Chapter XVI: Prologue: To Gaul (1)

How mournful is the silence of Night
When she pours her dark clouds over the valleys!
Sleep has overcome the youth of the chase:
He slumbers on the heath, and his dog at his knee.
The children of the mountain he pursues
In his dream, while sleep forsakes him.

Slumber, ye children of fatigue;
Star after star is now ascending the height.
Slumber! thou swift dog and nimble--
Ossian will arouse thee not from thy repose.
Lonely I keep watch,--
And dear to me is the gloom of night
When I travel from glen to glen,
With no hope to behold a morning or brightness.

Spare thy light, O Sun!
Waste not thy lamps so fast.
Generous is thy soul as the King of Morven's:
But thy renown shall yet fade;--
Spare thy lamps of a thousand flames
In thy blue hall, when thou retirest
Under thy dark-blue gates to sleep,
Beneath the dark embraces of the storm.
Spare them, ere thou art forsaken for ever,
As I am, without one whom I may love!
Spare them,--for there is not a hero now
To behold the blue flame of the beautiful lamps!

Ah, Cona of the precious lights,
Thy lamps burn dimly now:
Thou art like a blasted oak:
Thy dwellings and thy people are gone
East or west; on the face of thy mountain,
There shall be no more found of them but the trace!
In Selma, Tara, or Temora
There is not a song, a shell, or a harp;
They have all become green mounds;
Their stones have fallen into their own meadows;
The stranger from the deep or the desert
Will never behold them rise above the clouds.

And O Selma! home of my delight,
Is this heap my ruin,
Where grows the thistle, the heather, and the wild grass?

The following lines of St. Columba are taken from the 'Lyra Celtica,' cited above:--

COLUMCILLE FECIT

(ST. COLUMBA MADE IT)

Delightful would it be to me to be in Uchd Ailiun
On the pinnacle of a rock,
That I might often see
The face of the ocean;
That I might see its heaving waves
Over the wide ocean,
When they chant music to their Father
Upon the world's course;
That I might see its level sparkling strand,
It would be no cause of sorrow;
That I might hear the song of the wonderful birds,
Source of happiness;
That I might hear the thunder of the crowding waves
Upon the rocks;
That I might hear the roar by the side of the church
Of the surrounding sea;
That I might see its noble flocks
Over the watery ocean;
That I might see the sea monsters,
The greatest of all wonders;
That I might see its ebb and flood
In their career;
That my mystical name might be, I say,
Cul ri Erin [Back turned to Ireland];
That contrition might come upon my heart
Upon looking at her;
That I might bewail my evils all,
Though it were difficult to compute them;
That I might bless the Lord
Who conserves all,
Heaven with its countless bright orders,
Land, strand, and flood;
That I might search the books all,
That would be good for my soul;
At times kneeling to beloved Heaven;
At times psalm-singing;
At times contemplating the King of Heaven,
Holy the chief;
At times at work without compulsion,
This would be delightful;
At times plucking duilisc from the rocks;
At times at fishing;
At times giving food to the poor;
At times in a carcair [solitary cell];
The best advice in the presence of God
To me has been vouchsafed.
The King whose servant I am will not let
Anything deceive me.

The third selection is an example of later Gaelic. This stirring Hebridean poem is sometimes spoken of as from the ancient Gaelic. Probably by this is meant merely old Gaelic, mediaeval or even later. The translation is by Mr. Thomas Pattison, and is included in his 'Gaelic Bards.' He has the following note upon it:--

"This effusion, although in its original form it is only a
kind of wild chant,--almost indeed half prose,--yet is the
germ of the ballad. It occurs in many of the tales contained
in that collection,--the repository of old Gaelic lore,--the
'Popular Tales of the West Highlands,' sometimes more and
sometimes less perfect. The original will be found in the
second volume of the Tales.... The vigorous and elastic
spirit that pervades these verses must have strung the heart
of many a hardy mariner, who loved to feel the fresh and
briny breeze drive his snoring birlinn bounding like a living
creature over the tumbling billows of the inland loch, or the
huge swell of the majestic main."

IN HEBRID SEAS

We turned her prow into the sea,
Her stern into the shore,
And first we raised the tall tough masts,
And then the canvas hoar;

Fast filled our towering cloud-like sails,
For the wind came from the land,
And such a wind as we might choose
Were the winds at our command:

A breeze that rushing down the hill
Would strip the blooming heather,
Or rustling through the green-clad grove,
Would whirl its leaves together.

But when it seized the aged saugh,
With the light locks of gray,
It tore away its ancient root,
And there the old trunk lay!

It raised the thatch too from the roof,
And scattered it along;
Then tossed and whirled it through the air,
Singing a pleasant song.

It heaped the ruins on the land:--
Though sire and son stood by,
They could no help afford, but gaze
With wan and troubled eye!

A flap, a flash, the green roll dashed,
And laughed against the red;
Upon our boards, now here, now there,
It knocked its foamy head.

She could have split a slender straw,
So clean and well she went,
As still obedient to the helm
Her stately course she bent.

We watched the big beast eat the small,
The small beast nimbly fly,
And listened to the plunging eels,
The sea-gull's clang on high.

We had no other music
To cheer us on our way:
Till round those sheltering hills we passed
And anchored in this bay.

