Far from changing them, and taking
away some of their qualities, Christianity finished and perfected
them.
away some of their qualities, Christianity finished and perfected
them.
Literary and Philosophical Essays- French, German and Italian by Immanuel Kant
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. Fauriel--have completely disappeared under the
investigations of an enlightened and impartial criticism. [Footnote:
This evidently does not apply to the language of the poems in
question. It is well known that mediaeval scribes, alien as they
were to all ideas of archaeology, modernised the texts, in measure
as they copied them; and that a manuscript in the vulgar tongue, as
a rule, only attests the language of him who transcribed it. ] By a
rare exception sceptical opinion has for once been found in the
wrong. The sixth century is in fact for the Breton peoples a
perfectly historical century. We touch this epoch of their history
as closely and with as much certainty as Greek or Roman antiquity.
It is indeed known that, up to a somewhat late period, the bards
continued to compose pieces under the names--which had become
popular--of Aneurin, Taliessin, and Liwarc'h Hen; but no confusion
can be made between these insipid rhetorical exercises and the
really ancient fragments which bear the names of the poets cited--
fragments full of personal traits, local circumstances, and
individual passions and feelings.
Such is the literature of which M. de la Villemarque has attempted
to unite the most ancient and authentic monuments in his "Breton
Bards of the Sixth Century. " Wales has recognised the service that
our learned compatriot has thus rendered to Celtic studies. We
confess, however, to much preferring to the "Bards" the "Popular
Songs of Brittany. " It is in the latter that M. de la Villemarque
has best served Celtic studies, by revealing to us a delightful
literature, in which, more clearly than anywhere else, are apparent
these features of gentleness, fidelity, resignation, and timid
reserve which form the character of the Breton peoples. [Footnote:
This interesting collection ought not, however, to be accepted
unreservedly; and the absolute confidence with which it has been
quoted is not without its inconveniences. We believe that when M. de
la Villemarque comments on the fragments which, to his eternal
honour, he has been the first to bring to light, his criticism is
far from being proof against all reproach, and that several of the
historical allusions which he considers that he finds in them are
hypotheses more ingenious than solid. The past is too great, and has
come down to us in too fragmentary a manner, for such coincidences
to be probable. Popular celebrities are rarely those of history, and
when the rumours of distant centuries come to us by two channels,
one popular, the other historical, it is a rare thing for these two
forms of tradition to be fully in accord with one another. M. de la
Villemarque is also too ready to suppose that the people repeats for
centuries songs that it only half understands. When a song ceases to
be intelligible, it is nearly always altered by the people, with the
end of approximating it to the sounds farmliar and significant to
their ears. Is it not also to be feared that in this case the
editor, in entire good faith, may lend some slight inflection to the
text, so as to find in it the sense that he desires, or has in his
mind? ]
The theme of the poetry of the bards of the sixth century is simple
and exclusively heroic; it ever deals with the great motives of
patriotism and glory. There is a total absence of all tender
feeling, no trace of love, no well-marked religious idea, but only a
vague and naturalistic mysticism,--a survival of Druidic teaching,--
and a moral philosophy wholly expressed in Triads, similar to that
taught in the half-bardic, half-Christian schools of St. Cadoc and
St. Iltud. The singularly artificial and highly wrought form of the
style suggests the existence of a system of learned instruction
possessing long traditions. A more pronounced shade, and there would
be a danger of falling into a pedantic and mannered rhetoric. The
bardic literature, by its lengthened existence through the whole of
the Middle Ages, did not escape this danger. It ended by being no
more than a somewhat insipid collection of unoriginalities in style,
and conventional metaphors. [Footnote: A Welsh scholar, Mr.
Stephens, in his History of Cymric Literature (Llandovery, 1849),
has demonstrated these successive transformations very well. ]
The opposition between bardism and Christianity reveals itself in
the pieces translated by M. de la Villemarque by many features of
original and pathetic interest. The strife which rent the soul of
the old poets, their antipathy to the grey men of the monastery,
their sad and painful conversion, are to be found in their songs.
The sweetness and tenacity of the Breton character can alone explain
how a heterodoxy so openly avowed as this maintained its position in
face of the dominant Christianity, and how holy men, Kolumkill for
example, took upon themselves the defence of the bards against the
kings who desired to stamp them out. The strife was the longer in
its duration, in that Christianity among the Celtic peoples never
employed force against rival religions, and, at the worst, left to
the vanquished the liberty of ill humour. Belief in prophets,
indestructible among these peoples, created, in despite of faith the
Anti-Christian type of Merlin, and caused his acceptance by the
whole of Europe. Gildas and the orthodox Bretons were ceaseless in
their thunderings against the prophets, and opposed to them Elias
and Samuel, two bards who only foretold good; even in the twelfth
century Giraldus Cambrensis saw a prophet in the town of Caerleon.
Thanks to this toleration bardism lasted into the heart of the
Middle Ages, under the form of a secret doctrine, with a
conventional language, and symbols almost wholly borrowed from the
solar divinity of Arthur. This may be termed Neo-Druidism, a kind of
Druidism subtilised and reformed on the model of Christianity, which
may be seen growing more and more obscure and mysterious, until the
moment of its total disappearance. A curious fragment belonging to
this school, the dialogue between Arthur and Eliwlod, has
transmitted to us the latest sighs of this latest protestation of
expiring naturalism. Under the form of an eagle Eliwlod introduces
the divinity to the sentiment of resignation, of subjection, and of
humility, with which Christianity combated pagan pride. Hero-worship
recoils step by step before the great formula, which Christianity
ceases not to repeat to the Celtic races to sever them from their
memories: There is none greater than God. Arthur allows himself to
be persuaded to abdicate from his divinity, and ends by reciting the
Pater.
I know of no more curious spectacle than this revolt of the manly
sentiments of hero-worship against the feminine feeling which flowed
so largely into the new faith. What, in fact, exasperates the old
representatives of Celtic society are the exclusive triumph of the
pacific spirit and the men, clad in linen and chanting psalms, whose
voice is sad, who preach asceticism, and know the heroes no more.
[Footnote: The antipathy to Christianity attributed by the Armorican
people to the dwarfs and korigans belongs in like measure to
traditions of the opposition encountered by the Gospel in its
beginnings. The korigans in fact are, for the Breton peasant, great
princesses who would not accept Christianity when the apostles came
to Brittany. They hate the clergy and the churches, the bells of
which make them take to flight. The Virgin above all is their great
enemy; she it is who has hounded them forth from their fountains,
and on Saturday, the day consecrated to her, whosoever beholds them
combing their hair or counting their treasures is sure to perish.
(Villemarque, Chants populaires, Introduction. )] We know the use
that Ireland has made of this theme, in the dialogues which she
loves to imagine between the representatives of her profane and
religious life, Ossian and St. Patrick. [Footnote: See Miss Brooke's
Reliques of Irish Poetry, Dublin, 1789, pp. 37 et seq. , PP. 75 et
seq. ] Ossian regrets the adventures, the chase, the blast of the
horn, and the kings of old time. "If they were here," he says to St.
Patrick, "thou should'st not thus be scouring the country with the
psalm-singing flock. " Patrick seeks to calm him by soft words, and
sometimes carries his condescension so far as to listen to his long
histories, which appear to interest the saint but slightly. "Thou
hast heard my story," says the old bard in conclusion; "albeit my
memory groweth weak, and I am devoured with care, yet I desire to
continue still to sing the deeds of yore, and to live upon ancient
glories. Now am I stricken with years, my life is frozen within me,
and all my joys are fleeting away. No more can my hand grasp the
sword, nor mine arm hold the lance in rest. Among priests my last
sad hour lengtheneth out, and psalms take now the place of songs of
victory. " "Let thy songs rest," says Patrick, "and dare not to
compare thy Finn to the King of Kings, whose might knoweth no
bounds: bend thy knees before Him, and know Him for thy Lord. " It
was indeed necessary to surrender, and the legend relates how the
old bard ended his days in the cloister, among the priests whom he
had so often used rudely, in the midst of these chants that he knew
not. Ossian was too good an Irishman for any one to make up his mind
to damn him utterly. Merlin himself had to cede to the new spell. He
was, it is said, converted by St. Columba; and the popular voice in
the ballads repeats to him unceasingly this sweet and touching
appeal: "Merlin, Merlin, be converted; there is no divinity save
that of God. "
VI.
