars every evening; and now it is not so much
as a span high. From that day to this I have been here, and I have
never heard of the man for whom you enquire, except once when I went
in search of food as far as Llyn Llyw. And when I came there, I
struck my talons into a salmon, thinking he would serve me as food
for a long time. But he drew me into the deep, and I was scarcely
able to escape from him. After that I went with my whole kindred to
attack him, and to try to destroy him, but he sent messengers, and
made peace with me; and came and besought me to take fifty fish
spears out of his back. Unless he know something of him whom you
seek, I cannot tell who may. However, I will guide you to the place
where he is. "
So they went thither; and the Eagle said, "Salmon of Llyn Llyw, I
have come to thee with an embassy from Arthur, to ask thee if thou
knowest aught concerning Mabon the son of Modron, who was taken away
at three nights old from his mother. " "As much as I know I will tell
thee. With every tide I go along the river upwards, until I come
near to the walls of Gloucester, and there have I found such wrong
as I never found elsewhere; and to the end that ye may give credence
thereto, let one of you go thither upon each of my two shoulders. "
So Kai and Gwrhyr Gwalstawd Ieithoedd went upon the shoulders of the
salmon, and they proceeded until they came unto the wall of the
prison, and they heard a great wailing and lamenting from the
dungeon. Said Gwrhyr, "Who is it that laments in this house of
stone? " "Alas there is reason enough for whoever is here to lament.
It is Mabon the son of Modron who is here imprisoned; and no
imprisonment was ever so grievous as mine, neither that of Lludd
Llaw Ereint, nor that of Greid the son of Eri. " "Hast thou hope of
being released for gold or for silver, or for any gifts of wealth,
or through battle and fighting? " "By fighting will whatever I may
gain be obtained. "
We shall not follow the Cymric hero through trials the result of
which can be foreseen. What, above all else, is striking in these
strange legends is the part played by animals, transformed by the
Welsh imagination into intelligent beings. No race conversed so
intimately as did the Celtic race with the lower creation, and
accorded it so large a share of moral life. [Footnote: See
especially the narratives of Nennius, and of Giraldus Cambrensis. In
them animals have at least as important a part as men. ] The close
association of man and animal, the fictions so dear to mediaeval
poetry of the Knight of the Lion, the Knight of the Falcon, the
Knight of the Swan, the vows consecrated by the presence of birds of
noble repute, are equally Breton imaginings. Ecclesiastical
literature itself presents analogous features; gentleness towards
animals informs all the legends of the saints of Brittany and
Ireland. One day St. Kevin fell asleep, while he was praying at his
window with outstretched arms; and a swallow perceiving the open
hand of the venerable monk, considered it an excellent place wherein
to make her nest. The saint on awaking saw the mother sitting upon
her eggs, and, loth to disturb her, waited for the little ones to be
hatched before he arose from his knees.
This touching sympathy was derived from the singular vivacity with
which the Celtic races have inspired their feeling for nature. Their
mythology is nothing more than a transparent naturalism, not that
anthropomorphic naturalism of Greece and India, in which the forces
of the universe, viewed as living beings and endowed with
consciousness, tend more and more to detach themselves from physical
phenomena, and to become moral beings; but in some measure a
realistic naturalism, the love of nature for herself, the vivid
impression of her magic, accompanied by the sorrowful feeling that
man knows, when, face to face with her, he believes that he hears
her commune with him concerning his origin and his destiny. The
legend of Merlin mirrors this feeling. Seduced by a fairy of the
woods, he flies with her and becomes a savage. Arthur's messengers
come upon him as he is singing by the side of a fountain; he is led
back again to court; but the charm carries him away. He returns to
his forests, and this time for ever. Under a thicket of hawthorn
Vivien has built him a magical prison. There he prophesies the
future of the Celtic races; he speaks of a maiden of the woods, now
visible and now unseen, who holds him captive by her spells. Several
Arthurian legends are impressed with the same character. Arthur
himself in popular belief became, as it were, a woodland spirit.
"The foresters on their nightly round by the light of the moon,"
says Gervais of Tilbury, [Footnote: An English chronicler of the
twelfth century. ] "often hear a great sound as of horns, and meet
bands of huntsmen; when they are asked whence they come, these
huntsmen make reply that they are of King Arthur's following. "
[Footnote: This manner of explaining all the unknown noises of the
wood by Arthur's Hunting is still to be found in several districts.
To understand properly the cult of nature, and, if I may say so, of
landscape among the Celts, see Gildas and Nennius, pp. 131, 136,
137, etc. (Edit. San Marte, Berlin. 1884);] Even the French
imitators of the Breton romances keep an impression--although a
rather insipid one--of the attraction exercised by nature on the
Celtic imagination. Elaine, the heroine of Lancelot, the ideal of
Breton perfection, passes her life with her companions in a garden,
in the midst of flowers which she tends. Every flower culled by her
hands is at the instant restored to life; and the worshippers of her
memory are under an obligation, when they cut a flower, to sow
another in its place.
The worship of forest, and fountain, and stone is to be explained by
this primitive naturalism, which all the Councils of the Church held
in Brittany united to proscribe. The stone, in truth, seems the
natural symbol of the Celtic races. It is an immutable witness that
has no death. The animal, the plant, above all the human figure,
only express the divine life under a determinate form; the stone on
the contrary, adapted to receive all forms, has been the fetish of
peoples in their childhood. Pausanias saw, still standing erect, the
thirty square stones of Pharse, each bearing the name of a divinity.
The men-hir to be met with over the whole surface of the ancient
world, what is it but the monument of primitive humanity, a living
witness of its faith in Heaven? [Footnote: It is, however, doubtful
whether the monuments known in France at Celtic (men-hir. dot-men,
etc. ) are the work of the Celts. With M. Worsaae and the Copenhagen
archaeologists, I am inclined to think that these monuments belong
to a more ancient humanity. Never, in fact, has any branch of the
Indo-European race built in this fashion. (See two articles by M.
Merimee in L'Athenaum franfais, Sept. 11th, 1852, and April 25th,
1853.
)]
It has frequently been observed that the majority of popular beliefs
still extant in our different provinces are of Celtic origin. A not
less remarkable fact is the strong tinge of naturalism dominant in
these beliefs. Nay more, every time that the old Celtic spirit
appears in our history, there is to be seen, re-born with it, faith
in nature and her magic influences. One of the most characteristic
of these manifestations seems to me to be that of Joan of Arc. That
indomitable hope, that tenacity in the affirmation of the future,
that belief that the salvation of the kingdom will come from a
woman,--all those features, far removed as they are from the taste
of antiquity, and from Teutonic taste, are in many respects Celtic.
The memory of the ancient cult perpetuated itself at Domremy, as in
so many other places, under the form of popular superstition. The
cottage of the family of Arc was shaded by a beech tree, famed in
the country and reputed to be the abode of fairies. In her childhood
Joan used to go and hang upon its branches garlands of leaves and
flowers, which, so it was said, disappeared during the night. The
terms of her accusation speak with horror of this innocent custom,
as of a crime against the faith; and indeed they were not altogether
deceived, those unpitying theologians who judged the holy maid.
Although she knew it not, she was more Celtic than Christian. She
has been foretold by Merlin; she knows of neither Pope nor Church,--
she only believes the voice that speaks in her own heart. This voice
she hears in the fields, in the sough of the wind among the trees,
when measured and distant sounds fair upon her ears. During her
trial, worn out with questions and scholastic subtleties, she is
asked whether she still hears her voices. "Take me to the woods. "
she says, "and I shall hear them clearly. " Her legend is tinged with
the same colours; nature loved her, the wolves never touched the
sheep of her flock. When she was a little girl, the birds used to
come and eat bread from her lap as though they were tame. [Footnote:
Since the first publication of these views, on which I should not
like more emphasis to be put than what belongs to a passing
impression, similar considerations have been developed, in terms
that appear a little too positive, by M. H. Martin (History of
France, vol. vi. , 1856). The objections raised to it are, for the
most part, due to the fact that very few people are capable of
delicately appreciating questions of this kind, relative to the
genius of races. It frequently happens that the resurrection of an
old national genius takes place under a very different form from
that which one would have expected, and by means of individuals who
have no idea of the ethnographical part which they play. ]
III
The MABINOGION do not recommend themselves to our study, only as a
manifestation of the romantic genius of the Breton races. It was
through them that the Welsh imagination exercised its influence upon
the Continent, that it transformed, in the twelfth century, the
poetic art of Europe, and realised this miracle,--that the creations
of a half-conquered race have become the universal feast of
imagination for mankind.
Few heroes owe less to reality than Arthur. Neither Gildas nor
Aneurin, his contemporaries, speak of him; Bede did not even know
his name; Taliessin and Liwarc'h Hen gave him only a secondary
place. In Nennius, on the other hand, who lived about 850, the
legend has fully unfolded. Arthur is already the exterminator of the
Saxons; he has never experienced defeat; he is the suzerain of an
army of kings. Finally, in Geoffrey of Monmouth, the epic creation
culminates. Arthur reigns over the whole earth; he conquers Ireland,
Norway, Gascony, and France. At Caerleon he holds a tournament at
which all the monarchs of the world are present; there he puts upon
his head thirty crowns, and exacts recognition as the sovereign lord
of the universe. So incredible is it that a petty king of the sixth
century, scarcely remarked by his contemporaries, should have taken
in posterity such colossal proportions, that several critics have
supposed that the legendary Arthur and the obscure chieftain who
bore that name have nothing in common, the one with the other, and
that the son of Uther Pendragon is a wholly ideal hero, a survivor
of the old Cymric mythology. As a matter of fact, in the symbols of
Neo-Druidism--that is to say, of that secret doctrine, the outcome
of Druidism, which prolonged its existence even to the Middle Ages
under the form of Freemasonry--we again find Arthur transformed into
a divine personage, and playing a purely mythological part. It must
at least be allowed that, if behind the fable some reality lies
hidden, history offers us no means of attaining it. It cannot be
doubted that the discovery of Arthur's tomb in the Isle of Avalon in
1189 was an invention of Norman policy, just as in 1283, the very
year in which Edward I. was engaged in crushing out the last
vestiges of Welsh independence, Arthur's crown was very conveniently
found, and forthwith united to the other crown jewels of England.