III--WELSH

The laws governing the life of languages are as elusive as those that decide the fate of races and empires. Why is the Welsh tongue still alive and vigorous, and the Irish (_pace_ Dr. Douglas Hyde) moribund? It is a difficult question, but some light on it may be had by traversing the early history of Welsh literature.

The like difficulty meets us in both Welsh and Irish: that of deciding how far the mediaeval scribes and scholars doctored the older material which fell into their hands. But in Welsh, the separation of the primitive from the mediaeval element is often even a more difficult task than in Irish.

In sketching the early course of Welsh literature, we cannot do better than turn to the striking instance afforded by the name and fame of Merlin. In legendary Welsh history, Merlin appears under almost as many guises as he does in the pages of Malory's 'Morte d'Arthur.' Merddin Emrys (Ambrosius), Merddin Sylvester (Merlin the Wild), Merddin ab Morvryn (or Merlin Caledonius),--his name and fame vary according to the chronicler. Of these, Merlin the son of Morvryn, the most tangible in the list, was also known as Caledonius, because the Kymry of the sixth century lived in that greater Wales which ranged as far north as the Caledonian Forest. After the terrible battle of Arderydd, Merlin, having seen his kindred all but obliterated, was seized, tradition tells us, with a frenzy, and thereafter his bardic utterances assumed a more and more mystical and oracular form. This, added to his mysterious and magnetic personality and wildly impressive personal presence, may well have led on in process of time, by gradual legendary accretions, to the final conception of a Merlin miraculous, supernatural, daemonic! However this may be, nothing can be more instructive than to compare the late Merlin with the early Merlin, and to trace his phases in Welsh folk-tale, and define his poetry finally in the pages of the 'Black Book of Carmarthen.'

The 'Black Book of Carmarthen,' in its strikingly decorative black and red manuscript, makes a wonderful testament of old Welsh poetry. If we could solve all its problems and read all that is written between its lines, we should be very near the great secret of the Druidic religion and of Celtic mythology, as well as the secret of Merlin's actual and imaginary effect in Welsh literature.

The battle of Arderydd has been cited above as a determining event in Merlin's history. The opening poem in the 'Black Book of Carmarthen' is a remarkable rhymed dialogue between Merlin and Taliesin, some of whose lines are extremely imaginative and touching in their archaic simplicity. Merlin begins:--

"How sad is Merlin now! how sad!
Keduyf and Kadvan--are they dead?
The furious slaughter filled the field,
And pierced was the Tryrwyd shield!"

Taliesin replies:--

"His house-folk did not falter in the fight!"

So it goes on, telling of the battle and its consequences, until one reaches at the end that mysterious verse which haunts the imagination and the ear of the reader. Merlin again speaks:--

"Sevenscore chieftains
Were turned into spirits;
In the wood of Celyddon
Were they transformed.

The wood of Celyddon is the Caledonian Forest. So far as these excerpts go, they might seem to be the writing of the real Merlin. There is internal evidence however that this poem, the much disputed poem of the 'Apple-trees,' and others that follow it in the 'Black Book,' were written not earlier than the twelfth century. Stephens, usually an acute critic, imputes in his 'Literature of the Kymry' these poems to Gwalchmai and other bards of later date. But even so, these poets evidently founded their poems upon earlier ones, traditionally handed on as Merlin's.

From such later sources as the 'Myvyrian Archaeology,' or Skene's 'Four Ancient Books of Wales,' or the admirable Oxford texts edited by Professor Rhys and Mr. Gwenogfvyn Evans, one can rehabilitate at will the Merlin of the 'Black Book of Carmarthen,' much as Villemarque has done after a fashion quite his own. Enough will so be certainly discovered to outline a primitive Merlin, an original sixth-century Merlin, under the impressive mediaeval robes of the Latin-Welsh romantic chroniclers and poets. Enough too will be made clear to show a basis of myth and prehistoric legend behind the remotest recorded name, time, or place that can be counted historical.

The same is true of Taliesin, who appears, by the poetical remains attributed to him,--some of them clearly mediaeval, others just as clearly primitive,--even more interesting as a poet than Merlin. Just as there are several Merlins, however, there are two Taliesins: there is the fifth-century Taliesin, and there is the pseudo-Taliesin of the twelfth. Both are wonderful in their way, and one knows not which to admire most--him who wrote the 'Battle of Gwenystrad,' which is undoubtedly a primitive war song, or the mediaeval poet who chose to take the disguise of Taliesin, and taking too, probably, some of the traditional fragments of his early poetry, worked them up afresh with curious mediaeval art and mystic imagination. For comparison let us take an early and a late poem, commonly gathered, as in the 'Myvyrian Archaeology,' under one head.

Take first one of the later poems, the mystical 'Song to the Wind,' which even in its English dress won Emerson's admiration, and which, if we allow for all differences between mediaeval and modern imagination, is as wonderful a poem of its kind as any literature is likely to afford. As it is given among our selections, it need not be quoted here. In point of time it is usual to assign it, as Stephens does, to the twelfth or thirteenth century. But it seems to me to bear traces again of being an older, more primitive poem, retouched certainly, and probably reshaped, by a twelfth-century poet. And now for a genuine Taliesin, or what at any rate many critics think to be genuine. This you may have in the famous 'Gwaith Gwenystrad' (Battle of Gwenystrad), one of the most spirited war poems in existence, copied and recopied by a long succession of Kymric scribes, and which the writer came upon first in the MS. collection of William Morris o Gaergybi yn Mon, who flourished about 1758. Here are four lines of Morris's copy _literatim_, which will give a better idea than any criticism of mine of the mingled realism and imagination of the poem:--

"Yn nrws rhyd gwelais i wyr lledruddion,
Eirf ddillwng y rhag blawt gofedon,
Unynt tanc gan aethant golludion,
Llaw ynghroes gryd ygro granwynion."