We should form an altogether inadequate idea of the physiognomy of
the Celtic races, were we not to study them under what is perhaps
the most singular aspect of their development--that is to say, their
ecclesiastical antiquities and their saints. Leaving on one side the
temporary repulsion which Christian mildness had to conquer in the
classes of society which saw their influence diminished by the new
order of things, it can be truly said, that the gentleness of
manners and the exquisite sensibility of the Celtic races, in
conjunction with the absence of a formerly existing religion of
strong organisation, predestined them to Christianity. Christianity
in fact, addressing itself by preference to the more humble feelings
in human nature, met here with admirably prepared disciples; no race
has so delicately understood the charm of littleness, none has
placed the simple creature, the innocent, nearer God. The ease with
which the new religion took possession of these peoples is also
remarkable. Brittany and Ireland between them scarce count two or
three martyrs; they are reduced to venerating as such those of their
compatriots who were slain in the Anglo-Saxon and Danish invasions.
Here comes to light the profound difference dividing the Celtic from
the Teutonic race. The Teutons only received Christianity tardily
and in spite of themselves, by scheming or by force, after a
sanguinary resistance, and with terrible throes, Christianity was in
fact on several sides repugnant to their nature; and one understands
the regrets of pure Teutonists who, to this day, reproach the new
faith with having corrupted their sturdy ancestors.
Such was not the case with the Celtic peoples; that gentle little
race was naturally Christian.
Far from changing them, and taking
away some of their qualities, Christianity finished and perfected
them. Compare the legends relating to the introduction of
Christianity into the two countries, the Kristni Saga for instance,
and the delightful legends of Lucius and St. Patrick. What a
difference we find! In Iceland the first apostles are pirates,
converted by some chance, now saying mass, now massacring their
enemies, now resuming their former profession of sea-rovers;
everything is done in accord with expediency, and without any
serious faith.
In Ireland and Brittany grace operates through women, by I know not
what charm of purity and sweetness. The revolt of the Teutons was
never effectually stifled; never did they forget the forced
baptisms, and the sword-supported Carlovingian missionaries, until
the day when Teutonism took its revenge, and Luther through seven
centuries gave answer to Witikind. On the other hand, the Celts
were, even in the third century, perfect Christians. To the Teutons
Christianity was for long nothing but a Roman institution, imposed
from without. They entered the Church only to trouble it; and it was
not without very great difficulty that they succeeded in forming a
national clergy. To the Celts, on the contrary, Christianity did not
come from Rome; they had their native clergy, their own peculiar
usages, their faith at first hand. It cannot, in fact, be doubted
that in apostolic times Christianity was preached in Brittany; and
several historians, not without justification, have considered that
it was borne there by Judaistic Christians, or by disciples of the
school of St. John. Everywhere else Christianity found, as a first
substratum, Greek or Roman civilisation. Here it found a virgin soil
of a nature analogous to its own, and naturally prepared to receive
it.
Few forms of Christianity have offered an ideal of Christian
perfection so pure as the Celtic Church of the sixth, seventh, and
eighth centuries. Nowhere, perhaps, has God been better worshipped
in spirit than in those great monastic communities of Hy, or of
Iona, of Bangor, of Clonard, or of Lindisfarne. One of the most
distinguished developments of Christianity--doubtless too
distinguished for the popular and practical mission which the Church
had to undertake--Pelagianism, arose from it. The true and refined
morality, the simplicity, and the wealth of invention which give
distinction to the legends of the Breton and Irish saints are indeed
admirable. No race adopted Christianity with so much originality,
or, while subjecting itself to the common faith, kept its national
characteristics more persistently. In religion, as in all else, the
Bretons sought isolation, and did not willingly fraternise with the
rest of the world. Strong in their moral superiority, persuaded that
they possessed the veritable canon of faith and religion, having
received their Christianity from an apostolic and wholly primitive
preaching, they experienced no need of feeling themselves in
communion with Christian societies less noble than their own. Thence
arose that long struggle of the Breton churches against Roman
pretensions, which is so admirably narrated by M. Augustin Thierry,
[Footnote: In his History of the Conquest. The objections raised by
M. Varin and some other scholars to M. Thierry's narrative only
affect some secondary details, which were rectified in the edition
published after the illustrious historian's death. ] thence those
inflexible characters of Columba and the monks of Iona, defending
their usages and institutions against the whole Church, thence
finally the false position of the Celtic peoples in Catholicism,
when that mighty force, grown more and more aggressive, had drawn
them together from all quarters, and compelled their absorption in
itself. Having no Catholic past, they found themselves unclassed on
their entrance into the great family, and were never able to succeed
in creating for themselves an Archbishopric. All their efforts and
all their innocent deceits to attribute that title to the Churches
of Dol and St. Davids were wrecked on the overwhelming divergence of
their past; their bishops had to resign themselves to being obscure
suffragans of Tours and Canterbury.
It remains to be said that, even in our own days, the powerful
originality of Celtic Christianity is far from being effaced. The
Bretons of France, although they have felt the consequences of the
revolutions undergone by Catholicism on the Continent, are, at the
present hour, one of the populations in which religious feeling has
retained most independence. The new devotions find no favour with
it; the people are faithful to the old beliefs and the old saints;
the psalms of religion have for them an ineffable harmony. In the
same way, Ireland keeps, in her more remote districts, quite unique
forms of worship from those of the rest of the world, to which
nothing in other parts of Christendom can be compared. The influence
of modern Catholicism, elsewhere so destructive of national usages,
has had here a wholly contrary effect, the clergy having found it
incumbent on them to seek a vantage ground against Protestantism, in
attachment to local practices and the customs of the past.
It is the picture of these Christian institutions, quite distinct
from those of the remainder of the West, of this sometimes strange
worship, of these legends of the saints marked with so distinct a
seal of nationality, that lends an interest to the ecclesiastical
antiquities of Ireland, of Wales, and of Armorican Brittany. No
hagiology has remained more exclusively natural than that of the
Celtic peoples; until the twelfth century those peoples admitted
very few alien saints into their martyrology. None, too, includes so
many naturalistic elements. Celtic Paganism offered so little
resistance to the new religion, that the Church did not hold itself
constrained to put in force against it the rigour with which
elsewhere it pursued the slightest traces of mythology. The
conscientious essay by W. Rees on the "Saints of Wales", and that by
the Rev. John Williams, an extremely learned ecclesiastic of the
diocese of St. Asaph, on the "Ecclesiastical Antiquities of the
Cymry", suffice to make one understand the immense value which a
complete and intelligent history of the Celtic Churches, before
their absorption in the Roman Church, would possess. To these might
be added the learned work of Dom Lobineau on the Saints of Brittany,
re-issued in our days by the Abbe Tresvaux, had not the half-
criticism of the Benedictine, much worse than a total absence of
criticism, altered those naive legends and cut away from them, under
the pretext of good sense and religious reverence, that which to us
gives them interest and charm.
Ireland above all would offer a religious physiognomy quite peculiar
to itself, which would appear singularly original, were history in a
position to reveal it in its entirety. When we consider the legions
of Irish saints who in the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries
inundated the Continent and arrived from their isle bearing with
them their stubborn spirit, their attachment to their own usages,
their subtle and realistic turn of mind, and see the Scots (such was
the name given to the Irish) doing duty, until the twelfth century,
as instructors in grammar and literature to all the West, we cannot
doubt that Ireland, in the first half of the Middle Ages, was the
scene of a singular religious movement. Studious philologists and
daring philosophers, the Hibernian monks were above all
indefatigable copyists; and it was in part owing to them that the
work of the pen became a holy task. Columba, secretly warned that
his last hour is at hand, finishes the page of the psalter which he
has commenced, writes at the foot that he bequeaths the continuation
to his successor, and then goes into the church to die. Nowhere was
monastic life to find such docile subjects. Credulous as a child,
timid, indolent, inclined to submit and obey, the Irishman alone was
capable of lending himself to that complete self-abdication in the
hands of the abbot, which we find so deeply marked in the historical
and legendary memorials of the Irish Church. One easily recognises
the land where, in our own days, the priest, without provoking the
slightest scandal, can, on a Sunday before quitting the altar, give
the orders for his dinner in a very audible manner, and announce the
farm where he intends to go and dine, and where he will hear his
flock in confession. In the presence of a people which lived by
imagination and the senses alone, the Church did not consider itself
under the necessity of dealing severely with the caprices of
religious fantasy. It permitted the free action of the popular
instinct; and from this freedom emerged what is perhaps of all cults
the most mythological and most analogous to the mysteries of
antiquity, presented in Christian annals, a cult attached to certain
places, and almost exclusively consisting in certain acts held to be
sacramental.