We naturally expect Arthur, now become the representative of Welsh
nationality, to sustain in the Mabinogion a character analogous to
this role, and therein, as in Nennius, to serve the hatred of the
vanquished against the Saxons. But such is not the case. Arthur, in
the Mabinogion, exhibits no characteristics of patriotic resistance;
his part is limited to uniting heroes around him, to maintaining the
retainers of his palace, and to enforcing the laws of his order of
chivalry. He is too strong for any one to dream of attacking him. He
is the Charlemagne of the Carlovingian romances, the Agamemnon of
Homer,--one of those neutral personalities that serve but to give
unity to the poem. The idea of warfare against the alien, hatred
towards the Saxon, does not appear in a single instance. The heroes
of the Mabinogion have no fatherland; each fights to show his
personal excellence, and satisfy his taste for adventure, but not to
defend a national cause. Britain is the universe; no one suspects
that beyond the Cymry there may be other nations and other races.
It was by this ideal and representative character that the Arthurian
legend had such an astonishing prestige throughout the whole world.
Had Arthur been only a provincial hero, the more or less happy
defender of a little country, all peoples would not have adopted
him, any more than they have adopted the Marco of the Serbs,
[Footnote: A Servian ballad-hero. ] or the Robin Hood of the Saxons.
The Arthur who has charmed the world is the head of an order of
equality, in which all sit at the same table, in which a man's worth
depends upon his valour and his natural gifts. What mattered to the
world the fate of an unknown peninsula, and the strife waged on its
behalf? What enchanted it was the ideal court presided over by
Gwenhwyvar (Guinevere), where around the monarchical unity the
flower of heroes was gathered together, where ladies, as chaste as
they were beautiful, loved according to the laws of chivalry, and
where the time was passed in listening to stories, and learning
civility and beautiful manners.
This is the secret of the magic of that Round Table, about which the
Middle Ages grouped all their ideas of heroism, of beauty, of
modesty, and of love. We need not stop to inquire whether the ideal
of a gentle and polished society in the midst of the barbarian world
is, in all its features, a purely Breton creation, whether the
spirit of the courts of the Continent has not in some measure
furnished the model, and whether the Mabinogion themselves have not
felt the reaction of the French imitations;[Footnote: The surviving
version of the Mdbinogian has a later date than these imitations,
and the Red Book includes several tales borrowed from the French
trouveres. But it is out of the question to maintain that the really
Welsh narratives have been borrowed in a like manner, since among
them are some unknown to the trouveres, which could only possess
interest for Breton countries] it suffices for us that the new order
of sentiments which we have just indicated was, throughout the whole
of the Middle Ages, persistently attached to the groundwork of the
Cymric romances. Such an association could not be fortuitous; if the
imitations are all so glaring in colour, it is evidently because in
the original this same colour is to be found united to particularly
strong character. How otherwise shall we explain why a forgotten
tribe on the very confines of the world should have imposed its
heroes upon Europe, and, in the domain of imagination, accomplished
one of the most singular revolutions known to the historian of
letters?
If, in fact, one compares European literature before the
introduction of the Cymric romances, with what it became when the
trouveres set themselves to draw from Breton sources, one recognises
readily that with the Breton narratives a new element entered into
the poetic conception of the Christian peoples, and modified it
profoundly. The Carlovingian poem, both by its structure and by the
means which it employs, does not depart from classical ideas. The
motives of man's action are the same as in the Greek epic. The
essentially romantic element, the life of forests and mysterious
adventure, the feeling for nature, and that impulse of imagination
which makes the Breton warrior unceasingly pursue the unknown;--
nothing of all this is as yet to be observed. Roland differs from
the heroes of Homer only by his armour; in heart he is the brother
of Ajax or Achilles. Perceval, on the contrary, belongs to another
world, separated by a great gulf from that in which the heroes of
antiquity live and act.
It was above all by the creation of woman's character, by
introducing into mediaeval poetry, hitherto hard and austere, the
nuances of love, that the Breton romances brought about this curious
metamorphosis. It was like an electric spark; in a few years
European taste was changed. Nearly all the types of womankind known
to the Middle Ages, Guinevere, Iseult, Enid, are derived from
Arthur's court. In the Carlovingian poems woman is a nonentity
without character or individuality; in them love is either brutal,
as in the romance of "Ferebras," or scarcely indicated, as in the
"Song of Roland. " In the "Mabinogion," on the other hand, the
principal part always belongs to the women. Chivalrous gallantry,
which makes the warrior's happiness to consist in serving a woman
and meriting her esteem, the belief that the noblest use of strength
is to succour and avenge weakness, results, I know, from a turn of
imagination which possessed nearly all European peoples in the
twelfth century; but it cannot be doubted that this turn of
imagination first found literary expression among the Breton
peoples. One of the most surprising features in the Mabinogion is
the delicacy of the feminine feeling breathed in them; an
impropriety or a gross word is never to be met with. It would be
necessary to quote at length the two romances of Peredur and Geraint
to demonstrate an innocence such as this; but the naive simplicity
of these charming compositions forbids us to see in this innocence
any underlying meaning. The zeal of the knight in the defence of
ladies' honour became a satirical euphemism only in the French
imitators, who transformed the virginal modesty of the Breton
romances into a shameless gallantry--so far indeed that these
compositions, chaste as they are in the original, became the scandal
of the Middle Ages, provoked censures, and were the occasion of the
ideas of immorality which, for religious people, still cluster about
the name of romance.
Certainly chivalry is too complex a fact for us to be permitted to
assign it to any single origin. Let us say however that in the idea
of envisaging the esteem of a woman as the highest object of human
activity, and setting up love as the supreme principle of morality,
there is nothing of the antique spirit, or indeed of the Teutonic.
Is it in the "Edda" or in the "Niebelungen" that we shall find the
germ of this spirit of pure love, of exalted devotion, which forms
the very soul of chivalry? As to following the suggestion of some
critics and seeking among the Arabs for the beginnings of this
institution, surely of all literary paradoxes ever mooted, this is
one of the most singular. The idea of conquering woman in a land
where she is bought and sold, of seeking her esteem in a land where
she is scarcely considered capable of moral merit! I shall oppose
the partizans of this hypothesis with one single fact,--the surprise
experienced by the Arabs of Algeria when, by a somewhat unfortunate
recollection of mediaeval tournaments, the ladies were entrusted
with the presentation of prizes at the Beiram races. What to the
knight appeared an unparalleled honour seemed to the Arabs a
humiliation and almost an insult.
The introduction of the Breton romances into the current of European
literature worked a not less profound revolution in the manner of
conceiving and employing the marvellous. In the Carlovingian poems
the marvellous is timid, and conforms to the Christian faith; the
supernatural is produced directly by God or his envoys. Among the
Cymry, on the contrary, the principle of the marvel is in nature
herself, in her hidden forces, in her inexhaustible fecundity. There
is a mysterious swan, a prophetic bird, a suddenly appearing hand, a
giant, a black tyrant, a magic mist, a dragon, a cry that causes the
hearer to die of terror, an object with extraordinary properties.
There is no trace of the monotheistic conception, in which the
marvellous is only a miracle, a derogation of eternal laws. Nor are
there any of those personifications of the life of nature which form
the essential part of the Greek and Indian mythologies. Here we have
perfect naturalism, an unlimited faith in the possible, belief in
the existence of independent beings bearing within themselves the
principle of their strength,--an idea quite opposed to Christianity,
which in such beings necessarily sees either angels or fiends. And
besides, these strange beings are always presented as being outside
the pale of the Church; and when the knight of the Round Table has
conquered them, he forces them to go and pay homage to Guinevere,
and have themselves baptised.
Now, if in poetry there is a marvellous element that we might
accept, surely it is this. Classical mythology, taken in its first
simplicity, is too bold, taken as a mere figure of rhetoric, too
insipid, to give us satisfaction. As to the marvellous element in
Christianity, Boileau is right: no fiction is compatible with such a
dogmatism. There remains then the purely naturalistic marvellous,
nature interesting herself in action and acting herself, the great
mystery of fatality unveiling itself by the secret conspiring of all
beings, as in Shakespeare and Ariosto. It would be curious to
ascertain how much of the Celt there is in the former of these
poets; as for Ariosto he is the Breton poet par excellence. All his
machinery, all his means of interest, all his fine shades of
sentiment, all his types of women, all his adventures, are borrowed
from the Breton romances.
Do we now understand the intellectual role of that little race which
gave to the world Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot, Perceval, Merlin, St.
Brandan, St. Patrick, and almost all the poetical cycles of the
Middle Ages? What a striking destiny some nations have, in alone
possessing the right to cause the acceptance of their heroes, as
though for that were necessary a quite peculiar degree of authority,
seriousness, and faith! And it is a strange thing that it is to the
Normans, of all peoples the one least sympathetically inclined
towards the Bretons, that we owe the renown of the Breton fables.
Brilliant and imitative, the Norman everywhere became the pre-
eminent representative of the nation on which he had at first
imposed himself by force. French in France, English in England,
Italian in Italy, Russian at Novgorod, he forgot his own language to
speak that of the race which he had conquered, and to become the
interpreter of its genius. The deeply suggestive character of the
Welsh romances could not fail to impress men so prompt to seize and
assimilate the ideas of the foreigner. The first revelation of the
Breton fables, the Latin Chronicle of Geoffrey of Monmouth, appeared
about the year 1137, under the auspices of Robert of Gloucester,
natural son of Henry I. Henry II. acquired a taste for the same
narratives, and at his request Robert Wace, in 1155, wrote in French
the first history of Arthur, thus opening the path in which walked
after him a host of poets or imitators of all nationalities, French,
Provencal, Italian, Spanish, English, Scandinavian, Greek, and
Georgian. We need not belittle the glory of the first trouveres who
put into a language, then read and understood from one end of Europe
to the other, fictions which, but for them, would have doubtless
remained for ever unknown. It is however difficult to attribute to
them an inventive faculty, such as would permit them to merit the
title of creators. The numerous passages in which one feels that
they do not fully understand the original which they imitate, and in
which they attempt to give a natural significance to circumstances
of which the mythological bearing escaped them, suffice to prove
that, as a rule, they were satisfied to make a fairly faithful copy
of the work before their eyes.