And here is a rough, vigorous translation of these lines from the same volume:--

"In the pass of the fort have I seen men, dyed with red, who
hurtled their arms.... They fell to the ground together when
the day was lost, their hands on the crucifix. And horror was
in the pale face of the dead warriors."

A succeeding line,

"A gwyar a uaglei ar ddillad,"
(And the blood was tangled in their clothing),

adds the last touch of dreadful sincerity to the account. And in other primitive poems that we may ascribe to Taliesin are effects as convincing and vivid.

But we must leave Taliesin and his difficulties, to sketch briefly the course of poetry between his actual date in early time and his poetic resurrection in the Middle Ages. Not so interesting poetically but more important historically is the next of the Welsh bards, Aneurin, who wrote the 'Gododin.' This curious and interesting war poem tells of a foray made by the Ottadini, an early Kymric tribe, living in the greater Wales of their time, on the Northumbrian coast. Mr. Stephens imagines Cattraeth, which figures as a central scene of the action of the poem, to be Catterick in Yorkshire; and this we may provisionally accept.

"The Welshmen went to Cattraeth; and merry marched the host.
But thro' drinking the gray mead, the day--the day was lost."

The expedition was one of those which show the gradual cession of greater Wales by the Welsh, and their retreat to the lesser Wales that is still theirs.

We may pause here to remark that the bardic order was early constituted among the Welsh, as among the Irish. In the Laws of Howel Dda (Howel the Good), who flourished in the tenth century, we find very explicit provision made for the bard:--

"In case of fighting, the Bard shall play the 'Monarchy of Britain'
before the battle!
"His land shall be free; he shall have a horse from the King!
"He shall have a harp from the King, and a gold ring from the Queen,
when he is appointed. The harp he shall never part with."

Unless, which is highly probable, we have lost some of the records of the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries, we have to conclude that Welsh poetry made small headway. The remarkable laws of Howel Dda are the monument of the tenth century. In the eleventh we come upon the first signs of a revival in Meilir, who is historically interesting, and in his last poems shows himself a true poet. In the twelfth we have to mark a distinct further step in Gwalchmai, who is the first conscious poet of nature, and who may thus claim to be the founder of one of the finest traditions in all Welsh poetry. Following Gwalchmai comes the princely poet Howel the Tall, son of Owain Gwynedd by an Irish lady, and who himself wore the crown of Gwynedd for a brief two years. He died in 1171 at twenty-seven, after a life of stormiest adventure; but in the intervals of battle he found time to write some of the loveliest love poems that all Welsh literature can boast. His death was lamented by Periv ab Kedwoi in a much less conventional and more moving tone than the official bards generally troubled to use for such elegies. A century or so later, and we find Llywarch ab Llywelyn (known as "Prydydd y Moch," the Poet of the Pigs) writing a still finer and more ample lament on the last native prince of Wales, Llywelyn ab Gruffydd, "Llywelyn ewi Llyw Olaf," as he is still fondly called. These two laments may be taken as typical of a wide section of Welsh poetry, dealing with the deaths of heroes and princes, and ranging in date from the fifth or sixth century to the nineteenth. Llywelyn the Last died in 1282, and thereafter began what has been well termed "The Great Oppression" (y Gorthrwm Mawr), by which Norman and Saxon combined to crush the language and expropriate the people of the country, with the result of calling up at last Owen Glendower's hot spirit to fight for the national cause.

But it is remarkable that in this disastrous period arose some of the finest interpreters of her genius that the country was ever to find. Within its term were, without a doubt, carried to an approximate perfection those more native romances that we term 'Mabinogion,'--the most exquisite and exquisitely turned tales, in point of art, that the Celtic races have produced. The late Lady Charlotte Guest's edition of the 'Mabinogion' serves very well to convey, in a translation of extreme felicity, to non-Celtic readers the art and spirit of these tales. But it must be kept in mind that all she gives are not strictly 'Mabinogion'; several of them are more properly to be called romances, as showing strong traces of Norman and French influence. The 'Mabinogi' originally was a tale to be recited by a _mabinog_, _i. e._, a 'prentice to the bardic craft who had not yet obtained his full degree, and with it the right of composing and reciting poetry. The idea which some critics have, that the 'Mabinogion' were boys' tales, or still worse, nursery tales, is quite wrong. Let us remember that such tales were the delight of most of the princely halls and winter hearths of mediaeval Wales, where they were recited after the great banquets and on feast nights to the most critical audience that could be afforded. 'The Dream of Rhonabwy,' 'Kilhwch and Olwen,' and 'Math, Son of Mathonwy,' may be mentioned as among the tales in Lady Guest's volume which are most natively original; and we have chosen the portrait of Olwen from the second of these for our selections, to show the art and charm of the Welsh romancers in the Middle Ages.