Without contradiction the legend of St. Brandan is the most singular
product of this combination of Celtic naturalism with Christian
spiritualism. The taste of the Hibernian monks for making maritime
pilgrimages through the archipelago of the Scottish and Irish seas,
everywhere dotted with monasteries, [Footnote: The Irish saints
literally covered the Western seas. A very considerable number of
the saints of Brittany, St. Tenenan, St. Renan, etc. , were emigrants
from Ireland. The Breton legends of St. Malo, St. David, and of St.
Pol of Leon are replete with similar stories of voyages to the
distant isles of the West. ] and the memory of yet more distant
voyages in Polar seas, furnished the framework of this curious
composition, so rich in local impressions. From Pliny (IV. xxx. 3)
we learn that, even in his time, the Bretons loved to venture their
lives upon the high seas, in search of unknown isles. M. Letronne
has proved that in 795, sixty-five years consequently before the
Danes, Irish monks landed in Iceland and established themselves on
the coast. In this island the Danes found Irish books and bells; and
the names of certain localities still bear witness to the sojourn of
those monks, who were known by the name of Papae (fathers). In the
Faroe Isles, in the Orkneys, and the Shetlands, indeed in all parts
of the Northern seas, the Scandinavians found themselves preceded by
those Papas, whose habits contrasted so strangely with their own.
[Footnote: On this point see the careful researches of Humboldt in
his History of the Geography of the New Continent, vol. ii. ] Did
they not have a glimpse too of that great land, the vague memory of
which seems to pursue them, and which Columbus was to discover,
following the traces of their dreams? It is only known that the
existence of an island, traversed by a great river and situated to
the west of Ireland, was, on the faith of the Irish, a dogma for
mediaeval geographers.
The story went that, towards the middle of the sixth century, a monk
called Barontus, on his return from voyaging upon the sea, came and
craved hospitality at the monastery of Clonfert. Brandan the abbot
besought him to give pleasure to the brothers by narrating the
marvels of God that he had seen on the high seas. Barontus revealed
to them the existence of an island surrounded by fogs, where he had
left his disciple Mernoc; it is the Land of Promise that God keeps
for his saints. Brandan with seventeen of his monks desired to go in
quest of this mysterious land. They set forth in a leather boat,
bearing with them as their sole provision a utensil of butter,
wherewith to grease the hides of their craft. For seven years they
lived thus in their boat, abandoning to God sail and rudder, and
only stopping on their course to celebrate the feasts of Christmas
and Easter on the back of the king of fishes, Jasconius. Every step
of this monastic Odyssey is a miracle, on every isle is a monastery,
where the wonders of a fantastical universe respond to the
extravagances of a wholly ideal life. Here is the Isle of Sheep,
where these animals govern themselves according to their own laws;
elsewhere the Paradise of Birds, where the winged race lives after
the fashion of monks, singing matins and lauds at the canonical
hours. Brandan and his companions celebrate mass here with the
birds, and remain with them for fifty days, nourishing themselves
with nothing but the singing of their hosts. Elsewhere there is the
Isle of Delight, the ideal of monastic life in the midst of the
seas. Here no material necessity makes itself felt; the lamps light
of themselves for the offices of religion, and never burn out, for
they shine with a spiritual light. An absolute stillness reigns in
the island; every one knows precisely the hour of his death; one
feels neither cold, nor heat, nor sadness, nor sickness of body or
soul. All this has endured since the days of St. Patrick, who so
ordained it. The Land of Promise is more marvellous still; there an
eternal day reigns; all the plants have flowers, all the trees bear
fruits. Some privileged men alone have visited it. On their return a
perfume is perceived to come from them, which their garments keep
for forty days.
In the midst of these dreams there appears with a surprising
fidelity to truth the feeling for the picturesque in Polar voyages,-
-the transparency of the sea, the aspect of bergs and islands of ice
melting in the sun, the volcanic phenomena of Iceland, the sporting
of whales, the characteristic appearance of the Norwegian fiords,
the sudden fogs, the sea calm as milk, the green isles crowned with
grass which grows down to the very verge of the waves. This
fantastical nature created expressly for another humanity, this
strange topography at once glowing with fiction and speaking of
truth, make the poem of St. Brandan one of the most extraordinary
creations of the human mind, and perhaps the completest expression
of the Celtic ideal. All is lovely, pure, and innocent; never has a
gaze so benevolent and so gentle been cast upon the earth; there is
not a single cruel idea, not a trace of frailty or repentance. It is
the world seen through the crystal of a stainless conscience, one
might almost say a human nature, as Pelagius wished it, that has
never sinned. The very animals participate in this universal
mildness. Evil appears under the form of monsters wandering on the
deep, or of Cyclops confined in volcanic islands; but God causes
them to destroy one another, and does not permit them to do hurt to
the good.
We have just seen how, around the legend of a monk the Irish
imagination grouped a whole cycle of physical and maritime myths.
The Purgatory of St. Patrick became the framework of another series
of fables, embodying the Celtic ideas concerning the other life and
its different conditions. [Footnote: See Thomas Wright's excellent
dissertation, Saint Patrick's Purgatory (London, 1844), and
Calderon's The Well of Saint Patrick. ] Perhaps the profoundest
instinct of the Celtic peoples is their desire to penetrate the
unknown. With the sea before them, they wish to know what lies
beyond; they dream of a Promised Land. In the face of the unknown
that lies beyond the tomb, they dream of that great journey which
the pen of Dante has celebrated. The legend tells how, while St.
Patrick was preaching about Paradise and Hell to the Irish, they
confessed that they would feel more assured of the reality of these
places, if he would allow one of them to descend there, and then
come back with information St. Patrick consented. A pit was dug, by
which an Irishman set out upon the subterranean journey. Others
wished to attempt the journey after him. With the consent of the
abbot of the neighbouring monastery, they descended into the shaft,
they passed through the torments of Hell and Purgatory, and then
each told of what he had seen. Some did not emerge again; those who
did laughed no more, and were henceforth unable to join in any
gaiety. Knight Owen made a descent in 1153, and gave a narrative of
his travels which had a prodigious success.
Other legends related that when St. Patrick drove the goblins out of
Ireland, he was greatly tormented in this place for forty days by
legions of black birds. The Irish betook themselves to the spot, and
experienced the same assaults which gave them an immunity from
Purgatory. According to the narrative of Giraldus Cambrensis, the
isle which served as the theatre of this strange superstition was
divided into two parts. One belonged to the monks, the other was
occupied by evil spirits, who celebrated religious rites in their
own manner, with an infernal uproar. Some people, for the expiation
of their sins, voluntarily exposed themselves to the fury of those
demons. There were nine ditches in which they lay for a night,
tormented in a thousand different ways. To make the descent it was
necessary to obtain the permission of the bishop. His duty it was to
dissuade the penitent from attempting the adventure, and to point
out to him how many people had gone in who had never come out again.
If the devotee persisted, he was ceremoniously conducted to the
shaft. He was lowered down by means of a rope, with a loaf and a
vessel of water to strengthen him in the combat against the fiend
which he proposed to wage. On the following morning the sacristan
offered the rope anew to the sufferer. If he mounted to the surface
again, they brought him back to the church, bearing the cross and
chanting psalms. If he were not to be found, the sacristan closed
the door and departed. In more modern times pilgrims to the sacred
isles spent nine days there. They passed over to them in a boat
hollowed out of the trunk of a tree. Once a day they drank of the
water of the lake; processions and stations were performed in the
beds or cells of the saints. Upon the ninth day the penitents
entered into the shaft. Sermons were preached to them warning them
of the danger they were about to run, and they were told of terrible
examples. They forgave their enemies and took farewell of one
another, as though they were at their last agony. According to
contemporary accounts, the shaft was a low and narrow kiln, into
which nine entered at a time, and in which the penitents passed a
day and a night, huddled and tightly pressed against one another.
