Chapter X: The Discovery of the Celt

“Strange reversals, strange fulfilments may lie on the lap of
the gods, but we have no knowledge of these, and hear neither
the high laughter nor the far voices. But we front a possible
because a spiritual destiny greater than the height of imperial
fortunes, and have that which may send our voices further than
the trumpets of east and west. Through ages of slow westering,
till now we face the sundown seas, we have learned in continual
vicissitude that there are secret ways whereon armies cannot
march. And this has been given to us, a more ardent longing, a
more rapt passion in the things of outward beauty and in the
things of spiritual beauty. Nor it seems to me is there any
sadness, or only the serene sadness of a great day’s end, that,
to others, we reveal in our best the genius of a race whose
farewell is in a tragic lighting of torches of beauty around its
grave.”

FIONA MACLEOD.

Ernest Renan discovered the Celt somewhere about the year 1856; but in the year 1891 Grant Allen made the far more interesting discovery that there was such a thing as a Celtic movement in English art. In a vivacious article in _The Fortnightly Review_ he made it seem as if the Celtic influence dominated the field of artistic activity. “The return wave of Celtic influence over Teutonic or Teutonised England has brought with it many strange things, good, bad, and indifferent.” He wrote:

“It has brought with it Home Rule, Land Nationalisation,
Socialism, Radicalism, the Reverend Hugh Price Hughes, the
Tithes War, the Crofter Question, the Plan of Campaign. It
has brought fresh forces into political life--the eloquent
young Irishman, the perfervid Highland Scot, the enthusiastic
Welshman, the hard-headed Cornish miner: Methodism, Catholicism,
the Eisteddfod, the parish priest, New Tipperary, the Hebrides,
the Scotland Division of Liverpool; Conybeare, Cunninghame
Graham, Michael Davitt, Holyoake; Co-operation, the Dockers,
_The Star_, the Fabians. Powers hitherto undreamt of surge
up in our parliamentary world in the Sextons, the Healys, the
Atherley Joneses, the McDonalds, the O’Briens, the Dillons,
the Morgans, the Abrahams; in our wider public life in the
William Morrises, the Annie Besants, the Father Humphreys,
the Archbishop Crokes, the General Booths, the Alfred Russel
Wallaces, the John Stuart Blackies, the Joseph Arches, the
Bernard Shaws, the John Burnses; the People’s Palace, the Celtic
Society of Scotland, the Democratic Federation, the Socialist
League. Anybody who looks over any great list of names in any of
the leading modern movements in England--from the London County
Council to the Lectures at South Place--will see in a moment
that the New Radicalism is essentially a Celtic product. The
Celt in Britain, like Mr Burne Jones’s enchanted princess, has
lain silent for ages in an enforced long sleep; but the spirit
of the century, pushing aside the weeds and briars of privilege
and caste, has set free the sleeper at last....”

Sufficiently matter-of-fact in his assertions, Grant Allen’s enthusiasm was just a little premature. But he was only a year or so too early, and if he had stayed his pen a little while he would have been able to announce the real Celtic revival of the Nineties which received its first strong impetus from the genius of William Butler Yeats.

The Celtic movement as expressed in the various fields of activity named by Grant Allen was at the dawn of the Eighteen Nineties quite free of self-consciousness. It was not really a “movement” at all; and even where Grant Allen correctly indicates Celtic influence, that influence is the accidental outcome of the fact that those who were responsible for it happened to have been Celts or to have had Celtic blood in their veins. In many of his examples it would have been of equal pertinence to trace Teutonic or Latin influences. The real Celtic revival, as a revival, began with the Irish Literary movement. W. B. Yeats published his first book of poems in Dublin in 1885; but it was not until he issued _The Wanderings of Oisin, and Other Poems_, in 1889, that a new voice singing a song as old as time was recognised. With the publication of _The Countess Kathleen_, in 1892, and the _Celtic Twilight_, in 1893, this new voice was hailed as something more than new; it was hailed as a strong and persuasive voice that was already attracting to itself affinities in the land of its origin. Among these were Dr Douglas Hyde, Lady Gregory, George Russell (A.E.), Lionel Johnson, John Eglinton and, later, and with less certainty from the Celtic standpoint, George Moore. Dr Douglas Hyde and Lady Gregory were devoting their attention to the ancient legends and songs of Ireland, and their studies ultimately resulted in the publication of books such as the _Love Songs of Connacht_ and _Gods and Fighting Men_. George Russell and W. B. Yeats linked up the natural mysticism of the Celt with Theosophy, besides contributing to the movement poems of rare beauty. John Eglinton worked along lines of philosophic interpretation which he expressed in _Two Essays on the Remnant_, published in 1895. George Moore introduced an equally Celtic sense of fact into a movement which might otherwise have been a record of dreams.