If the 'Mabinogion' are fine as prose, we have an equally fine expression of this time in poetry, in the poems of Rhys Goch ab Rhicert (Rhys the Red, son of Rhicert) and the ever delightful Dafydd ab Gwilym, who will be found treated separately. After Dafydd, Welsh poetry was to enter upon a new phase, not fortunate even in its immediate effects, disastrous in its ultimate ones. It was in the fourteenth century that Welsh prosody, always intricate, finally waxed proud, so to speak, of its complexity, and formed for itself a hide-bound code which was to become the bugbear of Welsh poetry in the following centuries. To give any adequate account of its complexities of technique and the whole letter of its syntax would require a long and tedious treatise in itself. Enough to say that the underlying principle was that of what is termed in Welsh "Eynghanedd," or "consonancy"; by which rhymes within rhymes and echoes within echoes of certain dominant syllables were insisted upon arbitrarily, until almost every word in every line was subject to a rigid and invincible rule. Art for art, insisted upon in this way, could only end in conventionalizing the very thing it was meant to assist.

Poetry, too carefully nursed and housed, thus fell into a bad way; but luckily meanwhile a new literature was to begin for Wales, along quite other lines, with the Reformation. The translation of the Bible into Welsh by Bishop Morgan in the sixteenth century marks an epoch in the life of the Welsh people and their literature. Therewith the history of the princes and the great lords ends, and the history of the people--and a people mainly peasant, let us remark--begins. Its profound moral force apart, and judged purely as a literary force, the Bible, admirably and idiomatically translated, had an incalculable effect. It set a fine and high and yet simple standard of prose, much as the English Bible does; and taught the possibilities of his tongue to the poorest Welsh peasant. One finds its influence strong in almost every prose work of any note published in the last three centuries, and in a great proportion of the poetry. It did more than anything of later time to save the language; and here is the simple explanation of the extraordinary difference between the fortunes of the Welsh and the Irish tongue. Wales--the Wales of the people--became profoundly impressed by the religious sentiment and the heroic and profound poetry of the Hebrews, and gained from them a new stimulus to express itself and its needs and aspirations in its own native way and in its own tongue.

A characteristic expression of the homelier moral humor of the Welsh is to be had in the 'Canwyll y Cymry' (Candle of Wales), by Rhys Pritchard, the famous Elizabethan vicar of Llandovery, which for two centuries was the most popular book in Wales after the Bible. Its simple rhymed didactics do not often rise into poetry; but they are full of human feeling, expressed in a terse and proverbial way, with distinct individuality. The book easily leads one on to the very remarkable band of hymn writers, from Anne Griffiths to Williams Pantycelyn, who have flourished in Welsh. These, and some score beside, really rank by their imaginative fervor and inspiration as true poets. In quite another vein, but probably a very ancient and traditional one in Welsh, we have the homely interludes of Twm O'r Nant, who was born about 1750, of whose life George Borrow gives a very vigorous account in 'Wild Wales.' A greater than Twm O'r Nant, and born a generation earlier, Gronney Owen, a man of the finest poetic genius, ought to have a special interest for American readers because he was practically exiled from his beloved Anglesea by the ungrateful church he served; and died, poor and broken-hearted, in New Brunswick about the year 1780. His 'Cywydd y Faru' (Ode to the Day of Judgment), his touching lines to his little daughter Elin, or his Hogarthian lines upon the London garret in which he lived for a time, may be cited as showing the various sides of his poetry, of which unluckily there are no adequate translations yet forthcoming.

In prose we must not omit to mention the 'Bardd Cwsg' (The Sleeping Bard) of Elis Wynne,--a very imaginative and idiomatic prose epic-in-little, describing the bard's vision of a curiously Welsh Inferno. Wynne's prose style is remarkably fine and pure, modeled on the best Biblical standard of a Welsh without English admixture. Welsh prose has been admirably handled too by some of the divines who have flourished within the past two centuries, and who have not confined their eloquence to the pulpit. Even when the State church had no sympathy with the Welsh people and their language, many of its individual members did much to keep the spirit of literature alive; while the nonconformist ministers of Wales have always been vigorously and eminently devoted to the same cause.

Under happier conditions to-day, the latest expression of this vital persistence of the Welsh in the quest of spiritual ideals is the movement that has carried the new national university to completion, and rallied the younger generation under the banner of "Cymru Fydd" (Young Wales). The songs of Ceiriog Hughes, the poems of Islwyn, the works of scholars like Professor John Rhys, Canon Silvain Evans, and Mr. Gwenogfvyn Evans; the ardent writing and editing of Mr. Owen M. Edwards in his innumerable magazines and other adventures; and the novels of Daniel Owen,--these may be named as among the influences that count most to the Wales of the nineteenth century's end.

NOTE.--For citations from Welsh literature see articles
on Aneurin, Mabinogion, and Taliesin. The Breton branch
of Celtic literature will be treated under the heading
'Villemarque,' the celebrated collector of 'Barzaz-Breiz.'

IV--CORNISH

The literature of a single county of England is not likely to be very extensive, and when that literature and its language died for good and all, a century ago, it becomes still more limited. Until the reign of Henry VIII., though for some time English had been very generally spoken throughout the county, the old Celtic Cornish, holding a middle position, philologically as well as geographically, between Welsh and Breton, was the mother tongue of at any rate the peasantry as far east as the Tamar. The great ecclesiastical revolution of that period helped to destroy it. Neither prayer-book nor Bible was translated into it; and though the ardently Catholic Cornish at first would have none of the former, saying that it was "but like a Christmas game," they were overruled by the forcible argument of "apostolick blows and knocks," and had to submit. Then the language receded rapidly. By the time of the Great Rebellion Truro was its eastern limit; early in the eighteenth century only the two western claw-like promontories retained it; and though Dolly Pentreath, who died in 1778, was not really the last person who spoke it, it was dead before the present century was born. A few traditional sentences, the numerals up to twenty, and some stray words lingered on until our own day,--twenty years ago the present writer took down a fair collection from the mouths of ancient mariners in Mount's Bay,--and a few words are still mixed with the local dialect of English. But as a language Cornish is dead, though its ghost still haunts its old dwelling in the names of villages, houses, woods, valleys, wells, and rocks, from Tamar to Penwith.