Popular belief imagined an abyss underneath, to swallow up the
unworthy and the unbelieving. On emerging from the pit they went and
bathed in the lake, and so their Purgatory was accomplished. It
would appear from the accounts of eye-witnesses that, to this day,
things happen very nearly after the same fashion.
The immense reputation of the Purgatory of St. Patrick filled the
whole of the Middle Ages. Preachers made appeal to the public
notoriety of this great fact, to controvert those who had their
doubts regarding Purgatory. In the year 1358 Edward III. gave to a
Hungarian of noble birth, who had come from Hungary expressly to
visit the sacred well, letters patent attesting that he had
undergone his Purgatory. Narratives of those travels beyond the tomb
became a very fashionable form of literature; and it is important
for us to remark the wholly mythological, and as wholly Celtic,
characteristics dominant in them. It is in fact evident that we are
dealing with a mystery or local cult, anterior to Christianity, and
probably based upon the physical appearance of the country. The idea
of Purgatory, in its final and concrete form, fared specially well
amongst the Bretons and the Irish. Bede is one of the first to speak
of it in a descriptive manner, and the learned Mr. Wright very
justly observes that nearly all the descriptions of Purgatory come
from Irishmen, or from Anglo-Saxons who have resided in Ireland,
such as St. Fursey, Tundale, the Northumbrian Dryhthelm, and Knight
Owen. It is likewise a remarkable thing that only the Irish were
able to behold the marvels of their Purgatory. A canon from Hemstede
in Holland, who descended in 1494, saw nothing at all. Evidently
this idea of travels in the other world and its infernal categories,
as the Middle Ages accepted it, is Celtic. The belief in the three
circles of existence is again to be found in the Triads, [Footnote:
A series of aphorisms under the form of triplets, which give us,
with numerous interpolations, the ancient teaching of the bards, and
that traditional wisdom which, according to the testimony of the
ancients, was transmitted by means of mnemonic verses in the schools
of the Druids. under an aspect which does not permit one to see any
Christian interpolation. ]
The soul's peregrinations after death are also the favourite theme
of the most ancient Armorican poetry. Among the features by which
the Celtic races most impressed the Romans were the precision of
their ideas upon the future life, their inclination to suicide, and
the loans and contracts which they signed with the other world in
view. The more frivolous peoples of the South saw with awe in this
assurance the fact of a mysterious race, having an understanding of
the future and the secret of death. Through the whole of classical
antiquity runs the tradition of an Isle of Shadows, situated on the
confines of Brittany, and of a folk devoted to the passage of souls,
which lives upon the neighbouring coast. In the night they hear dead
men prowling about their cabin, and knocking at the door. Then they
rise up; their craft is laden with invisible beings; on their return
it is lighter. Several of these features reproduced by Plutarch,
Claudian, Procopius, [Footnote: A Byzantine historian of the fifth
and sixth centuries. ] and Tzetzes [Footnote: A Greek poet and
grammarian of the twelfth century. ] would incline one to believe
that the renown of the Irish myths made its way into classical
antiquity about the first or second century. Plutarch, for example,
relates, concerning the Cronian Sea, fables identical with those
which fill the legend of St. Malo. Procopius, describing the sacred
Island of Brittia, which consists of two parts separated by the sea,
one delightful, the other given over to evil spirits, seems to have
read in advance the description of the Purgatory of St. Patrick,
which Giraldus Cambrensis was to give seven centuries later. It
cannot be doubted for a moment, after the able researches of Messrs.
Ozanam, Labitte, and Wright, that to the number of poetical themes
which Europe owes to the genius of the Celts, is to be added the
framework of the Divine Comedy.
One can understand how greatly this invincible attraction to fables
must have discredited the Celtic race in the eyes of nationalities
that believed themselves to be more serious. It is in truth a
strange thing, that the whole of the mediaeval epoch, whilst
submitting to the influence of the Celtic imagination, and borrowing
from Brittany and Ireland at least half of its poetical subjects,
believed itself obliged, for the saving of its own honour, to slight
and satirise the people to which it owed them. Even Chretien de
Troyes, for example, who passed his life in exploiting the Breton
romances for his own purposes, originated the saying--
"Les Gallois sont tous par nature
Plus sots que betes de pature. "
Some English chronicler, I know not who, imagined he was making a
charming play upon words when he described those beautiful
creations, the whole world of which deserved to live, as "the
childish nonsense with which those brutes of Bretons amuse
themselves. " The Bollandists [Footnote: A group of Jesuits who
issued a collection of "Lives of the Saints". The first five volumes
were edited by John Bolland. ] found it incumbent to exclude from
their collection, as apocryphal extravagances, those admirable
religious legends, with which no Church has anything to compare. The
decided leaning of the Celtic race towards the ideal, its sadness,
its fidelity, its good faith, caused it to be regarded by its
neighbours as dull, foolish, and superstitious. They could not
understand its delicacy and refined manner of feeling. They mistook
for awkwardness the embarrassment experienced by sincere and open
natures in the presence of more artificial natures. The contrast
between French frivolity and Breton stubbornness above all led,
after the fourteenth century, to most deplorable conflicts, whence
the Bretons ever emerged with a reputation for wrong-headedness.
It was still worse, when the nation that most prides itself on its
practical good sense found confronting it the people that, to its
own misfortune, is least provided with that gift. Poor Ireland, with
her ancient mythology, with her Purgatory of St. Patrick, and her
fantastic travels of St. Brandan, was not destined to find grace in
the eyes of English puritanism. One ought to observe the disdain of
English critics for these fables, and their superb pity for the
Church which dallies with Paganism, so far as to keep up usages
which are notoriously derived from it. Assuredly we have here a
praiseworthy zeal, arising from natural goodness; and yet, even if
these flights of imagination did no more than render a little more
supportable many sufferings which are said to have no remedy, that
after all would be something. Who shall dare to say where, here on
earth, is the boundary between reason and dreaming? Which is worth
more, the imaginative instinct of man, or the narrow orthodoxy that
pretends to remain rational, when speaking of things divine? For my
own part, I prefer the frank mythology, with all its vagaries, to a
theology so paltry, so vulgar, and so colourless, that it would be
wronging God to believe that, after having made the visible world so
beautiful he should have made the invisible world so prosaically
reasonable.
In presence of the ever-encroaching progress of a civilisation which
is of no country, and can receive no name, other than that of modern
or European, it would be puerile to hope that the Celtic race is in
the future to succeed in obtaining isolated expression of its
originality. And yet we are far from believing that this race has
said its last word. After having put in practice all chivalries,
devout and worldly, gone with Peredur in quest of the Holy Grail and
fair ladies, and dreamed with St. Brandan of mystical Atlantides,
who knows what it would produce in the domain of intellect, if it
hardened itself to an entrance into the world, and subjected its
rich and profound nature to the conditions of modern thought? It
appears to me that there would result from this combination,
productions of high originality, a subtle and discreet manner of
taking life, a singular union of strength and weakness, of rude
simplicity and mildness. Few races have had so complete a poetic
childhood as the Celtic; mythology, lyric poetry, epic, romantic
imagination, religious enthusiasm--none of these failed them; why
should reflection fail them? Germany, which commenced with science
and criticism, has come to poetry; why should not the Celtic races,
which began with poetry, finish with criticism? There is not so
great a distance from one to the other as is supposed; the poetical
races are the philosophic races, and at bottom philosophy is only a
manner of poetry. When one considers how Germany, less than a
century ago, had her genius revealed to her, how a multitude of
national individualities, to all appearance effaced, have suddenly
risen again in our own days, more instinct with life than ever, one
feels persuaded that it is a rash thing to lay down any law on the
intermittence and awakening of nations; and that modern
civilisation, which appeared to be made to absorb them, may perhaps
be nothing more than their united fruition.