What part has Armorican Brittany played in the creation or
propagation of the legends of the Round Table? It is impossible to
say with any degree of precision; and in truth such a question
becomes a matter of secondary import once we form a just idea of the
close bonds of fraternity, which did not cease until the twelfth
century to unite the two branches of the Breton peoples. That the
heroic traditions of Wales long continued to live in the branch of
the Cymric family which came and settled in Armorica cannot be
doubted when we find Geraint, Urien, and other heroes become saints
in Lower Brittany; [Footnote: I shall only cite a single proof; it
is a law of Edward the Confessor: "Britones vero Armorici quum
venerint in regno isto, suscipi debent et in regno protegi sicut
probi cives de corpore regni hujus; exierunt quondam de sanguine
Britonum regni hujus. "--Wilkins, Leges Anglo-Saxonicae, p. 206. ]and
above all when we see one of the most essential episodes of the
Arthurian cycle, that of the Forest of Broceliande, placed in the
same country. A large number of facts collected by M. de la
Villemarrque [Footnote: "Les Romans de la Table-Ronde et les contes
des anciens Bretons" (Paris, 1859), pp. 20 et seq. In the "Contes
populaires des anciens Bretons," of which the above may be
considered as a new edition, the learned author had somewhat
exaggerated the influence of French Brittany. In the present
article, when first published, I had, on the other hand, depreciated
it too much. ] prove, on the other hand, that these same traditions
produced a true poetic cycle in Brittany, and even that at certain
epochs they must have recrossed the Channel, as though to give new
life to the mother country's memories. The fact that Gauthier
Calenius, Archdeacon of Oxford, brought back from Brittany to
England (about 1125) the very text of the legends which were
translated into Latin ten years afterwards by Geoffrey of Monmouth
is here decisive. I know that to readers of the Mabinogion such an
opinion will appear surprising at a first glance, All is Welsh in
these fables, the places, the genealogies, the customs; in them
Armorica is only represented by Hoel, an important personage no
doubt, but one who has not achieved the fame of the other heroes of
Arthur's court. Again, if Armorica saw the birth of the Arthurian
cycle, how is it that we fail to find there any traces of that
brilliant nativity? [Footnote: M. de la Villemarque makes appeal to
the popular songs still extant in Brittany, in which Arthur's deeds
are celebrated. In fact, in his Chants populaires de la Bretagne two
poems are to be found in which that hero's name figures. ]
These objections, I avow, long barred my way, but I no longer find
them insoluble. And first of all there is a class of Mabinogion,
including those of Owen, Geraint, and Peredur, stories which possess
no very precise geographical localisation. In the second place,
national written literature being less successfully defended in
Brittany than in Wales against the invasion of foreign culture, it
may be conceived that the memory of the old epics should be there
more obliterated. The literary share of the two countries thus
remains sufficiently distinct. The glory of French Brittany is in
her popular songs; but it is only in Wales that the genius of the
Breton people has succeeded in establishing itself in authentic
books and achieved creations.
IV.
In comparing the Breton cycle as the French trouveres knew it, and
the same cycle as it is to be found in the text of the Mabinogion,
one might be tempted to believe that the European imagination,
enthralled by these brilliant fables, added to them some poetical
themes unknown to the Welsh. Two of the most celebrated heroes of
the continental Breton romances, Lancelot and Tristan, do not figure
in the Mabinogion; on the other hand, the characteristics of the
Holy Grail are presented in a totally different way from that which
we find in the French and German poets. A more attentive study shows
that these elements, apparently added by the French poets, are in
reality of Cymric origin. And first of all, M. de la Villemarque has
demonstrated to perfection that the name of Lancelot is only a
translation of that of the Welsh hero Mael, who in point of fact
exhibits the fullest analogy with the Lancelot of the French
romances. [Footnote: Ancelot is the diminutive of Ancel, and means
servant, page, or esquire. To this day in the Cymric dialects Mael
has the same signification. The surname of Poursigant, which we find
borne by some Welshmen in the French service in the early part of
the fourteenth century, is also no doubt a translation of Mael. ] The
context, the proper names, all the details of the romance of
Lancelot also present the most pronounced Breton aspect. As much
must be said of the romance of Tristan. It is even to be hoped that
this curious legend will be discovered complete in some Welsh
manuscript. Dr. Owen states that he has seen one of which he was
unable to obtain a copy. As to the Holy Grail, it must be avowed
that the mystic cup, the object after which the French Parceval and
the German Parsifal go in search, has not nearly the same importance
among the Welsh. In the romance of Peredur it only figures in an
episodical fashion, and without a well-defined religious intention.
"Then Peredur and his uncle discoursed together, and he beheld two
youths enter the hall, and proceed up to the chamber, bearing a
spear of mighty size, with three streams of blood flowing from the
point to the ground. And when all the company saw this, they began
wailing and lamenting. But for all that, the man did not break off
his discourse with Peredur. And as he did not tell Peredur the
meaning of what he saw, he forbore to ask him concerning it. And
when the clamour had a little subsided, behold two maidens entered,
with a large salver between them, in which was a man's head,
surrounded by a profusion of blood. And thereupon the company of the
court made so great an outcry, that it was irksome to be in the same
hall with them. But at length they were silent. " This strange and
wondrous circumstance remains an enigma to the end of the narrative.
Then a mysterious young man appears to Peredur, apprises him that
the lance from which the blood was dropping is that with which his
uncle was wounded, that the vessel contains the blood and the head
of one of his cousins, slain by the witches of Kerloiou, and that it
is predestined that he, Peredur, should be their avenger. In point
of fact, Peredur goes and convokes the Round Table; Arthur and his
knights come and put the witches of Kerloiou to death.
If we now pass to the French romance of Parceval, we find that all
this phantasmagoria clothes a very different significance. The lance
is that with which Longus pierced Christ's side, the Grail or basin
is that in which Joseph of Arimathea caught the divine blood. This
miraculous vase procures all the good things of heaven and earth; it
heals wounds, and is filled at the owner's pleasure with the most
exquisite food. To approach it one must be in a state of grace; only
a priest can tell of its marvels. To find these sacred relics after
the passage of a thousand trials,--such is the object of Peredur's
chivalry, at once worldly and mystical. In the end he becomes a
priest; he takes the Grail and the lance into his hermitage; on the
day of his death an angel bears them up to Heaven. Let us add that
many traits prove that in the mind of the French trouvere the Grail
is confounded with the eucharist. In the miniatures which
occasionally accompany the romance of Parceval, the Grail is in the
form of a pyx, appearing at all the solemn moments of the poem as a
miraculous source of succour.
Is this strange myth, differing as it does from the simple narrative
presented in the Welsh legend of Peredur, really Cymric, or ought we
rather to see in it an original creation of the trouveres, based
upon a Breton foundation? With M. de la Villemarque we believe that
this curious fable is essentially Cymric. [Footnote: See the
excellent discussion of this interesting problem in the introduction
to "Contes populaires des anciens Bretons" (pp. 181 et seq. ). ] In
the eighth century a Breton hermit had a vision of Joseph of
Arimathea bearing the chalice of the Last Supper, and wrote the
history called the Gradal. The whole Celtic mythology is full of the
marvels of a magic caldron under which nine fairies blow silently, a
mysterious vase which inspires poetic genius, gives wisdom, reveals
the future, and unveils the secrets of the world. One day as Bran
the Blessed was hunting in Ireland upon the shore of a lake, he saw
come forth from it a black man bearing upon his back an enormous
caldron, followed by a witch and a dwarf. This caldron was the
instrument of the supernatural power of a family of giants. It cured
all ills, and gave back life to the dead, but without restoring to
them the use of speech--an allusion to the secret of the bardic
initiation. In the same way Perceval's wariness forms the whole plot
of the quest of the Holy Grail. The Grail thus appears to us in its
primitive meaning as the pass-word of a kind of free-masonry which
survived in Wales long after the preaching of the Gospel, and of
which we find deep traces in the legend of Taliessin. Christianity
grafted its legend upon the mythological data, and a like
transformation was doubtless made by the Cymric race itself. If the
Welsh narrative of Peredur does not offer the same developments as
the French romance of Parceval, it is because the Red Book of
Hergest gives us an earlier version than that which served as a
model for Chretien de Troyes. It is also to be remarked that, even
in Parceval, the mystical idea is not as yet completely developed,
that the trouvere seems to treat this strange theme as a narrative
which he has found already complete, and the meaning of which he can
scarcely guess. The motive that sets Parceval a-field in the French
romance, as well as in the Welsh version, is a family motive; he
seeks the Holy Grail as a talisman to cure his uncle the Fisherman-
King, in such a way that the religious idea is still subordinated to
the profane intention. In the German version, on the other hand,
full as it is of mysticism and theology, the Grail has a temple and
priests. Parsifal, who has become a purely ecclesiastical hero,
reaches the dignity of King of the Grail by his religious enthusiasm
and his chastity. [Footnote: It is indeed remarkable that all the
Breton heroes in their last transformation are at once gallant and
devout. One of the most celebrated ladies of Arthur's court, Luned,
becomes a saint and a martyr for her chastity, her festival being
celebrated on August 1st. She it is who figures in the French
romances under the name of Lunette. See Lady Guest, vol. i. , pp.
113, 114. ] Finally, the prose versions, more modern still, sharply
distinguish the two chivalries, the one earthly, the other mystical.
In them Parceval becomes the model of the devout knight. This was
the last of the metamorphoses which that all-powerful enchantress
called the human imagination made him undergo; and it was only right
that, after having gone through so many dangers, he should don a
monkish frock, wherein to take his rest after his life of adventure.
V.