As may be expected, a great proportion of the literature is in verse, and most of that is in dramatic form. So little is there that an exhaustive list of what survives is quite possible. It is as follows:--

1. _The Poem of the Passion._ A versified account of the Passion of our Lord, recounting the events from Palm Sunday to Easter, with the addition of many legendary incidents from the Gospel of Nicodemus and other similar sources. The earliest MS. (in the British Museum) is of the fifteenth century, which is probably the date of its composition. It has been twice printed, once by Davies Gilbert, with a translation by John Keigwin in 1826, and by Dr. Whitley Stokes in 1862.

2. _The Ordinalia._ Three connected dramas, known collectively under this title. The first recounts the Creation and the history of the world as far as Noah's Flood. The second act of this gives the story of Moses and of David and the Building of Solomon's Temple, ending with the curiously incongruous episode of the martyrdom of St. Maximilla, _as a Christian_, by the bishop placed in charge of the Temple of Solomon. The second play represents the life of our Lord from the Temptation to the Crucifixion, and this goes on without a break into the third play, which gives the story of the Resurrection and Ascension, and the legend of the death of Pilate. The connecting link between the three is the legend of the wood of the cross. This well-known story, most of which is interwoven with the whole trilogy, is as follows:--Seth was sent by his dying father to beg the promised Oil of Mercy to save him; the angel who guarded Paradise gave him three seeds, or, according to the play, apple-pips; and when he returned and found his father already dead, he placed them in Adam's mouth and buried him on Mount Moriah. In process of time the three seeds grew into three trees, and from them Abraham gathered the wood for the sacrifice of Isaac, and Moses got his rod wherewith he smote the sea and the rock. Later the three trees, to symbolize the Trinity, grew into one tree, and David sat under it to bewail his sin. But Solomon cut it down to make a beam for the Temple, and since it would in no wise fit into any place, he cast it out and set it as a bridge over Cedron. Later on he buried it, and from the place where it lay there sprang the healing spring of Bethesda, to the surface of which it miraculously floated up, and the Jews found it and made of it the Cross of Calvary.

These plays were probably written in the fifteenth century, perhaps by one of the priests of Glazeney College near Falmouth, and were acted with others that are now lost in the places called _Planan-Guare_ (the Plain of the Play), of which several still remain. The 'Ordinalia' were published with a translation by Edwin Norris in 1859.

3. _The Creation of the World, with Noah's Flood_, was a modernized version of the first act of the first of the 'Ordinalia' trilogy. It was written by William Jordan of Helston in 1611; but the author has borrowed whole passages of considerable length from the older play. The language represents a later period of Cornish, and occasionally several lines of English are introduced. Perhaps by a natural Celtic antipathy to the Saxon, these are generally put into the mouths of Lucifer and his angels, who furnish a good deal of the comic part of the piece. This play was published by Davies Gilbert in 1827, and by Dr. Whitley Stokes in 1864.

4. _The Life of St. Meriasek._ This play, written in 1504, is perhaps the most interesting of the batch. The story at least of the others contains nothing very new to most people, but St. Meriasek or Meriadoc (to give him his Breton name), the patron of Camborne, is not a well-known character, and his life, full as it is of allusions and incidents of a misty period of Cornish history, is most curious and interesting. It is not perhaps simplified by being mixed up in the wildest manner with the legend of Constantine and St. Sylvester, and the scenes shift about from Cornwall or Brittany to Rome, and from the fourth to the Heaven-knows-what century, with bewildering frequency. There are also certain other legends interwoven with the story, and it seems probable that at least three plays have been, as Dr. Whitley Stokes expresses it, "unskillfully pieced together." Yet there are many passages of considerable literary merit. The only existing MS. of this play is in the Hengwrt collection at Peniarth, and it was edited and translated by Dr. Stokes in 1872.

5. There were probably many other plays which have perished, but one other there certainly was, of which a fragment exists. What it was called or what it was about no one knows, but an actor in it, setting about to learn his own part in it, wrote that short piece of thirty-six lines on the back of a title-deed of some land in the parish of St. Stephen, near Bodmin. The deed drifted eventually into the British Museum, and the present writer discovered the Cornish verses on it, not wholly by accident, about nineteen years ago. The writing belongs to the latter part of the fourteenth century, and is therefore the earliest literary fragment of the language.

6. The rest of the literature of the Cornish language consists of a few songs, epigrams, mottoes, proverbs, and the like, a short dissertation on the language, and the tale of 'John of Chy-an-Hur,' a widely known folk-tale. These are mostly in the latest form of Cornish, and are contained in the MS. collection of William Gwavas in the British Museum and in that of Dr. Borlase, until lately in the possession of his descendants. Most of them have been printed by Davies Gilbert (with the play of the 'Creation'), by William Pryce in the 'Archaeologia Cornu-Britannica' in 1790, by Mr. W. C. Borlase in the Transactions of the Royal Institution of Cornwall, and in a fragmentary way in a few other places. They are mostly translations or adaptations from the English, but a few, such as the rather doggerel 'Pilchard Fishing Song,' are originals. Lastly, in the Church of St. Paul, near Penzance, there is the one solitary epitaph in the language; written while it was still just alive, and perhaps the last composition in it.