THE EDUCATION OF THE HUMAN RACE
BY
GOTTHOLD EPHRAIM LESSINO
TRANSLATED BY
F.
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. Fauriel--have completely disappeared under the
investigations of an enlightened and impartial criticism. [Footnote:
This evidently does not apply to the language of the poems in
question. It is well known that mediaeval scribes, alien as they
were to all ideas of archaeology, modernised the texts, in measure
as they copied them; and that a manuscript in the vulgar tongue, as
a rule, only attests the language of him who transcribed it. ] By a
rare exception sceptical opinion has for once been found in the
wrong. The sixth century is in fact for the Breton peoples a
perfectly historical century. We touch this epoch of their history
as closely and with as much certainty as Greek or Roman antiquity.
It is indeed known that, up to a somewhat late period, the bards
continued to compose pieces under the names--which had become
popular--of Aneurin, Taliessin, and Liwarc'h Hen; but no confusion
can be made between these insipid rhetorical exercises and the
really ancient fragments which bear the names of the poets cited--
fragments full of personal traits, local circumstances, and
individual passions and feelings.
Such is the literature of which M. de la Villemarque has attempted
to unite the most ancient and authentic monuments in his "Breton
Bards of the Sixth Century. " Wales has recognised the service that
our learned compatriot has thus rendered to Celtic studies. We
confess, however, to much preferring to the "Bards" the "Popular
Songs of Brittany. " It is in the latter that M. de la Villemarque
has best served Celtic studies, by revealing to us a delightful
literature, in which, more clearly than anywhere else, are apparent
these features of gentleness, fidelity, resignation, and timid
reserve which form the character of the Breton peoples. [Footnote:
This interesting collection ought not, however, to be accepted
unreservedly; and the absolute confidence with which it has been
quoted is not without its inconveniences. We believe that when M. de
la Villemarque comments on the fragments which, to his eternal
honour, he has been the first to bring to light, his criticism is
far from being proof against all reproach, and that several of the
historical allusions which he considers that he finds in them are
hypotheses more ingenious than solid. The past is too great, and has
come down to us in too fragmentary a manner, for such coincidences
to be probable. Popular celebrities are rarely those of history, and
when the rumours of distant centuries come to us by two channels,
one popular, the other historical, it is a rare thing for these two
forms of tradition to be fully in accord with one another. M. de la
Villemarque is also too ready to suppose that the people repeats for
centuries songs that it only half understands. When a song ceases to
be intelligible, it is nearly always altered by the people, with the
end of approximating it to the sounds farmliar and significant to
their ears. Is it not also to be feared that in this case the
editor, in entire good faith, may lend some slight inflection to the
text, so as to find in it the sense that he desires, or has in his
mind? ]
The theme of the poetry of the bards of the sixth century is simple
and exclusively heroic; it ever deals with the great motives of
patriotism and glory. There is a total absence of all tender
feeling, no trace of love, no well-marked religious idea, but only a
vague and naturalistic mysticism,--a survival of Druidic teaching,--
and a moral philosophy wholly expressed in Triads, similar to that
taught in the half-bardic, half-Christian schools of St. Cadoc and
St. Iltud. The singularly artificial and highly wrought form of the
style suggests the existence of a system of learned instruction
possessing long traditions. A more pronounced shade, and there would
be a danger of falling into a pedantic and mannered rhetoric. The
bardic literature, by its lengthened existence through the whole of
the Middle Ages, did not escape this danger. It ended by being no
more than a somewhat insipid collection of unoriginalities in style,
and conventional metaphors. [Footnote: A Welsh scholar, Mr.
Stephens, in his History of Cymric Literature (Llandovery, 1849),
has demonstrated these successive transformations very well. ]
The opposition between bardism and Christianity reveals itself in
the pieces translated by M. de la Villemarque by many features of
original and pathetic interest. The strife which rent the soul of
the old poets, their antipathy to the grey men of the monastery,
their sad and painful conversion, are to be found in their songs.
The sweetness and tenacity of the Breton character can alone explain
how a heterodoxy so openly avowed as this maintained its position in
face of the dominant Christianity, and how holy men, Kolumkill for
example, took upon themselves the defence of the bards against the
kings who desired to stamp them out. The strife was the longer in
its duration, in that Christianity among the Celtic peoples never
employed force against rival religions, and, at the worst, left to
the vanquished the liberty of ill humour. Belief in prophets,
indestructible among these peoples, created, in despite of faith the
Anti-Christian type of Merlin, and caused his acceptance by the
whole of Europe. Gildas and the orthodox Bretons were ceaseless in
their thunderings against the prophets, and opposed to them Elias
and Samuel, two bards who only foretold good; even in the twelfth
century Giraldus Cambrensis saw a prophet in the town of Caerleon.
Thanks to this toleration bardism lasted into the heart of the
Middle Ages, under the form of a secret doctrine, with a
conventional language, and symbols almost wholly borrowed from the
solar divinity of Arthur. This may be termed Neo-Druidism, a kind of
Druidism subtilised and reformed on the model of Christianity, which
may be seen growing more and more obscure and mysterious, until the
moment of its total disappearance. A curious fragment belonging to
this school, the dialogue between Arthur and Eliwlod, has
transmitted to us the latest sighs of this latest protestation of
expiring naturalism. Under the form of an eagle Eliwlod introduces
the divinity to the sentiment of resignation, of subjection, and of
humility, with which Christianity combated pagan pride. Hero-worship
recoils step by step before the great formula, which Christianity
ceases not to repeat to the Celtic races to sever them from their
memories: There is none greater than God. Arthur allows himself to
be persuaded to abdicate from his divinity, and ends by reciting the
Pater.
I know of no more curious spectacle than this revolt of the manly
sentiments of hero-worship against the feminine feeling which flowed
so largely into the new faith. What, in fact, exasperates the old
representatives of Celtic society are the exclusive triumph of the
pacific spirit and the men, clad in linen and chanting psalms, whose
voice is sad, who preach asceticism, and know the heroes no more.
[Footnote: The antipathy to Christianity attributed by the Armorican
people to the dwarfs and korigans belongs in like measure to
traditions of the opposition encountered by the Gospel in its
beginnings. The korigans in fact are, for the Breton peasant, great
princesses who would not accept Christianity when the apostles came
to Brittany. They hate the clergy and the churches, the bells of
which make them take to flight. The Virgin above all is their great
enemy; she it is who has hounded them forth from their fountains,
and on Saturday, the day consecrated to her, whosoever beholds them
combing their hair or counting their treasures is sure to perish.
(Villemarque, Chants populaires, Introduction. )] We know the use
that Ireland has made of this theme, in the dialogues which she
loves to imagine between the representatives of her profane and
religious life, Ossian and St. Patrick. [Footnote: See Miss Brooke's
Reliques of Irish Poetry, Dublin, 1789, pp. 37 et seq. , PP. 75 et
seq. ] Ossian regrets the adventures, the chase, the blast of the
horn, and the kings of old time. "If they were here," he says to St.
Patrick, "thou should'st not thus be scouring the country with the
psalm-singing flock. " Patrick seeks to calm him by soft words, and
sometimes carries his condescension so far as to listen to his long
histories, which appear to interest the saint but slightly. "Thou
hast heard my story," says the old bard in conclusion; "albeit my
memory groweth weak, and I am devoured with care, yet I desire to
continue still to sing the deeds of yore, and to live upon ancient
glories. Now am I stricken with years, my life is frozen within me,
and all my joys are fleeting away. No more can my hand grasp the
sword, nor mine arm hold the lance in rest. Among priests my last
sad hour lengtheneth out, and psalms take now the place of songs of
victory. " "Let thy songs rest," says Patrick, "and dare not to
compare thy Finn to the King of Kings, whose might knoweth no
bounds: bend thy knees before Him, and know Him for thy Lord. " It
was indeed necessary to surrender, and the legend relates how the
old bard ended his days in the cloister, among the priests whom he
had so often used rudely, in the midst of these chants that he knew
not. Ossian was too good an Irishman for any one to make up his mind
to damn him utterly. Merlin himself had to cede to the new spell. He
was, it is said, converted by St. Columba; and the popular voice in
the ballads repeats to him unceasingly this sweet and touching
appeal: "Merlin, Merlin, be converted; there is no divinity save
that of God. "
VI.