When we seek to determine the precise moment in the history of the
Celtic races at which we ought to place ourselves in order to
appreciate their genius in its entirety, we find ourselves led back
to the sixth century of our era. Races have nearly always a
predestined hour at which, passing from simplicity to reflection,
they bring forth to the light of day, for the first time, all the
treasures of their nature. For the Celtic races the poetic moment of
awakening and primal activity was the sixth century. Christianity,
still young amongst them, has not completely stifled the national
cult; the religion of the Druids defends itself in its schools and
holy places; warfare against the foreigner, without which a people
never achieves a full consciousness of itself, attains its highest
degree of spirit. It is the epoch of all the heroes of enduring
fame, of all the characteristic saints of the Breton Church;
finally, it is the great age of bardic literature, illustrious by
the names of Taliessin, of Aneurin, of Liwarc'h Hen.
To such as would view critically the historical use of these half-
fabulous names and would hesitate to accept as authentic, poems that
have come down to us through so long a series of ages, we reply that
the objections raised to the antiquity of the bardic literature--
objections of which W. Schlegel made himself the interpreter in
opposition to M.
Peredur, or its French imitation Parceval le Gallois; its pages are,
as it were, dewy with feminine sentiment. Woman appears therein as a
kind of vague vision, an intermediary between man and the
supernatural world. I am acquainted with no literature that offers
anything analogous to this. Compare Guinevere or Iseult with those
Scandinavian furies Gudrun and Chrimhilde, and you will avow that
woman such as chivalry conceived her, an ideal of sweetness and
loveliness set up as the supreme end of life, is a creation neither
classical, nor Christian, nor Teutonic, but in reality Celtic.
Imaginative power is nearly always proportionate to concentration of
feeling, and lack of the external development of life. The limited
nature of Greek and Italian imagination is due to the easy
expansiveness of the peoples of the South, with whom the soul,
wholly spread abroad, reflects but little within itself. Compared
with the classical imagination, the Celtic imagination is indeed the
infinite contrasted with the finite. In the fine Mabinogi of the
Dream of Maxem Wledig, the Emperor Maximus beholds in a dream a
young maiden so beautiful, that on waking he declares he cannot live
without her. For several years his envoys scour the world in search
of her; at last she is discovered in Brittany. So is it with the
Celtic race; it has worn itself out in taking dreams for realities,
and in pursuing its splendid visions. The essential element in the
Celt's poetic life is the adventure--that is to say, the pursuit of
the unknown, an endless quest after an object ever flying from
desire. It was of this that St. Brandan dreamed, that Peredur sought
with his mystic chivalry, that Knight Owen asked of his subterranean
journeyings. This race desires the infinite, it thirsts for it, and
pursues it at all costs, beyond the tomb, beyond hell itself. The
characteristic failing of the Breton peoples, the tendency to
drunkenness--a failing which, according to the traditions of the
sixth century, was the cause of their disasters--is due to this
invincible need of illusion. Do not say that it is an appetite for
gross enjoyment; never has there been a people more sober and more
alien to all sensuality. No, the Bretons sought in mead what Owen,
St. Brandan, and Peredur sought in their own way,--the vision of the
invisible world. To this day in Ireland drunkenness forms a part of
all Saint's Day festivals--that is to say, the festivals which best
have retained their national and popular aspect.
Thence arises the profound sense of the future and of the eternal
destinies of his race, which has ever borne up the Cymry, and kept
him young still beside his conquerors who have grown old. Thence
that dogma of the resurrection of the heroes, which appears to have
been one of those that Christianity found most difficulty in rooting
out. Thence Celtic Messianism, that belief in a future avenger who
shall restore Cambria, and deliver her out of the hands of her
oppressors, like the mysterious Leminok promised by Merlin, the Lez-
Breiz of the Armoricans, the Arthur of the Welsh. [Footnote: M.
Augustin Thierry has finely remarked that the renown attaching to
Welsh prophecies in the Middle Ages was due to their steadfastness
in affirming the future of their race. (Histoire de la Conquete
d'Angleterre. )] The hand that arose from the mere, when the sword of
Arthur fell therein, that seized it, and brandished it thrice, is
the hope of the Celtic races. It is thus that little peoples dowered
with imagination revenge themselves on their conquerors. Feeling
themselves to be strong inwardly and weak outwardly, they protest,
they exult; and such a strife unloosing their might, renders them
capable of miracles. Nearly all great appeals to the supernatural
are due to peoples hoping against all hope. Who shall say what in
our own times has fermented in the bosom of the most stubborn, the
most powerless of nationalities--Poland? Israel in humiliation
dreamed of the spiritual conquest of the world, and the dream has
come to pass.
II
At a first glance the literature of Wales is divided into three
perfectly distinct distinct branches: the bardic or lyric, which
shines forth in splendour in the sixth century by the works of
Taliessin, of Aneurin, and of Liware'h Hen, and continues through an
uninterrupted series of imitations up to modern times; the
Mabinogion, or literature of romance, fixed towards the twelfth
century, but linking themselves in the groundwork of their ideas
with the remotest ages of the Celtic genius; finally, an
ecclesiastical and legendary literature, impressed with a distinct
stamp of its own. These three literatures seem to have existed side
by side, almost without knowledge of one another. The bards, proud
of their solemn rhetoric, held in disdain the popular tales, the
form of which they considered careless; on the other hand, both
bards and romancers appear to have had few relations with the
clergy; and one at times might be tempted to suppose that they
ignored the existence of Christianity. To our thinking it is in the
Mabinogion that the true expression of the Celtic genius is to be
sought; and it is surprising that so curious a literature, the
source of nearly all the romantic creations of Europe, should have
remained unknown until our own days. The cause is doubtless to be
ascribed to the dispersed state of the Welsh manuscripts, pursued
till last century by the English, as seditious books compromising
those who possessed them. Often too they fell into hands of ignorant
owners whose caprice or ill-will sufficed to keep them from critical
research.
The Mabinogion have been preserved for us in two principal
documents--one of the thirteenth century from the library of
Hengurt, belonging to the Vaughan family; the other dating from the
fourteenth century, known under the name of the Red Book of Hergest,
and now in Jesus College, Oxford. No doubt it was some such
collection that charmed the weary hours of the hapless Leolin in the
Tower of London, and was burned after his condemnation, with the
other Welsh books which had been the companions of his captivity.
Lady Charlotte Guest has based her edition on the Oxford manuscript;
it cannot be sufficiently regretted that paltry considerations have
caused her to be refused the use of the earlier manuscript, of which
the later appears to be only a copy. Regrets are redoubled when one
knows that several Welsh texts, which were seen and copied fifty
years ago, have now disappeared. It is in the presence of facts such
as these that one comes to believe that revolutions--in general so
destructive of the works of the past--are favourable to the
preservation of literary monuments, by compelling their
concentration in great centres, where their existence, as well as
their publicity, is assured.
The general tone of the Mabinogion is rather romantic than epic.
Life is treated naively and not too emphatically. The hero's
individuality is limitless. We have free and noble natures acting in
all their spontaneity. Each man appears as a kind of demi-god
characterised by a supernatural gift. This gift is nearly always
connected with some miraculous object, which in some measure is the
personal seal of him who possesses it. The inferior classes, which
this people of heroes necessarily supposes beneath it, scarcely show
themselves, except in the exercise of some trade, for practising
which they are held in high esteem. The somewhat complicated
products of human industry are regarded as living beings, and in
their manner endowed with magical properties. A multiplicity of
celebrated objects have proper names, such as the drinking-cup, the
lance, the sword, and the shield of Arthur; the chess-board of
Gwendolen, on which the black pieces played of their own accord
against the white; the horn of Bran Galed, where one found whatever
liquor one desired; the chariot of Morgan, which directed itself to
the place to which one wished to go; the pot of Tyrnog, which would
not cook when meat for a coward was put into it; the grindstone of
Tudwal, which would only sharpen brave men's swords; the coat of
Padarn, which none save a noble could don; and the mantle of Tegan,
which no woman could put upon herself were she not above reproach.
[Footnote: Here may be recognised the origin of trial by court
mantle, one of the most interesting episodes in Lancelot of the
Lake. ] The animal is conceived in a still more individual way; it
has a proper name, personal qualities, and a role which it develops
at its own will and with full consciousness. The same hero appears
as at once man and animal, without it being possible to trace the
line of demarcation between the two natures.
The tale of Kilhwch and Olwen, the most extraordinary of the
Mabinogion, deals with Arthur's struggle against the wild-boar king
Twrch Trwyth, who with his seven cubs holds in check all the heroes
of the Round Table. The adventures of the three hundred ravens of
Kerverhenn similarly form the subject of the Dream of Rhonabwy. The
idea of moral merit and demerit is almost wholly absent from all
these compositions. There are wicked beings who insult ladies, who
tyrannise over their neighbours, who only find pleasure in evil
because such is their nature; but it does not appear that they incur
wrath on that account. Arthur's knights pursue them, not as
criminals but as mischievous fellows. All other beings are perfectly
good and just, but more or less richly gifted. This is the dream of
an amiable and gentle race which looks upon evil as being the work
of destiny, and not a product of the human conscience. All nature is
enchanted, and fruitful as imagination itself in indefinitely varied
creations. Christianity rarely discloses itself; although at times
its proximity can be felt, it alters in no respect the purely
natural surroundings in which everything takes place. A bishop
figures at table beside Arthur, but his function is strictly limited
to blessing the dishes. The Irish saints, who at one time present
themselves to give their benediction to Arthur and receive favours
at his hands, are portrayed as a race of men vaguely known and
difficult to understand. No mediaeval literature held itself further
removed from all monastic influence. We evidently must suppose that
the Welsh bards and story-tellers lived in a state of great
isolation from the clergy, and had their culture and traditions
quite apart.