[The versions given of these specimens of Cornish literature
are founded on those of Dr. Whitley Stokes and Dr. E. Norris.
The phraseology has been to some extent altered, but the
renderings are almost all the same.]

FROM THE 'POEM OF THE PASSION'

[The Death of Our Lord on the Cross]

His pain was strong and sharp, so that he could not live,
But must yield up his white soul; ever purely had he lived.
And Christ prayed, as thus in many a place we read,
"My soul I do commend, O Lord, between thy hands!"

For weakly he breathed, being constrained, so that he could not rest;
On nothing could he lean his head for the garland that he wore.
If he leaned to one side, for his shoulder it grieved him
And the tree did yet worse, if he set it backwards.

Nor could he lean forward for fear of being choked.
Then was it as we read in books as it is written:--
"For the birds to make their nests, places are prepared,
But for Christ where he may lay his head no place is found."

But now must he needs leave his head to hang,
For his blood was all gone from him, and he could not live.
To the side of the Mother that owned him, his head he would hold,
And his soul went from him with chilling shriek and shrill cry.

Beside the Cross of Jesus was a man hight Sentury,
And when he saw the wondrous things that happened at Christ's death,
And how his soul he yielded, against nature, with a cry,
He said without scorning, "This truly was God's Son;"
And many were there with him that testimony bore.

Now was it midday in the land, or later, as is written.
Earthquake there was and lightning, and darkness over all;
The Temple Veil was rent in twain, and to the ground it fell,
And likewise broken were the stones so strong and hard.

Graves in many places were opened wide,
And the bodies that were in them were raised up,
And went straightway to the city--by many were they seen--
To bear witness that it was God's Son that was slain.

Water, earth, and fire, and wind, sun, moon, and stars likewise,
At Christ's suffering death knew sorrow.
Nature will cause, I trow, if the good Lord be pained,
All his subjects, even saints, to be grieved for his pain.

FROM 'ORIGO MUNDI,' IN THE 'ORDINALIA'

[Seth, being sent to fetch the oil of mercy from Paradise for
his dying father, comes to the guardian cherub.]

_Cherubin_--
Seth, what is thine errand,
That thou comest so far?
Tell me anon.

_Seth_--
O Angel, I will tell it thee:
My father is old and weary;
He wishes no longer to live;
And through me he prayed thee
To tell the truth
Of the oil of mercy promised
To him at the last day.

_Cherubin_--
Within the gate put thou thy head,
And behold it all, nor fear,
Whatever thou seest.
And look on all sides,
Spy out every detail,
Search out everything carefully.

_Seth_--
Very gladly I will do it;
I am glad to have permission
To know what is there
And tell it to my father.

[_And he looks and turns round, saying:_

Fair field to behold is this;
Hapless he who lost the land.
But for the tree I wonder greatly
That it should be dry.
But I trow that it went dry
And all was made bare, for the sin
Which my father and mother sinned.
Like the prints of their feet,
They all became dry as herbs,
Alas, when the morsel was eaten.

_Cherubin_--
O Seth, thou art come
Within the gate of Paradise:
Tell me what thou sawest.

_Seth_--
All the beauty that I saw
Tongue of man can never tell,
Of good fruits and beauteous flowers,
Of minstrels and sweet song,
A fountain bright as silver,
And flowing from it four great streams,
That there is a desire to gaze upon them.
In it there is a tree,
High and with many boughs,
But they are bare and leafless.
Bark there is none around it;
From the stem to the head
All its branches are bare.
And below when I looked,
I saw its roots
Even into hell descending,
In the midst of great darkness;
And its branches growing up
Even to heaven high in light.
And it was wholly without bark,
Both the head and the boughs.

_Cherubin_--
Look yet again within,
And all else thou shalt see
Before thou come from it.

_Seth_--
I am happy to have leave;
I will go to the gate at once,
That I may see further good.

[_He goes and looks and returns._

_Cherubin_--
Dost thou see more now
Than what there was just now?

_Seth_--
There is a serpent in the tree:
Truly a hideous beast is he.

_Cherubin_--
Go yet the third time to it,
And look better at the tree.
Look what you can see on it
Besides roots and branches.

_Seth_--
Cherubin, angel of the God of grace,
High in the branches of the tree I saw
A new-born child, wrapped in swaddling clothes
And bound with bands.

_Cherubin_--
It was God's son that thou sawest,
Like a child in swaddling clothes.
He will redeem Adam thy father
With his flesh and blood likewise,
When the time is come,
And thy mother and all good people.
He is the oil of mercy
Which was promised to thy father.
Through his death truly
Shall all the world be saved.