We should form an altogether inadequate idea of the physiognomy of
the Celtic races, were we not to study them under what is perhaps
the most singular aspect of their development--that is to say, their
ecclesiastical antiquities and their saints. Leaving on one side the
temporary repulsion which Christian mildness had to conquer in the
classes of society which saw their influence diminished by the new
order of things, it can be truly said, that the gentleness of
manners and the exquisite sensibility of the Celtic races, in
conjunction with the absence of a formerly existing religion of
strong organisation, predestined them to Christianity. Christianity
in fact, addressing itself by preference to the more humble feelings
in human nature, met here with admirably prepared disciples; no race
has so delicately understood the charm of littleness, none has
placed the simple creature, the innocent, nearer God. The ease with
which the new religion took possession of these peoples is also
remarkable. Brittany and Ireland between them scarce count two or
three martyrs; they are reduced to venerating as such those of their
compatriots who were slain in the Anglo-Saxon and Danish invasions.
Here comes to light the profound difference dividing the Celtic from
the Teutonic race. The Teutons only received Christianity tardily
and in spite of themselves, by scheming or by force, after a
sanguinary resistance, and with terrible throes, Christianity was in
fact on several sides repugnant to their nature; and one understands
the regrets of pure Teutonists who, to this day, reproach the new
faith with having corrupted their sturdy ancestors.
Such was not the case with the Celtic peoples; that gentle little
race was naturally Christian.
Far from changing them, and taking
away some of their qualities, Christianity finished and perfected
them. Compare the legends relating to the introduction of
Christianity into the two countries, the Kristni Saga for instance,
and the delightful legends of Lucius and St. Patrick. What a
difference we find! In Iceland the first apostles are pirates,
converted by some chance, now saying mass, now massacring their
enemies, now resuming their former profession of sea-rovers;
everything is done in accord with expediency, and without any
serious faith.
In Ireland and Brittany grace operates through women, by I know not
what charm of purity and sweetness. The revolt of the Teutons was
never effectually stifled; never did they forget the forced
baptisms, and the sword-supported Carlovingian missionaries, until
the day when Teutonism took its revenge, and Luther through seven
centuries gave answer to Witikind. On the other hand, the Celts
were, even in the third century, perfect Christians. To the Teutons
Christianity was for long nothing but a Roman institution, imposed
from without. They entered the Church only to trouble it; and it was
not without very great difficulty that they succeeded in forming a
national clergy. To the Celts, on the contrary, Christianity did not
come from Rome; they had their native clergy, their own peculiar
usages, their faith at first hand. It cannot, in fact, be doubted
that in apostolic times Christianity was preached in Brittany; and
several historians, not without justification, have considered that
it was borne there by Judaistic Christians, or by disciples of the
school of St. John. Everywhere else Christianity found, as a first
substratum, Greek or Roman civilisation. Here it found a virgin soil
of a nature analogous to its own, and naturally prepared to receive
it.
Few forms of Christianity have offered an ideal of Christian
perfection so pure as the Celtic Church of the sixth, seventh, and
eighth centuries. Nowhere, perhaps, has God been better worshipped
in spirit than in those great monastic communities of Hy, or of
Iona, of Bangor, of Clonard, or of Lindisfarne. One of the most
distinguished developments of Christianity--doubtless too
distinguished for the popular and practical mission which the Church
had to undertake--Pelagianism, arose from it. The true and refined
morality, the simplicity, and the wealth of invention which give
distinction to the legends of the Breton and Irish saints are indeed
admirable. No race adopted Christianity with so much originality,
or, while subjecting itself to the common faith, kept its national
characteristics more persistently. In religion, as in all else, the
Bretons sought isolation, and did not willingly fraternise with the
rest of the world. Strong in their moral superiority, persuaded that
they possessed the veritable canon of faith and religion, having
received their Christianity from an apostolic and wholly primitive
preaching, they experienced no need of feeling themselves in
communion with Christian societies less noble than their own. Thence
arose that long struggle of the Breton churches against Roman
pretensions, which is so admirably narrated by M. Augustin Thierry,
[Footnote: In his History of the Conquest. The objections raised by
M. Varin and some other scholars to M. Thierry's narrative only
affect some secondary details, which were rectified in the edition
published after the illustrious historian's death. ] thence those
inflexible characters of Columba and the monks of Iona, defending
their usages and institutions against the whole Church, thence
finally the false position of the Celtic peoples in Catholicism,
when that mighty force, grown more and more aggressive, had drawn
them together from all quarters, and compelled their absorption in
itself. Having no Catholic past, they found themselves unclassed on
their entrance into the great family, and were never able to succeed
in creating for themselves an Archbishopric. All their efforts and
all their innocent deceits to attribute that title to the Churches
of Dol and St. Davids were wrecked on the overwhelming divergence of
their past; their bishops had to resign themselves to being obscure
suffragans of Tours and Canterbury.
It remains to be said that, even in our own days, the powerful
originality of Celtic Christianity is far from being effaced. The
Bretons of France, although they have felt the consequences of the
revolutions undergone by Catholicism on the Continent, are, at the
present hour, one of the populations in which religious feeling has
retained most independence. The new devotions find no favour with
it; the people are faithful to the old beliefs and the old saints;
the psalms of religion have for them an ineffable harmony. In the
same way, Ireland keeps, in her more remote districts, quite unique
forms of worship from those of the rest of the world, to which
nothing in other parts of Christendom can be compared. The influence
of modern Catholicism, elsewhere so destructive of national usages,
has had here a wholly contrary effect, the clergy having found it
incumbent on them to seek a vantage ground against Protestantism, in
attachment to local practices and the customs of the past.
It is the picture of these Christian institutions, quite distinct
from those of the remainder of the West, of this sometimes strange
worship, of these legends of the saints marked with so distinct a
seal of nationality, that lends an interest to the ecclesiastical
antiquities of Ireland, of Wales, and of Armorican Brittany. No
hagiology has remained more exclusively natural than that of the
Celtic peoples; until the twelfth century those peoples admitted
very few alien saints into their martyrology. None, too, includes so
many naturalistic elements. Celtic Paganism offered so little
resistance to the new religion, that the Church did not hold itself
constrained to put in force against it the rigour with which
elsewhere it pursued the slightest traces of mythology. The
conscientious essay by W. Rees on the "Saints of Wales", and that by
the Rev. John Williams, an extremely learned ecclesiastic of the
diocese of St. Asaph, on the "Ecclesiastical Antiquities of the
Cymry", suffice to make one understand the immense value which a
complete and intelligent history of the Celtic Churches, before
their absorption in the Roman Church, would possess. To these might
be added the learned work of Dom Lobineau on the Saints of Brittany,
re-issued in our days by the Abbe Tresvaux, had not the half-
criticism of the Benedictine, much worse than a total absence of
criticism, altered those naive legends and cut away from them, under
the pretext of good sense and religious reverence, that which to us
gives them interest and charm.
Ireland above all would offer a religious physiognomy quite peculiar
to itself, which would appear singularly original, were history in a
position to reveal it in its entirety. When we consider the legions
of Irish saints who in the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries
inundated the Continent and arrived from their isle bearing with
them their stubborn spirit, their attachment to their own usages,
their subtle and realistic turn of mind, and see the Scots (such was
the name given to the Irish) doing duty, until the twelfth century,
as instructors in grammar and literature to all the West, we cannot
doubt that Ireland, in the first half of the Middle Ages, was the
scene of a singular religious movement. Studious philologists and
daring philosophers, the Hibernian monks were above all
indefatigable copyists; and it was in part owing to them that the
work of the pen became a holy task. Columba, secretly warned that
his last hour is at hand, finishes the page of the psalter which he
has commenced, writes at the foot that he bequeaths the continuation
to his successor, and then goes into the church to die. Nowhere was
monastic life to find such docile subjects. Credulous as a child,
timid, indolent, inclined to submit and obey, the Irishman alone was
capable of lending himself to that complete self-abdication in the
hands of the abbot, which we find so deeply marked in the historical
and legendary memorials of the Irish Church. One easily recognises
the land where, in our own days, the priest, without provoking the
slightest scandal, can, on a Sunday before quitting the altar, give
the orders for his dinner in a very audible manner, and announce the
farm where he intends to go and dine, and where he will hear his
flock in confession. In the presence of a people which lived by
imagination and the senses alone, the Church did not consider itself
under the necessity of dealing severely with the caprices of
religious fantasy. It permitted the free action of the popular
instinct; and from this freedom emerged what is perhaps of all cults
the most mythological and most analogous to the mysteries of
antiquity, presented in Christian annals, a cult attached to certain
places, and almost exclusively consisting in certain acts held to be
sacramental.