The charm of the Mabinogion principally resides in the amiable
serenity of the Celtic mind, neither sad nor gay, ever in suspense
between a smile and a tear. We have in them the simple recital of a
child, unwitting of any distinction between the noble and the
common; there is something of that softly animated world, of that
calm and tranquil ideal to which Ariosto's stanzas transport us. The
chatter of the later mediaeval French and German imitators can give
no idea of this charming manner of narration. The skilful Chretien
de Troyes himself remains in this respect far below the Welsh story-
tellers, and as for Wolfram of Eschenbach, it must be avowed that
the joy of the first discovery has carried German critics too far in
the exaggeration of his merits. He loses himself in interminable
descriptions, and almost completely ignores the art of his recital.
What strikes one at a first glance in the imaginative compositions
of the Celtic races, above all when they are contrasted with those
of the Teutonic races, is the extreme mildness of manners pervading
them. There are none of those frightful vengeances which fill the
Edda and the Niebelungen. Compare the Teutonic with the Gaelic
hero,--Beowulf with Peredur, for example. What a difference there
is! In the one all the horror of disgusting and blood-embrued
barbarism, the drunkenness of carnage, the disinterested taste, if I
may say so, for destruction and death; in the other a profound sense
of justice, a great height of personal pride it is true, but also a
great capacity for devotion, an exquisite loyalty. The tyrannical
man, the monster, the Black Man, find a place here like the
Lestrigons and the Cyclops of Homer only to inspire horror by
contrast with softer manners; they are almost what the wicked man is
in the naive imagination of a child brought up by a mother in the
ideas of a gentle and pious morality. The primitive man of Teutonism
is revolting by his purposeless brutality, by a love of evil that
only gives him skill and strength in the service of hatred and
injury. The Cymric hero on the other hand, even in his wildest
flights, seems possessed by habits of kindness and a warm sympathy
with the weakv. Sympathy indeed is one of the deepest feelings among
the Celtic peoples. Even Judas is not denied a share of their pity.
St. Brandan found him upon a rock in the midst of the Polar seas;
once a week he passes a day there to refresh himself from the fires
of hell. A cloak that he had given to a beggar is hung before him,
and tempers his sufferings.
If Wales has a right to be proud of her Mabinogion, she has not less
to felicitate herself in having found a translator truly worthy of
interpreting them. For the proper understanding of these original
beauties there was needed a delicate appreciation of Welsh
narration, and an intelligence of the naive order, qualities of
which an erudite translator would with difficulty have been capable.
To render these gracious imaginings of a people so eminently dowered
with feminine tact, the pen of a woman was necessary. Simple,
animated, without effort and without vulgarity, Lady Guest's
translation is a faithful mirror of the original Cymric. Even
supposing that, as regards philology, the labours of this noble
Welsh lady be destined to receive improvement, that does not prevent
her book from for ever remaining a work of erudition and highly
distinguished taste. [Footnote: M. de la Villemarque published in
1843 under the title of Cantes populaires des anciens Bretons, a
French translation of the narratives that Guest had already
presented in English at that time. ]
The Mabinogion, or at least the writings which Lady Guest thought
she ought to include under this common name, divide themselves into
two perfectly distinct classes--some connected exclusively with the
two peninsulas of Wales and Cornwall, and relating to the heroic
personality of Arthur; the others alien to Arthur, having for their
scene not only the parts of England that have remained Cymric, but
the whole of Great Britain, and leading us back by the persons and
traditions mentioned in them to the later years of the Roman
occupation. The second class, of greater antiquity than the first,
at least on the ground of subject, is also distinguished by a much
more mythological character, a bolder use of the miraculous, an
enigmatical form, a style full of alliteration and plays upon words.
Of this number are the tales of Pwyll, of Bramwen, of Manawyddan, of
Math the son of Mathonwy, the Dream of the Emperor Maximus, the
story of Llud and Llewelys, and the legend of Taliessin. To the
Arthurian cycle belong the narratives of Owen, of Geraint, of
Peredur, of Kilhwch and Olwen, and the Dream of Rhonabwy. It is also
to be remarked that the two last-named narratives have a
particularly antique character. In them Arthur dwells in Cornwall,
and not as in the others at Caerleon on the Usk. In them he appears
with an individual character, hunting and taking a personal part in
warfare, while in the more modern tales he is only an emperor all-
powerful and impassive, a truly sluggard hero, around whom a pleiad
of active heroes groups itself. The Mabinogi of Kilhwch and Olwen,
by its entirely primitive aspect, by the part played in it by the
wild-boar in conformity to the spirit of Celtic mythology, by the
wholly supernatural and magical character of the narration, by
innumerable allusions the sense of which escapes us, forms a cycle
by itself. It represents for us the Cymric conception in all its
purity, before it had been modified by the introduction of any
foreign element. Without attempting here to analyse this curious
poem, I should like by some extracts to make its antique aspect and
high originality apparent.
Kilhwch, the son of Kilydd, prince of Kelyddon, having heard some
one mention the name of Olwen, daughter of Yspaddaden Penkawr, falls
violently in love, without having ever seen her. He goes to find
Arthur, that he may ask for his aid in the difficult undertaking
which he meditates; in point of fact, he does not know in what
country the fair one of his affection dwells. Yspaddaden is besides
a frightful tyrant who suffers no man to go from his castle alive,
and whose death is linked by destiny to the marriage of his
daughter. [Footnote: The idea of making the death of the father the
condition of possession of the daughter is to be found in several
romances of the Breton cycle, in Lancelot for example. ] Arthur
grants Kilhwch some of his most valiant comrades in arms to assist
him in this enterprise. After wonderful adventures the knights
arrive at the castle of Yspaddaden, and succeed in seeing the young
maiden of Kilhwch's dream. Only after three days of persistent
struggle do they manage to obtain a response from Olwen's father,
who attaches his daughter's hand to conditions apparently impossible
of realisation. The performance of these trials makes a long chain
of adventures, the framework of a veritable romantic epic which has
come to us in a very fragmentary form. Of the thirty-eight
adventures imposed on Kilhwch the manuscript used by Lady Guest only
relates seven or eight. I choose at random one of these narratives,
which appears to me fitted to give an idea of the whole composition.
It deals with the finding of Mabon the son of Modron, who was
carried away from his mother three days after his birth, and whose
deliverance is one of the labours exacted of Kilhwch.
"His followers said unto Arthur, 'Lord, go thou home; thou canst not
proceed with thy host in quest of such small adventures as these. '
Then said Arthur, 'It were well for thee, Gwrhyr Gwalstawd
Ieithoedd, to go upon this quest, for thou knowest all languages,
and art familiar with those of the birds and the beasts. Thou,
Eidoel, oughtest likewise to go with my men in search of thy cousin.
And as for you, Kai and Bedwyr, I have hope of whatever adventure ye
are in quest of, that ye will achieve it. Achieve ye this adventure
for me. '"
They went forward until they came to the Ousel of Cilgwri. And
Gwrhyr adjured her for the sake of Heaven, saying, "Tell me if thou
knowest aught of Mabon the son of Modron, who was taken when three
nights old from between his mother and the wall. " And the Ousel
answered, "When I first came here there was a smith's anvil in this
place, and I was then a young bird; and from that time no work has
been done upon it, save the pecking of my beak every evening, and
now there is not so much as the size of a nut remaining thereof; yet
all the vengeance of Heaven be upon me, if during all that time I
have ever heard of the man for whom you enquire. Nevertheless I will
do that which is right, and that which it is fitting I should do for
an embassy from Arthur. There is a race of animals who were formed
before me, and I will be your guide to them. "
So they proceeded to the place where was the Stag of Redynvre. "Stag
of Redynvre, behold we are come to thee, an embassy from Arthur, for
we have not heard of any animal older than thou. Say, knowest thou
aught of Mabon the son of Modron, who was taken from his mother when
three nights old? " The Stag said, "When first I came hither there
was a plain all around me, without any trees save one oak sapling,
which grew up to be an oak with an hundred branches. And that oak
has since perished, so that now nothing remains of it but the
withered stump; and from that day to this I have been here, yet have
I never heard of the man for whom you enquire. Nevertheless, being
an embassy from Arthur, I will be your guide to the place where
there is an animal which was formed before I was. "
So they proceeded to the place where was the Owl of Cwm Cawlwyd.
"Owl of Cwm Cawlwyd, here is an embassy from Arthur; knowest thou
aught of Mabon the son of Modron, who was taken after three nights
from his mother? " "If I knew I would tell you. When first I came
hither, the wide valley you see was a wooded glen. And a race of men
came and rooted it up. And there grew there a second wood; and this
wood is the third. My wings, are they not withered stumps? Yet all
this time, even until to-day, I have never heard of the man for whom
you enquire. Nevertheless I will be the guide of Arthur's embassy
until you come to the place where is the oldest animal in the world,
and the one that has travelled most, the Eagle of Gwern Abwy. "
Gwrhyr said, "Eagle of Gwern Abwy, we have come to thee an embassy
from Arthur, to ask thee if thou knowest aught of Mabon the son of
Modron, who was taken from his mother when he was three nights old. "
The Eagle said, "I have been here for a great space of time, and
when I first came hither there was a rock here, from the top of
which I pecked at the stars every evening; and now it is not so much
as a span high. From that day to this I have been here, and I have
never heard of the man for whom you enquire, except once when I went
in search of food as far as Llyn Llyw. And when I came there, I
struck my talons into a salmon, thinking he would serve me as food
for a long time. But he drew me into the deep, and I was scarcely
able to escape from him. After that I went with my whole kindred to
attack him, and to try to destroy him, but he sent messengers, and
made peace with me; and came and besought me to take fifty fish
spears out of his back. Unless he know something of him whom you
seek, I cannot tell who may. However, I will guide you to the place
where he is. "
So they went thither; and the Eagle said, "Salmon of Llyn Llyw, I
have come to thee with an embassy from Arthur, to ask thee if thou
knowest aught concerning Mabon the son of Modron, who was taken away
at three nights old from his mother. " "As much as I know I will tell
thee. With every tide I go along the river upwards, until I come
near to the walls of Gloucester, and there have I found such wrong
as I never found elsewhere; and to the end that ye may give credence
thereto, let one of you go thither upon each of my two shoulders. "
So Kai and Gwrhyr Gwalstawd Ieithoedd went upon the shoulders of the
salmon, and they proceeded until they came unto the wall of the
prison, and they heard a great wailing and lamenting from the
dungeon. Said Gwrhyr, "Who is it that laments in this house of
stone? " "Alas there is reason enough for whoever is here to lament.