[Signature: William Sharp & Ernest Rhys]

CERVANTES

(1547-1616)

BY GEORGE SANTAYANA

Cervantes is known to the world as the author of 'Don Quixote' and although his other works are numerous and creditable, and his pathetic life is carefully recorded, yet it is as the author of 'Don Quixote' alone that he deserves to be generally known or considered. Had his wit not come by chance on the idea of the Ingenious Hidalgo, Cervantes would never have attained his universal renown, even if his other works and the interest of his career should have sufficed to give him a place in the literary history of his country. Here, then, where our task is to present in miniature only what has the greatest and most universal value, we may treat our author as playwrights are advised to treat their heroes, saying of him only what is necessary to the understanding of the single action with which we are concerned. This single action is the writing of 'Don Quixote': and what we shall try to understand is what there was in the life and environment of Cervantes that enabled him to compose that great book, and that remained imbedded in its characters, its episodes, and its moral.

There was in vogue in the Spain of the sixteenth century a species of romance called books of chivalry. They were developments of the legends dealing with King Arthur and the Knights of the Table Round, and their numerous descendants and emulators. These stories had appealed in the first place to what we should still think of as the spirit of chivalry: they were full of tourneys and single combats, desperate adventures and romantic loves. The setting was in the same vague and wonderful region as the Coast of Bohemia, where to the known mountains, seas, and cities that have poetic names, was added a prodigious number of caverns, castles, islands, and forests of the romancer's invention. With time and popularity this kind of story had naturally intensified its characteristics until it had reached the greatest extravagance and absurdity, and combined in a way the unreality of the fairy tale with the bombast of the melodrama.

Cervantes had apparently read these books with avidity, and was not without a great sympathy with the kind of imagination they embodied. His own last and most carefully written book, the 'Travails of Persiles and Sigismunda,' is in many respects an imitation of them; it abounds in savage islands, furious tyrants, prodigious feats of arms, disguised maidens whose discretion is as marvelous as their beauty, and happy deliverances from intricate and hopeless situations. His first book also, the 'Galatea,' was an embodiment of a kind of pastoral idealism: sentimental verses being interspersed with euphuistic prose, the whole describing the lovelorn shepherds and heartless shepherdesses of Arcadia.

But while these books, which were the author's favorites among his own works, expressed perhaps Cervantes's natural taste and ambition, the events of his life and the real bent of his talent, which in time he came himself to recognize, drove him to a very different sort of composition. His family was ancient but impoverished, and he was forced throughout his life to turn his hand to anything that could promise him a livelihood. His existence was a continuous series of experiments, vexations, and disappointments. He adopted at first the profession of arms, and followed his colors as a private soldier upon several foreign expeditions. He was long quartered in Italy; he fought at Lepanto against the Turks, where among other wounds he received one that maimed his left hand, to the greater glory, as he tells us, of his right; he was captured by Barbary pirates and remained for five years a slave in Algiers; he was ransomed, and returned to Spain only to find official favors and recognitions denied him; and finally, at the age of thirty-seven, he abandoned the army for literature.

His first thought as a writer does not seem to have been to make direct use of his rich experience and varied observation; he was rather possessed by an obstinate longing for that poetic gift which, as he confesses in one place, Heaven had denied him. He began with the idyllic romance, the 'Galatea' already mentioned, and at various times during the rest of his life wrote poems, plays, and stories of a romantic and sentimental type. In the course of these labors, however, he struck one vein of much richer promise. It was what the Spanish call the _picaresque_; that is, the description of the life and character of rogues, pickpockets, vagabonds, and all those wretches and sorry wits that might be found about the highways, in the country inns, or in the slums of cities. Of this kind is much of what is best in his collected stories, the 'Novelas Exemplares.' The talent and the experience which he betrays in these amusing narratives were to be invaluable to him later as the author of 'Don Quixote,' where they enabled him to supply a foil to the fine world of his poor hero's imagination.

We have now mentioned what were perhaps the chief elements of the preparation of Cervantes for his great task. They were a great familiarity with the romances of chivalry, and a natural liking for them; a life of honorable but unrewarded endeavor both in war and in the higher literature; and much experience of Vagabondia, with the art of taking down and reproducing in amusing profusion the typical scenes and languages of low life. Out of these elements a single spark, which we may attribute to genius, to chance, or to inspiration, was enough to produce a new and happy conception: that of a parody on the romances of chivalry, in which the extravagances of the fables of knighthood should be contrasted with the sordid realities of life. This is done by the ingenious device of representing a country gentleman whose naturally generous mind, unhinged by much reading of the books of chivalry, should lead him to undertake the office of knight-errant, and induce him to ride about the country clad in ancient armor, to right wrongs, to succor defenseless maidens, to kill giants, and to win empires at least as vast as that of Alexander.

This is the subject of 'Don Quixote.' But happy as the conception is, it could not have produced a book of enduring charm and well-seasoned wisdom, had it not been filled in with a great number of amusing and lifelike episodes, and verified by two admirable figures, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, characters at once intimately individual and truly universal.

Don Quixote at first appears to the reader, and probably appeared to the author as well, as primarily a madman,--a thin and gaunt old village squire, whose brain has been turned by the nonsense he has read and taken for gospel truth; and who is punished for his ridiculous mania by an uninterrupted series of beatings, falls, indignities, and insults. But the hero and the author together, with the ingenuity proper to madness and the inevitableness proper to genius, soon begin to disclose the fund of intelligence and ideal passion which underlies this superficial insanity. We see that Don Quixote is only mad north-north-west, when the wind blows from the quarter of his chivalrous preoccupation. At other times he shows himself a man of great goodness and fineness of wit; virtuous, courageous, courteous, and generous, and in fact the perfect ideal of a gentleman. When he takes, for instance, a handful of acorns from the goat-herds' table and begins a grandiloquent discourse upon the Golden Age, we feel how cultivated the man is, how easily the little things of life suggest to him the great things, and with what delight he dwells on what is beautiful and happy. The truth and pathos of the character become all the more compelling when we consider how naturally the hero's madness and calamities flow from this same exquisite sense of what is good.