Without contradiction the legend of St. Brandan is the most singular
product of this combination of Celtic naturalism with Christian
spiritualism. The taste of the Hibernian monks for making maritime
pilgrimages through the archipelago of the Scottish and Irish seas,
everywhere dotted with monasteries, [Footnote: The Irish saints
literally covered the Western seas. A very considerable number of
the saints of Brittany, St. Tenenan, St. Renan, etc. , were emigrants
from Ireland. The Breton legends of St. Malo, St. David, and of St.
Pol of Leon are replete with similar stories of voyages to the
distant isles of the West. ] and the memory of yet more distant
voyages in Polar seas, furnished the framework of this curious
composition, so rich in local impressions. From Pliny (IV. xxx. 3)
we learn that, even in his time, the Bretons loved to venture their
lives upon the high seas, in search of unknown isles. M. Letronne
has proved that in 795, sixty-five years consequently before the
Danes, Irish monks landed in Iceland and established themselves on
the coast. In this island the Danes found Irish books and bells; and
the names of certain localities still bear witness to the sojourn of
those monks, who were known by the name of Papae (fathers). In the
Faroe Isles, in the Orkneys, and the Shetlands, indeed in all parts
of the Northern seas, the Scandinavians found themselves preceded by
those Papas, whose habits contrasted so strangely with their own.
[Footnote: On this point see the careful researches of Humboldt in
his History of the Geography of the New Continent, vol. ii. ] Did
they not have a glimpse too of that great land, the vague memory of
which seems to pursue them, and which Columbus was to discover,
following the traces of their dreams? It is only known that the
existence of an island, traversed by a great river and situated to
the west of Ireland, was, on the faith of the Irish, a dogma for
mediaeval geographers.
The story went that, towards the middle of the sixth century, a monk
called Barontus, on his return from voyaging upon the sea, came and
craved hospitality at the monastery of Clonfert. Brandan the abbot
besought him to give pleasure to the brothers by narrating the
marvels of God that he had seen on the high seas. Barontus revealed
to them the existence of an island surrounded by fogs, where he had
left his disciple Mernoc; it is the Land of Promise that God keeps
for his saints. Brandan with seventeen of his monks desired to go in
quest of this mysterious land. They set forth in a leather boat,
bearing with them as their sole provision a utensil of butter,
wherewith to grease the hides of their craft. For seven years they
lived thus in their boat, abandoning to God sail and rudder, and
only stopping on their course to celebrate the feasts of Christmas
and Easter on the back of the king of fishes, Jasconius. Every step
of this monastic Odyssey is a miracle, on every isle is a monastery,
where the wonders of a fantastical universe respond to the
extravagances of a wholly ideal life. Here is the Isle of Sheep,
where these animals govern themselves according to their own laws;
elsewhere the Paradise of Birds, where the winged race lives after
the fashion of monks, singing matins and lauds at the canonical
hours. Brandan and his companions celebrate mass here with the
birds, and remain with them for fifty days, nourishing themselves
with nothing but the singing of their hosts. Elsewhere there is the
Isle of Delight, the ideal of monastic life in the midst of the
seas. Here no material necessity makes itself felt; the lamps light
of themselves for the offices of religion, and never burn out, for
they shine with a spiritual light. An absolute stillness reigns in
the island; every one knows precisely the hour of his death; one
feels neither cold, nor heat, nor sadness, nor sickness of body or
soul. All this has endured since the days of St. Patrick, who so
ordained it. The Land of Promise is more marvellous still; there an
eternal day reigns; all the plants have flowers, all the trees bear
fruits. Some privileged men alone have visited it. On their return a
perfume is perceived to come from them, which their garments keep
for forty days.
In the midst of these dreams there appears with a surprising
fidelity to truth the feeling for the picturesque in Polar voyages,-
-the transparency of the sea, the aspect of bergs and islands of ice
melting in the sun, the volcanic phenomena of Iceland, the sporting
of whales, the characteristic appearance of the Norwegian fiords,
the sudden fogs, the sea calm as milk, the green isles crowned with
grass which grows down to the very verge of the waves. This
fantastical nature created expressly for another humanity, this
strange topography at once glowing with fiction and speaking of
truth, make the poem of St. Brandan one of the most extraordinary
creations of the human mind, and perhaps the completest expression
of the Celtic ideal. All is lovely, pure, and innocent; never has a
gaze so benevolent and so gentle been cast upon the earth; there is
not a single cruel idea, not a trace of frailty or repentance. It is
the world seen through the crystal of a stainless conscience, one
might almost say a human nature, as Pelagius wished it, that has
never sinned. The very animals participate in this universal
mildness. Evil appears under the form of monsters wandering on the
deep, or of Cyclops confined in volcanic islands; but God causes
them to destroy one another, and does not permit them to do hurt to
the good.
We have just seen how, around the legend of a monk the Irish
imagination grouped a whole cycle of physical and maritime myths.
The Purgatory of St. Patrick became the framework of another series
of fables, embodying the Celtic ideas concerning the other life and
its different conditions. [Footnote: See Thomas Wright's excellent
dissertation, Saint Patrick's Purgatory (London, 1844), and
Calderon's The Well of Saint Patrick. ] Perhaps the profoundest
instinct of the Celtic peoples is their desire to penetrate the
unknown. With the sea before them, they wish to know what lies
beyond; they dream of a Promised Land. In the face of the unknown
that lies beyond the tomb, they dream of that great journey which
the pen of Dante has celebrated. The legend tells how, while St.
Patrick was preaching about Paradise and Hell to the Irish, they
confessed that they would feel more assured of the reality of these
places, if he would allow one of them to descend there, and then
come back with information St. Patrick consented. A pit was dug, by
which an Irishman set out upon the subterranean journey. Others
wished to attempt the journey after him. With the consent of the
abbot of the neighbouring monastery, they descended into the shaft,
they passed through the torments of Hell and Purgatory, and then
each told of what he had seen. Some did not emerge again; those who
did laughed no more, and were henceforth unable to join in any
gaiety. Knight Owen made a descent in 1153, and gave a narrative of
his travels which had a prodigious success.
Other legends related that when St. Patrick drove the goblins out of
Ireland, he was greatly tormented in this place for forty days by
legions of black birds. The Irish betook themselves to the spot, and
experienced the same assaults which gave them an immunity from
Purgatory. According to the narrative of Giraldus Cambrensis, the
isle which served as the theatre of this strange superstition was
divided into two parts. One belonged to the monks, the other was
occupied by evil spirits, who celebrated religious rites in their
own manner, with an infernal uproar. Some people, for the expiation
of their sins, voluntarily exposed themselves to the fury of those
demons. There were nine ditches in which they lay for a night,
tormented in a thousand different ways. To make the descent it was
necessary to obtain the permission of the bishop. His duty it was to
dissuade the penitent from attempting the adventure, and to point
out to him how many people had gone in who had never come out again.
If the devotee persisted, he was ceremoniously conducted to the
shaft. He was lowered down by means of a rope, with a loaf and a
vessel of water to strengthen him in the combat against the fiend
which he proposed to wage. On the following morning the sacristan
offered the rope anew to the sufferer. If he mounted to the surface
again, they brought him back to the church, bearing the cross and
chanting psalms. If he were not to be found, the sacristan closed
the door and departed. In more modern times pilgrims to the sacred
isles spent nine days there. They passed over to them in a boat
hollowed out of the trunk of a tree. Once a day they drank of the
water of the lake; processions and stations were performed in the
beds or cells of the saints. Upon the ninth day the penitents
entered into the shaft. Sermons were preached to them warning them
of the danger they were about to run, and they were told of terrible
examples. They forgave their enemies and took farewell of one
another, as though they were at their last agony. According to
contemporary accounts, the shaft was a low and narrow kiln, into
which nine entered at a time, and in which the penitents passed a
day and a night, huddled and tightly pressed against one another.