It is Mabon the son of Modron who is here imprisoned; and no
imprisonment was ever so grievous as mine, neither that of Lludd
Llaw Ereint, nor that of Greid the son of Eri. " "Hast thou hope of
being released for gold or for silver, or for any gifts of wealth,
or through battle and fighting? " "By fighting will whatever I may
gain be obtained. "
We shall not follow the Cymric hero through trials the result of
which can be foreseen. What, above all else, is striking in these
strange legends is the part played by animals, transformed by the
Welsh imagination into intelligent beings. No race conversed so
intimately as did the Celtic race with the lower creation, and
accorded it so large a share of moral life. [Footnote: See
especially the narratives of Nennius, and of Giraldus Cambrensis. In
them animals have at least as important a part as men. ] The close
association of man and animal, the fictions so dear to mediaeval
poetry of the Knight of the Lion, the Knight of the Falcon, the
Knight of the Swan, the vows consecrated by the presence of birds of
noble repute, are equally Breton imaginings. Ecclesiastical
literature itself presents analogous features; gentleness towards
animals informs all the legends of the saints of Brittany and
Ireland. One day St. Kevin fell asleep, while he was praying at his
window with outstretched arms; and a swallow perceiving the open
hand of the venerable monk, considered it an excellent place wherein
to make her nest. The saint on awaking saw the mother sitting upon
her eggs, and, loth to disturb her, waited for the little ones to be
hatched before he arose from his knees.
This touching sympathy was derived from the singular vivacity with
which the Celtic races have inspired their feeling for nature. Their
mythology is nothing more than a transparent naturalism, not that
anthropomorphic naturalism of Greece and India, in which the forces
of the universe, viewed as living beings and endowed with
consciousness, tend more and more to detach themselves from physical
phenomena, and to become moral beings; but in some measure a
realistic naturalism, the love of nature for herself, the vivid
impression of her magic, accompanied by the sorrowful feeling that
man knows, when, face to face with her, he believes that he hears
her commune with him concerning his origin and his destiny. The
legend of Merlin mirrors this feeling. Seduced by a fairy of the
woods, he flies with her and becomes a savage. Arthur's messengers
come upon him as he is singing by the side of a fountain; he is led
back again to court; but the charm carries him away. He returns to
his forests, and this time for ever. Under a thicket of hawthorn
Vivien has built him a magical prison. There he prophesies the
future of the Celtic races; he speaks of a maiden of the woods, now
visible and now unseen, who holds him captive by her spells. Several
Arthurian legends are impressed with the same character. Arthur
himself in popular belief became, as it were, a woodland spirit.
"The foresters on their nightly round by the light of the moon,"
says Gervais of Tilbury, [Footnote: An English chronicler of the
twelfth century. ] "often hear a great sound as of horns, and meet
bands of huntsmen; when they are asked whence they come, these
huntsmen make reply that they are of King Arthur's following. "
[Footnote: This manner of explaining all the unknown noises of the
wood by Arthur's Hunting is still to be found in several districts.
To understand properly the cult of nature, and, if I may say so, of
landscape among the Celts, see Gildas and Nennius, pp. 131, 136,
137, etc. (Edit. San Marte, Berlin. 1884);] Even the French
imitators of the Breton romances keep an impression--although a
rather insipid one--of the attraction exercised by nature on the
Celtic imagination. Elaine, the heroine of Lancelot, the ideal of
Breton perfection, passes her life with her companions in a garden,
in the midst of flowers which she tends. Every flower culled by her
hands is at the instant restored to life; and the worshippers of her
memory are under an obligation, when they cut a flower, to sow
another in its place.
The worship of forest, and fountain, and stone is to be explained by
this primitive naturalism, which all the Councils of the Church held
in Brittany united to proscribe. The stone, in truth, seems the
natural symbol of the Celtic races. It is an immutable witness that
has no death. The animal, the plant, above all the human figure,
only express the divine life under a determinate form; the stone on
the contrary, adapted to receive all forms, has been the fetish of
peoples in their childhood. Pausanias saw, still standing erect, the
thirty square stones of Pharse, each bearing the name of a divinity.
The men-hir to be met with over the whole surface of the ancient
world, what is it but the monument of primitive humanity, a living
witness of its faith in Heaven? [Footnote: It is, however, doubtful
whether the monuments known in France at Celtic (men-hir. dot-men,
etc. ) are the work of the Celts. With M. Worsaae and the Copenhagen
archaeologists, I am inclined to think that these monuments belong
to a more ancient humanity. Never, in fact, has any branch of the
Indo-European race built in this fashion. (See two articles by M.
Merimee in L'Athenaum franfais, Sept. 11th, 1852, and April 25th,
1853.
)]
It has frequently been observed that the majority of popular beliefs
still extant in our different provinces are of Celtic origin. A not
less remarkable fact is the strong tinge of naturalism dominant in
these beliefs. Nay more, every time that the old Celtic spirit
appears in our history, there is to be seen, re-born with it, faith
in nature and her magic influences. One of the most characteristic
of these manifestations seems to me to be that of Joan of Arc. That
indomitable hope, that tenacity in the affirmation of the future,
that belief that the salvation of the kingdom will come from a
woman,--all those features, far removed as they are from the taste
of antiquity, and from Teutonic taste, are in many respects Celtic.
The memory of the ancient cult perpetuated itself at Domremy, as in
so many other places, under the form of popular superstition. The
cottage of the family of Arc was shaded by a beech tree, famed in
the country and reputed to be the abode of fairies. In her childhood
Joan used to go and hang upon its branches garlands of leaves and
flowers, which, so it was said, disappeared during the night. The
terms of her accusation speak with horror of this innocent custom,
as of a crime against the faith; and indeed they were not altogether
deceived, those unpitying theologians who judged the holy maid.
Although she knew it not, she was more Celtic than Christian. She
has been foretold by Merlin; she knows of neither Pope nor Church,--
she only believes the voice that speaks in her own heart. This voice
she hears in the fields, in the sough of the wind among the trees,
when measured and distant sounds fair upon her ears. During her
trial, worn out with questions and scholastic subtleties, she is
asked whether she still hears her voices. "Take me to the woods. "
she says, "and I shall hear them clearly. " Her legend is tinged with
the same colours; nature loved her, the wolves never touched the
sheep of her flock. When she was a little girl, the birds used to
come and eat bread from her lap as though they were tame. [Footnote:
Since the first publication of these views, on which I should not
like more emphasis to be put than what belongs to a passing
impression, similar considerations have been developed, in terms
that appear a little too positive, by M. H. Martin (History of
France, vol. vi. , 1856). The objections raised to it are, for the
most part, due to the fact that very few people are capable of
delicately appreciating questions of this kind, relative to the
genius of races. It frequently happens that the resurrection of an
old national genius takes place under a very different form from
that which one would have expected, and by means of individuals who
have no idea of the ethnographical part which they play. ]
III
The MABINOGION do not recommend themselves to our study, only as a
manifestation of the romantic genius of the Breton races. It was
through them that the Welsh imagination exercised its influence upon
the Continent, that it transformed, in the twelfth century, the
poetic art of Europe, and realised this miracle,--that the creations
of a half-conquered race have become the universal feast of
imagination for mankind.
Few heroes owe less to reality than Arthur. Neither Gildas nor
Aneurin, his contemporaries, speak of him; Bede did not even know
his name; Taliessin and Liwarc'h Hen gave him only a secondary
place. In Nennius, on the other hand, who lived about 850, the
legend has fully unfolded. Arthur is already the exterminator of the
Saxons; he has never experienced defeat; he is the suzerain of an
army of kings. Finally, in Geoffrey of Monmouth, the epic creation
culminates. Arthur reigns over the whole earth; he conquers Ireland,
Norway, Gascony, and France. At Caerleon he holds a tournament at
which all the monarchs of the world are present; there he puts upon
his head thirty crowns, and exacts recognition as the sovereign lord
of the universe. So incredible is it that a petty king of the sixth
century, scarcely remarked by his contemporaries, should have taken
in posterity such colossal proportions, that several critics have
supposed that the legendary Arthur and the obscure chieftain who
bore that name have nothing in common, the one with the other, and
that the son of Uther Pendragon is a wholly ideal hero, a survivor
of the old Cymric mythology. As a matter of fact, in the symbols of
Neo-Druidism--that is to say, of that secret doctrine, the outcome
of Druidism, which prolonged its existence even to the Middle Ages
under the form of Freemasonry--we again find Arthur transformed into
a divine personage, and playing a purely mythological part. It must
at least be allowed that, if behind the fable some reality lies
hidden, history offers us no means of attaining it. It cannot be
doubted that the discovery of Arthur's tomb in the Isle of Avalon in
1189 was an invention of Norman policy, just as in 1283, the very
year in which Edward I. was engaged in crushing out the last
vestiges of Welsh independence, Arthur's crown was very conveniently
found, and forthwith united to the other crown jewels of England.
We naturally expect Arthur, now become the representative of Welsh
nationality, to sustain in the Mabinogion a character analogous to
this role, and therein, as in Nennius, to serve the hatred of the
vanquished against the Saxons. But such is not the case. Arthur, in
the Mabinogion, exhibits no characteristics of patriotic resistance;
his part is limited to uniting heroes around him, to maintaining the
retainers of his palace, and to enforcing the laws of his order of
chivalry. He is too strong for any one to dream of attacking him. He
is the Charlemagne of the Carlovingian romances, the Agamemnon of
Homer,--one of those neutral personalities that serve but to give
unity to the poem. The idea of warfare against the alien, hatred
towards the Saxon, does not appear in a single instance. The heroes
of the Mabinogion have no fatherland; each fights to show his
personal excellence, and satisfy his taste for adventure, but not to
defend a national cause. Britain is the universe; no one suspects
that beyond the Cymry there may be other nations and other races.