The contrast to this figure is furnished by that of Sancho Panza, who embodies all that is matter-of-fact, gross, and plebeian. Yet he is willing to become Don Quixote's esquire, and by his credulity and devotion shows what an ascendency a heroic and enthusiastic nature can gain over the most sluggish of men. Sancho has none of the instincts of his master. He never read the books of chivalry or desired to right the wrongs of the world. He is naturally satisfied with his crust and his onions, if they can be washed down with enough bad wine. His good drudge of a wife never transformed herself in his fancy into a peerless Dulcinea. Yet Sancho follows his master into every danger, shares his discomfiture and the many blows that rain down upon him, and hopes to the end for the governorship of that Insula with which Don Quixote is some day to reward his faithful esquire.

As the madness of Don Quixote is humanized by his natural intelligence and courage, so the grossness and credulity of Sancho are relieved by his homely wit. He abounds in proverbs. He never fails to see the reality of a situation, and to protest doggedly against his master's visionary flights. He holds fast as long as he can to the evidence of his senses, and to his little weaknesses of flesh and spirit. But finally he surrenders to the authority of Don Quixote, and of the historians of chivalry, although not without a certain reluctance and some surviving doubts.

The character of Sancho is admirable for the veracity with which its details are drawn. The traits of the boor, the glutton, and the coward come most naturally to the surface upon occasion, yet Sancho remains a patient, good-natured peasant, a devoted servant, and a humble Christian. Under the cover of such lifelike incongruities, and of a pervasive humor, the author has given us a satirical picture of human nature not inferior, perhaps, to that furnished by Don Quixote himself. For instance: Don Quixote, after mending his helmet, tries its strength with a blow that smashes it to pieces. He mends it a second time, but now, without trial, deputes it to be henceforth a strong and perfect helmet. Sancho, when he is sent to bear a letter to Dulcinea, neglects to deliver it, and invents an account of his interview with the imaginary lady for the satisfaction of his master. But before long, by dint of repeating the story, he comes himself to believe his own lies. Thus self-deception in the knight is the ridiculous effect of courage, and in the esquire the not less ridiculous effect of sloth.

The adventures these two heroes encounter are naturally only such as travelers along the Spanish roads would then have been likely to come upon. The point of the story depends on the familiarity and commonness of the situations in which Don Quixote finds himself, so that the absurdity of his pretensions may be overwhelmingly shown. Critics are agreed in blaming the exceptions which Cervantes allowed himself to make to the realism of his scenes, where he introduced romantic tales into the narrative of the first part. The tales are in themselves unworthy of their setting, and contrary to the spirit of the whole book. Cervantes doubtless yielded here partly to his story-telling habits, partly to a fear of monotony in the uninterrupted description of Don Quixote's adventures. He avoided this mistake in the second part, and devised the visit to the Duke's palace, and the intentional sport there made of the hero, to give variety to the story.

More variety and more unity may still, perhaps, seem desirable in the book. The episodes are strung together without much coherence, and without any attempt to develop either the plot or the characters. Sancho, to be sure, at last tastes the governorship of his Insula, and Don Quixote on his death-bed recovers his wits. But this conclusion, appropriate and touching as it is, might have come almost anywhere in the course of the story. The whole book has, in fact, rather the quality of an improvisation. The episodes suggest themselves to the author's fancy as he proceeds; a fact which gives them the same unexpectedness and sometimes the same incompleteness which the events of a journey naturally have. It is in the genius of this kind of narrative to be a sort of imaginary diary, without a general dramatic structure. The interest depends on the characters and the incidents alone; on the fertility of the author's invention, on the ingenuity of the turns he gives to the story, and on the incidental scenes and figures he describes.

When we have once accepted this manner of writing fiction--which might be called that of the novelist before the days of the novel--we can only admire the execution of 'Don Quixote' as masterly in its kind. We find here an abundance of fancy that is never at a loss for some probable and interesting incident; we find a graphic power that makes living and unforgettable many a minor character, even if slightly sketched; we find the charm of the country rendered by little touches without any formal descriptions; and we find a humorous and minute reproduction of the manners of the time. All this is rendered in a flowing and easy style, abounding in both characterization and parody of diverse types of speech and composition; and the whole is still but the background for the figures of Don Quixote and Sancho, and for their pleasant discourse, the quality and savor of which is maintained to the end. These excellences unite to make the book one of the most permanently delightful in the world, as well as one of the most diverting. Seldom has laughter been so well justified as that which the reading of 'Don Quixote' continually provokes; seldom has it found its causes in such genuine fancy, such profound and real contrast, and such victorious good-humor.

We sometimes wish, perhaps, that our heroes were spared some of their bruises, and that we were not asked to delight so much in promiscuous beatings and floggings. But we must remember that these three hundred years have made the European race much more sensitive to physical suffering. Our ancestors took that doubtful pleasure in the idea of corporal writhings which we still take in the description of the tortures of the spirit. The idea of both evils is naturally distasteful to a refined mind; but we admit more willingly the kind which habit has accustomed us to regard as inevitable, and which personal experience very probably has made an old friend.