Popular belief imagined an abyss underneath, to swallow up the
unworthy and the unbelieving. On emerging from the pit they went and
bathed in the lake, and so their Purgatory was accomplished. It
would appear from the accounts of eye-witnesses that, to this day,
things happen very nearly after the same fashion.
The immense reputation of the Purgatory of St. Patrick filled the
whole of the Middle Ages. Preachers made appeal to the public
notoriety of this great fact, to controvert those who had their
doubts regarding Purgatory. In the year 1358 Edward III. gave to a
Hungarian of noble birth, who had come from Hungary expressly to
visit the sacred well, letters patent attesting that he had
undergone his Purgatory. Narratives of those travels beyond the tomb
became a very fashionable form of literature; and it is important
for us to remark the wholly mythological, and as wholly Celtic,
characteristics dominant in them. It is in fact evident that we are
dealing with a mystery or local cult, anterior to Christianity, and
probably based upon the physical appearance of the country. The idea
of Purgatory, in its final and concrete form, fared specially well
amongst the Bretons and the Irish. Bede is one of the first to speak
of it in a descriptive manner, and the learned Mr. Wright very
justly observes that nearly all the descriptions of Purgatory come
from Irishmen, or from Anglo-Saxons who have resided in Ireland,
such as St. Fursey, Tundale, the Northumbrian Dryhthelm, and Knight
Owen. It is likewise a remarkable thing that only the Irish were
able to behold the marvels of their Purgatory. A canon from Hemstede
in Holland, who descended in 1494, saw nothing at all. Evidently
this idea of travels in the other world and its infernal categories,
as the Middle Ages accepted it, is Celtic. The belief in the three
circles of existence is again to be found in the Triads, [Footnote:
A series of aphorisms under the form of triplets, which give us,
with numerous interpolations, the ancient teaching of the bards, and
that traditional wisdom which, according to the testimony of the
ancients, was transmitted by means of mnemonic verses in the schools
of the Druids. under an aspect which does not permit one to see any
Christian interpolation. ]
The soul's peregrinations after death are also the favourite theme
of the most ancient Armorican poetry. Among the features by which
the Celtic races most impressed the Romans were the precision of
their ideas upon the future life, their inclination to suicide, and
the loans and contracts which they signed with the other world in
view. The more frivolous peoples of the South saw with awe in this
assurance the fact of a mysterious race, having an understanding of
the future and the secret of death. Through the whole of classical
antiquity runs the tradition of an Isle of Shadows, situated on the
confines of Brittany, and of a folk devoted to the passage of souls,
which lives upon the neighbouring coast. In the night they hear dead
men prowling about their cabin, and knocking at the door. Then they
rise up; their craft is laden with invisible beings; on their return
it is lighter. Several of these features reproduced by Plutarch,
Claudian, Procopius, [Footnote: A Byzantine historian of the fifth
and sixth centuries. ] and Tzetzes [Footnote: A Greek poet and
grammarian of the twelfth century. ] would incline one to believe
that the renown of the Irish myths made its way into classical
antiquity about the first or second century. Plutarch, for example,
relates, concerning the Cronian Sea, fables identical with those
which fill the legend of St. Malo. Procopius, describing the sacred
Island of Brittia, which consists of two parts separated by the sea,
one delightful, the other given over to evil spirits, seems to have
read in advance the description of the Purgatory of St. Patrick,
which Giraldus Cambrensis was to give seven centuries later. It
cannot be doubted for a moment, after the able researches of Messrs.
Ozanam, Labitte, and Wright, that to the number of poetical themes
which Europe owes to the genius of the Celts, is to be added the
framework of the Divine Comedy.
One can understand how greatly this invincible attraction to fables
must have discredited the Celtic race in the eyes of nationalities
that believed themselves to be more serious. It is in truth a
strange thing, that the whole of the mediaeval epoch, whilst
submitting to the influence of the Celtic imagination, and borrowing
from Brittany and Ireland at least half of its poetical subjects,
believed itself obliged, for the saving of its own honour, to slight
and satirise the people to which it owed them. Even Chretien de
Troyes, for example, who passed his life in exploiting the Breton
romances for his own purposes, originated the saying--
"Les Gallois sont tous par nature
Plus sots que betes de pature. "
Some English chronicler, I know not who, imagined he was making a
charming play upon words when he described those beautiful
creations, the whole world of which deserved to live, as "the
childish nonsense with which those brutes of Bretons amuse
themselves. " The Bollandists [Footnote: A group of Jesuits who
issued a collection of "Lives of the Saints". The first five volumes
were edited by John Bolland. ] found it incumbent to exclude from
their collection, as apocryphal extravagances, those admirable
religious legends, with which no Church has anything to compare. The
decided leaning of the Celtic race towards the ideal, its sadness,
its fidelity, its good faith, caused it to be regarded by its
neighbours as dull, foolish, and superstitious. They could not
understand its delicacy and refined manner of feeling. They mistook
for awkwardness the embarrassment experienced by sincere and open
natures in the presence of more artificial natures. The contrast
between French frivolity and Breton stubbornness above all led,
after the fourteenth century, to most deplorable conflicts, whence
the Bretons ever emerged with a reputation for wrong-headedness.
It was still worse, when the nation that most prides itself on its
practical good sense found confronting it the people that, to its
own misfortune, is least provided with that gift. Poor Ireland, with
her ancient mythology, with her Purgatory of St. Patrick, and her
fantastic travels of St. Brandan, was not destined to find grace in
the eyes of English puritanism. One ought to observe the disdain of
English critics for these fables, and their superb pity for the
Church which dallies with Paganism, so far as to keep up usages
which are notoriously derived from it. Assuredly we have here a
praiseworthy zeal, arising from natural goodness; and yet, even if
these flights of imagination did no more than render a little more
supportable many sufferings which are said to have no remedy, that
after all would be something. Who shall dare to say where, here on
earth, is the boundary between reason and dreaming? Which is worth
more, the imaginative instinct of man, or the narrow orthodoxy that
pretends to remain rational, when speaking of things divine? For my
own part, I prefer the frank mythology, with all its vagaries, to a
theology so paltry, so vulgar, and so colourless, that it would be
wronging God to believe that, after having made the visible world so
beautiful he should have made the invisible world so prosaically
reasonable.
In presence of the ever-encroaching progress of a civilisation which
is of no country, and can receive no name, other than that of modern
or European, it would be puerile to hope that the Celtic race is in
the future to succeed in obtaining isolated expression of its
originality. And yet we are far from believing that this race has
said its last word. After having put in practice all chivalries,
devout and worldly, gone with Peredur in quest of the Holy Grail and
fair ladies, and dreamed with St. Brandan of mystical Atlantides,
who knows what it would produce in the domain of intellect, if it
hardened itself to an entrance into the world, and subjected its
rich and profound nature to the conditions of modern thought? It
appears to me that there would result from this combination,
productions of high originality, a subtle and discreet manner of
taking life, a singular union of strength and weakness, of rude
simplicity and mildness. Few races have had so complete a poetic
childhood as the Celtic; mythology, lyric poetry, epic, romantic
imagination, religious enthusiasm--none of these failed them; why
should reflection fail them? Germany, which commenced with science
and criticism, has come to poetry; why should not the Celtic races,
which began with poetry, finish with criticism? There is not so
great a distance from one to the other as is supposed; the poetical
races are the philosophic races, and at bottom philosophy is only a
manner of poetry. When one considers how Germany, less than a
century ago, had her genius revealed to her, how a multitude of
national individualities, to all appearance effaced, have suddenly
risen again in our own days, more instinct with life than ever, one
feels persuaded that it is a rash thing to lay down any law on the
intermittence and awakening of nations; and that modern
civilisation, which appeared to be made to absorb them, may perhaps
be nothing more than their united fruition.
THE EDUCATION OF THE HUMAN RACE
BY
GOTTHOLD EPHRAIM LESSINO
TRANSLATED BY
F.