It was by this ideal and representative character that the Arthurian
legend had such an astonishing prestige throughout the whole world.
Had Arthur been only a provincial hero, the more or less happy
defender of a little country, all peoples would not have adopted
him, any more than they have adopted the Marco of the Serbs,
[Footnote: A Servian ballad-hero. ] or the Robin Hood of the Saxons.
The Arthur who has charmed the world is the head of an order of
equality, in which all sit at the same table, in which a man's worth
depends upon his valour and his natural gifts. What mattered to the
world the fate of an unknown peninsula, and the strife waged on its
behalf? What enchanted it was the ideal court presided over by
Gwenhwyvar (Guinevere), where around the monarchical unity the
flower of heroes was gathered together, where ladies, as chaste as
they were beautiful, loved according to the laws of chivalry, and
where the time was passed in listening to stories, and learning
civility and beautiful manners.
This is the secret of the magic of that Round Table, about which the
Middle Ages grouped all their ideas of heroism, of beauty, of
modesty, and of love. We need not stop to inquire whether the ideal
of a gentle and polished society in the midst of the barbarian world
is, in all its features, a purely Breton creation, whether the
spirit of the courts of the Continent has not in some measure
furnished the model, and whether the Mabinogion themselves have not
felt the reaction of the French imitations;[Footnote: The surviving
version of the Mdbinogian has a later date than these imitations,
and the Red Book includes several tales borrowed from the French
trouveres. But it is out of the question to maintain that the really
Welsh narratives have been borrowed in a like manner, since among
them are some unknown to the trouveres, which could only possess
interest for Breton countries] it suffices for us that the new order
of sentiments which we have just indicated was, throughout the whole
of the Middle Ages, persistently attached to the groundwork of the
Cymric romances. Such an association could not be fortuitous; if the
imitations are all so glaring in colour, it is evidently because in
the original this same colour is to be found united to particularly
strong character. How otherwise shall we explain why a forgotten
tribe on the very confines of the world should have imposed its
heroes upon Europe, and, in the domain of imagination, accomplished
one of the most singular revolutions known to the historian of
letters?
If, in fact, one compares European literature before the
introduction of the Cymric romances, with what it became when the
trouveres set themselves to draw from Breton sources, one recognises
readily that with the Breton narratives a new element entered into
the poetic conception of the Christian peoples, and modified it
profoundly. The Carlovingian poem, both by its structure and by the
means which it employs, does not depart from classical ideas. The
motives of man's action are the same as in the Greek epic. The
essentially romantic element, the life of forests and mysterious
adventure, the feeling for nature, and that impulse of imagination
which makes the Breton warrior unceasingly pursue the unknown;--
nothing of all this is as yet to be observed. Roland differs from
the heroes of Homer only by his armour; in heart he is the brother
of Ajax or Achilles. Perceval, on the contrary, belongs to another
world, separated by a great gulf from that in which the heroes of
antiquity live and act.
It was above all by the creation of woman's character, by
introducing into mediaeval poetry, hitherto hard and austere, the
nuances of love, that the Breton romances brought about this curious
metamorphosis. It was like an electric spark; in a few years
European taste was changed. Nearly all the types of womankind known
to the Middle Ages, Guinevere, Iseult, Enid, are derived from
Arthur's court. In the Carlovingian poems woman is a nonentity
without character or individuality; in them love is either brutal,
as in the romance of "Ferebras," or scarcely indicated, as in the
"Song of Roland. " In the "Mabinogion," on the other hand, the
principal part always belongs to the women. Chivalrous gallantry,
which makes the warrior's happiness to consist in serving a woman
and meriting her esteem, the belief that the noblest use of strength
is to succour and avenge weakness, results, I know, from a turn of
imagination which possessed nearly all European peoples in the
twelfth century; but it cannot be doubted that this turn of
imagination first found literary expression among the Breton
peoples. One of the most surprising features in the Mabinogion is
the delicacy of the feminine feeling breathed in them; an
impropriety or a gross word is never to be met with. It would be
necessary to quote at length the two romances of Peredur and Geraint
to demonstrate an innocence such as this; but the naive simplicity
of these charming compositions forbids us to see in this innocence
any underlying meaning. The zeal of the knight in the defence of
ladies' honour became a satirical euphemism only in the French
imitators, who transformed the virginal modesty of the Breton
romances into a shameless gallantry--so far indeed that these
compositions, chaste as they are in the original, became the scandal
of the Middle Ages, provoked censures, and were the occasion of the
ideas of immorality which, for religious people, still cluster about
the name of romance.
Certainly chivalry is too complex a fact for us to be permitted to
assign it to any single origin. Let us say however that in the idea
of envisaging the esteem of a woman as the highest object of human
activity, and setting up love as the supreme principle of morality,
there is nothing of the antique spirit, or indeed of the Teutonic.
Is it in the "Edda" or in the "Niebelungen" that we shall find the
germ of this spirit of pure love, of exalted devotion, which forms
the very soul of chivalry? As to following the suggestion of some
critics and seeking among the Arabs for the beginnings of this
institution, surely of all literary paradoxes ever mooted, this is
one of the most singular. The idea of conquering woman in a land
where she is bought and sold, of seeking her esteem in a land where
she is scarcely considered capable of moral merit! I shall oppose
the partizans of this hypothesis with one single fact,--the surprise
experienced by the Arabs of Algeria when, by a somewhat unfortunate
recollection of mediaeval tournaments, the ladies were entrusted
with the presentation of prizes at the Beiram races. What to the
knight appeared an unparalleled honour seemed to the Arabs a
humiliation and almost an insult.
The introduction of the Breton romances into the current of European
literature worked a not less profound revolution in the manner of
conceiving and employing the marvellous. In the Carlovingian poems
the marvellous is timid, and conforms to the Christian faith; the
supernatural is produced directly by God or his envoys. Among the
Cymry, on the contrary, the principle of the marvel is in nature
herself, in her hidden forces, in her inexhaustible fecundity. There
is a mysterious swan, a prophetic bird, a suddenly appearing hand, a
giant, a black tyrant, a magic mist, a dragon, a cry that causes the
hearer to die of terror, an object with extraordinary properties.
There is no trace of the monotheistic conception, in which the
marvellous is only a miracle, a derogation of eternal laws. Nor are
there any of those personifications of the life of nature which form
the essential part of the Greek and Indian mythologies. Here we have
perfect naturalism, an unlimited faith in the possible, belief in
the existence of independent beings bearing within themselves the
principle of their strength,--an idea quite opposed to Christianity,
which in such beings necessarily sees either angels or fiends. And
besides, these strange beings are always presented as being outside
the pale of the Church; and when the knight of the Round Table has
conquered them, he forces them to go and pay homage to Guinevere,
and have themselves baptised.
Now, if in poetry there is a marvellous element that we might
accept, surely it is this. Classical mythology, taken in its first
simplicity, is too bold, taken as a mere figure of rhetoric, too
insipid, to give us satisfaction. As to the marvellous element in
Christianity, Boileau is right: no fiction is compatible with such a
dogmatism. There remains then the purely naturalistic marvellous,
nature interesting herself in action and acting herself, the great
mystery of fatality unveiling itself by the secret conspiring of all
beings, as in Shakespeare and Ariosto. It would be curious to
ascertain how much of the Celt there is in the former of these
poets; as for Ariosto he is the Breton poet par excellence. All his
machinery, all his means of interest, all his fine shades of
sentiment, all his types of women, all his adventures, are borrowed
from the Breton romances.
Do we now understand the intellectual role of that little race which
gave to the world Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot, Perceval, Merlin, St.
Brandan, St. Patrick, and almost all the poetical cycles of the
Middle Ages? What a striking destiny some nations have, in alone
possessing the right to cause the acceptance of their heroes, as
though for that were necessary a quite peculiar degree of authority,
seriousness, and faith! And it is a strange thing that it is to the
Normans, of all peoples the one least sympathetically inclined
towards the Bretons, that we owe the renown of the Breton fables.
Brilliant and imitative, the Norman everywhere became the pre-
eminent representative of the nation on which he had at first
imposed himself by force. French in France, English in England,
Italian in Italy, Russian at Novgorod, he forgot his own language to
speak that of the race which he had conquered, and to become the
interpreter of its genius. The deeply suggestive character of the
Welsh romances could not fail to impress men so prompt to seize and
assimilate the ideas of the foreigner. The first revelation of the
Breton fables, the Latin Chronicle of Geoffrey of Monmouth, appeared
about the year 1137, under the auspices of Robert of Gloucester,
natural son of Henry I. Henry II. acquired a taste for the same
narratives, and at his request Robert Wace, in 1155, wrote in French
the first history of Arthur, thus opening the path in which walked
after him a host of poets or imitators of all nationalities, French,
Provencal, Italian, Spanish, English, Scandinavian, Greek, and
Georgian. We need not belittle the glory of the first trouveres who
put into a language, then read and understood from one end of Europe
to the other, fictions which, but for them, would have doubtless
remained for ever unknown. It is however difficult to attribute to
them an inventive faculty, such as would permit them to merit the
title of creators. The numerous passages in which one feels that
they do not fully understand the original which they imitate, and in
which they attempt to give a natural significance to circumstances
of which the mythological bearing escaped them, suffice to prove
that, as a rule, they were satisfied to make a fairly faithful copy
of the work before their eyes.
What part has Armorican Brittany played in the creation or
propagation of the legends of the Round Table? It is impossible to
say with any degree of precision; and in truth such a question
becomes a matter of secondary import once we form a just idea of the
close bonds of fraternity, which did not cease until the twelfth
century to unite the two branches of the Breton peoples. That the
heroic traditions of Wales long continued to live in the branch of
the Cymric family which came and settled in Armorica cannot be
doubted when we find Geraint, Urien, and other heroes become saints
in Lower Brittany; [Footnote: I shall only cite a single proof; it
is a law of Edward the Confessor: "Britones vero Armorici quum
venerint in regno isto, suscipi debent et in regno protegi sicut
probi cives de corpore regni hujus; exierunt quondam de sanguine
Britonum regni hujus. "--Wilkins, Leges Anglo-Saxonicae, p. 206. ]and
above all when we see one of the most essential episodes of the
Arthurian cycle, that of the Forest of Broceliande, placed in the
same country. A large number of facts collected by M. de la
Villemarrque [Footnote: "Les Romans de la Table-Ronde et les contes
des anciens Bretons" (Paris, 1859), pp. 20 et seq. In the "Contes
populaires des anciens Bretons," of which the above may be
considered as a new edition, the learned author had somewhat
exaggerated the influence of French Brittany. In the present
article, when first published, I had, on the other hand, depreciated
it too much. ] prove, on the other hand, that these same traditions
produced a true poetic cycle in Brittany, and even that at certain
epochs they must have recrossed the Channel, as though to give new
life to the mother country's memories. The fact that Gauthier
Calenius, Archdeacon of Oxford, brought back from Brittany to
England (about 1125) the very text of the legends which were
translated into Latin ten years afterwards by Geoffrey of Monmouth
is here decisive. I know that to readers of the Mabinogion such an
opinion will appear surprising at a first glance, All is Welsh in
these fables, the places, the genealogies, the customs; in them
Armorica is only represented by Hoel, an important personage no
doubt, but one who has not achieved the fame of the other heroes of
Arthur's court. Again, if Armorica saw the birth of the Arthurian
cycle, how is it that we fail to find there any traces of that
brilliant nativity? [Footnote: M. de la Villemarque makes appeal to
the popular songs still extant in Brittany, in which Arthur's deeds
are celebrated. In fact, in his Chants populaires de la Bretagne two
poems are to be found in which that hero's name figures. ]
These objections, I avow, long barred my way, but I no longer find
them insoluble. And first of all there is a class of Mabinogion,
including those of Owen, Geraint, and Peredur, stories which possess
no very precise geographical localisation. In the second place,
national written literature being less successfully defended in
Brittany than in Wales against the invasion of foreign culture, it
may be conceived that the memory of the old epics should be there
more obliterated. The literary share of the two countries thus
remains sufficiently distinct. The glory of French Brittany is in
her popular songs; but it is only in Wales that the genius of the
Breton people has succeeded in establishing itself in authentic
books and achieved creations.
IV.
In comparing the Breton cycle as the French trouveres knew it, and
the same cycle as it is to be found in the text of the Mabinogion,
one might be tempted to believe that the European imagination,
enthralled by these brilliant fables, added to them some poetical
themes unknown to the Welsh. Two of the most celebrated heroes of
the continental Breton romances, Lancelot and Tristan, do not figure
in the Mabinogion; on the other hand, the characteristics of the
Holy Grail are presented in a totally different way from that which
we find in the French and German poets. A more attentive study shows
that these elements, apparently added by the French poets, are in
reality of Cymric origin. And first of all, M. de la Villemarque has
demonstrated to perfection that the name of Lancelot is only a
translation of that of the Welsh hero Mael, who in point of fact
exhibits the fullest analogy with the Lancelot of the French
romances. [Footnote: Ancelot is the diminutive of Ancel, and means
servant, page, or esquire. To this day in the Cymric dialects Mael
has the same signification. The surname of Poursigant, which we find
borne by some Welshmen in the French service in the early part of
the fourteenth century, is also no doubt a translation of Mael. ] The
context, the proper names, all the details of the romance of
Lancelot also present the most pronounced Breton aspect. As much
must be said of the romance of Tristan. It is even to be hoped that
this curious legend will be discovered complete in some Welsh
manuscript. Dr. Owen states that he has seen one of which he was
unable to obtain a copy. As to the Holy Grail, it must be avowed
that the mystic cup, the object after which the French Parceval and
the German Parsifal go in search, has not nearly the same importance
among the Welsh. In the romance of Peredur it only figures in an
episodical fashion, and without a well-defined religious intention.
"Then Peredur and his uncle discoursed together, and he beheld two
youths enter the hall, and proceed up to the chamber, bearing a
spear of mighty size, with three streams of blood flowing from the
point to the ground. And when all the company saw this, they began
wailing and lamenting. But for all that, the man did not break off
his discourse with Peredur. And as he did not tell Peredur the
meaning of what he saw, he forbore to ask him concerning it. And
when the clamour had a little subsided, behold two maidens entered,
with a large salver between them, in which was a man's head,
surrounded by a profusion of blood. And thereupon the company of the
court made so great an outcry, that it was irksome to be in the same
hall with them. But at length they were silent. " This strange and
wondrous circumstance remains an enigma to the end of the narrative.
Then a mysterious young man appears to Peredur, apprises him that
the lance from which the blood was dropping is that with which his
uncle was wounded, that the vessel contains the blood and the head
of one of his cousins, slain by the witches of Kerloiou, and that it
is predestined that he, Peredur, should be their avenger. In point
of fact, Peredur goes and convokes the Round Table; Arthur and his
knights come and put the witches of Kerloiou to death.
If we now pass to the French romance of Parceval, we find that all
this phantasmagoria clothes a very different significance. The lance
is that with which Longus pierced Christ's side, the Grail or basin
is that in which Joseph of Arimathea caught the divine blood. This
miraculous vase procures all the good things of heaven and earth; it
heals wounds, and is filled at the owner's pleasure with the most
exquisite food. To approach it one must be in a state of grace; only
a priest can tell of its marvels. To find these sacred relics after
the passage of a thousand trials,--such is the object of Peredur's
chivalry, at once worldly and mystical. In the end he becomes a
priest; he takes the Grail and the lance into his hermitage; on the
day of his death an angel bears them up to Heaven. Let us add that
many traits prove that in the mind of the French trouvere the Grail
is confounded with the eucharist. In the miniatures which
occasionally accompany the romance of Parceval, the Grail is in the
form of a pyx, appearing at all the solemn moments of the poem as a
miraculous source of succour.
Is this strange myth, differing as it does from the simple narrative
presented in the Welsh legend of Peredur, really Cymric, or ought we
rather to see in it an original creation of the trouveres, based
upon a Breton foundation? With M. de la Villemarque we believe that
this curious fable is essentially Cymric. [Footnote: See the
excellent discussion of this interesting problem in the introduction
to "Contes populaires des anciens Bretons" (pp. 181 et seq. ). ] In
the eighth century a Breton hermit had a vision of Joseph of
Arimathea bearing the chalice of the Last Supper, and wrote the
history called the Gradal. The whole Celtic mythology is full of the
marvels of a magic caldron under which nine fairies blow silently, a
mysterious vase which inspires poetic genius, gives wisdom, reveals
the future, and unveils the secrets of the world. One day as Bran
the Blessed was hunting in Ireland upon the shore of a lake, he saw
come forth from it a black man bearing upon his back an enormous
caldron, followed by a witch and a dwarf. This caldron was the
instrument of the supernatural power of a family of giants. It cured
all ills, and gave back life to the dead, but without restoring to
them the use of speech--an allusion to the secret of the bardic
initiation. In the same way Perceval's wariness forms the whole plot
of the quest of the Holy Grail. The Grail thus appears to us in its
primitive meaning as the pass-word of a kind of free-masonry which
survived in Wales long after the preaching of the Gospel, and of
which we find deep traces in the legend of Taliessin. Christianity
grafted its legend upon the mythological data, and a like
transformation was doubtless made by the Cymric race itself. If the
Welsh narrative of Peredur does not offer the same developments as
the French romance of Parceval, it is because the Red Book of
Hergest gives us an earlier version than that which served as a
model for Chretien de Troyes. It is also to be remarked that, even
in Parceval, the mystical idea is not as yet completely developed,
that the trouvere seems to treat this strange theme as a narrative
which he has found already complete, and the meaning of which he can
scarcely guess. The motive that sets Parceval a-field in the French
romance, as well as in the Welsh version, is a family motive; he
seeks the Holy Grail as a talisman to cure his uncle the Fisherman-
King, in such a way that the religious idea is still subordinated to
the profane intention. In the German version, on the other hand,
full as it is of mysticism and theology, the Grail has a temple and
priests. Parsifal, who has become a purely ecclesiastical hero,
reaches the dignity of King of the Grail by his religious enthusiasm
and his chastity. [Footnote: It is indeed remarkable that all the
Breton heroes in their last transformation are at once gallant and
devout. One of the most celebrated ladies of Arthur's court, Luned,
becomes a saint and a martyr for her chastity, her festival being
celebrated on August 1st. She it is who figures in the French
romances under the name of Lunette. See Lady Guest, vol. i. , pp.
113, 114. ] Finally, the prose versions, more modern still, sharply
distinguish the two chivalries, the one earthly, the other mystical.
In them Parceval becomes the model of the devout knight. This was
the last of the metamorphoses which that all-powerful enchantress
called the human imagination made him undergo; and it was only right
that, after having gone through so many dangers, he should don a
monkish frock, wherein to take his rest after his life of adventure.
V.
When we seek to determine the precise moment in the history of the
Celtic races at which we ought to place ourselves in order to
appreciate their genius in its entirety, we find ourselves led back
to the sixth century of our era. Races have nearly always a
predestined hour at which, passing from simplicity to reflection,
they bring forth to the light of day, for the first time, all the
treasures of their nature. For the Celtic races the poetic moment of
awakening and primal activity was the sixth century. Christianity,
still young amongst them, has not completely stifled the national
cult; the religion of the Druids defends itself in its schools and
holy places; warfare against the foreigner, without which a people
never achieves a full consciousness of itself, attains its highest
degree of spirit. It is the epoch of all the heroes of enduring
fame, of all the characteristic saints of the Breton Church;
finally, it is the great age of bardic literature, illustrious by
the names of Taliessin, of Aneurin, of Liwarc'h Hen.
To such as would view critically the historical use of these half-
fabulous names and would hesitate to accept as authentic, poems that
have come down to us through so long a series of ages, we reply that
the objections raised to the antiquity of the bardic literature--
objections of which W. Schlegel made himself the interpreter in
opposition to M.