In 1891 W. B. Yeats founded the National Literary Society, which, seven years later, brought into existence the Irish Literary Theatre at Dublin. The object of the Irish Literary Theatre was first and foremost to create a medium for the production of “something better than the ordinary play of commerce,” and by so doing to augment the chances of a native Irish dramatic renaissance. The first performances of the society took place in 1899, when two plays, _The Countess Kathleen_, by W. B. Yeats, and _The Heather Field_, by Edward Martyn, were produced at the Antient Concert Rooms, Dublin. Next year the Irish Literary Theatre produced five plays at the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin. These were: _The Bending of the Bough_, by George Moore; _The Last Feast of the Fraima_, by Alice Milligan; _Mæeve_, by Edward Martyn. In 1901 at the same theatre were produced _Diarmuid and Grania_, by W. B. Yeats and George Moore; and a Gaelic play, _The Twisting of the Rope_, by Douglas Hyde. These performances closed the first attempt in Ireland to create a national drama. During its brief life, the Irish Literary Theatre recorded its views and achievements in an occasional publication called _Beltaine_ (1899–1900), which was the forerunner of _Samhain_, as the Irish Literary Theatre was of the National Theatre Society Ltd., and its famous playhouse in Abbey Street, Dublin. The dramatic and literary awakening in Ireland found expression in the local Press, _The Daily Express_ of Dublin devoting considerable space to the discussion of literature and art, to which most of the young Irish writers contributed.

Side by side with the development of the Celtic revival in Ireland there were Celtic awakenings of a lesser degree in Scotland and Wales. The chief activity of the Scottish revival was at Edinburgh, where Patrick Geddes produced four numbers of a quarterly review called the _Evergreen_ in 1895 and 1896. The idea seemed to be to make each number complete in itself and so to arrange the contents that they should serve as comments on art and life apropos the four seasons. Among the literary contributors are found the names of Patrick Geddes, Sir Noel Paton, S. R. Crockett, William Sharp, “Fiona Macleod,” Sir George Douglas, Riccardo Stephens and Gabriel Setoun. The French communist, Élisée Reclus, was also a contributor. All the decorations were in black and white, and the artists included Pittendrigh Macgillivray, John Duncan, E. A. Hornel and James Cadenhead.

The most important literary product of the Celtic revival in Scotland was the work of the mysterious personality “Fiona Macleod,” whom we now know to have been the novelist and critic, William Sharp. “Fiona Macleod’s” first volume, _Pharais; a Romance of the Isles_, was published by Moray, of Derby, in 1894; other works from the same pen, such as _The Washer of the Ford_, were published by Patrick Geddes and Colleagues, at Edinburgh. The work of “Fiona Macleod” possessed all the more pronounced characteristics of Celtic art, with an insistence upon mystical aloofness so deliberate as to suggest a determination to be Celtic at all costs; a pose carried off successfully only by rare literary skill.

The movement in Wales was far less definite. There was a decided quickening of social consciousness among the Celts, which expressed itself in ardent political activities of a Radical tendency. The extreme section was represented by the Labour leader, “Mabon,” but the main current of the national political genius found its fullest expression in the vigorous personality of a rising young politician, Lloyd George, who was later to become the chief protagonist of Joseph Chamberlain during the Jingo outbreak of the final years of the decade. Literary activity was confined to a renewed interest in national myth and tradition, an interest aroused by the magnificent collection of legends made by Lady Charlotte Guest in _The Mabinogian_. But there was no distinctive modern art or literary production. The Welsh poetic renaissance, save for such hints as are to be found in the poems of Ernest Rhys, was unborn, and Wales was still under the impression that all things associated with the theatre were evil; a view that was not to be altered until well into the present century.

These various expressions of the Celtic renaissance, rather than those indicated by Grant Allen, were in the true tradition of that Celtic spirit first interpreted by Ernest Renan in _The Poetry of the Celtic Races_. Speaking of that race he says:

“Its history is itself one long lament; it still recalls its
exiles, its flights across the seas. If at times it seems to be
cheerful, a tear is not slow to glisten behind its smile; it
does not know that strange forgetfulness of human conditions
and destinies which is called gaiety. Its songs of joy end as
elegies; there is nothing to equal the delicious sadness of
its national melodies. One might call them emanations from on
high which, falling drop by drop upon the soul, pass through
it like memories of another world. Never have men feasted so
long upon these solitary delights of the spirit, these poetic
memories which simultaneously intercross all the sensation of
life, so vague, so deep, so penetrative, that one might die from
them, without being able to say whether it was from bitterness
or sweetness.... The essential element of the Celt’s poetic
life is the _adventure_--that is to say, the pursuit of
the unknown, an endless quest after an object ever flying from
desire. It was of this that St Brandam dreamed, that Peredur
sought with his mystic chivalry, that Knight Owen asked of his
subterranean journeyings. This race desires the infinite, it
thirsts for it, and pursues it at all costs, beyond the tomb,
beyond hell itself.”

The most profound and the most effective interpreter of that view of life in modern British literature is W. B. Yeats. It was he who was the chief figure of the Celtic Renaissance of the Eighteen Nineties; the artists, writers and politicians named by Grant Allen were Celts playing the Teutonic game, and winning. In Yeats we have the fullest expression of the intellectual Celt--poet, mystic and patriot--expressing himself in an imaginative propaganda which has affected the thoughts and won the appreciation of the English-speaking world.

He was born in Dublin in the year 1866, the son of the Irish painter J. B. Yeats, R.H.A. Educated chiefly in the city of his birth, he was probably helped in the ripening of his genius by frequent visits to relatives in County Sligo, where, among a peasantry intimate with ghosts, fairies and demons, he laid the foundations of a wide knowledge of the more remote characteristics and traditions of his countrymen. Ireland was his home until 1887. Later, the Yeats family went to London, and during the Nineties he lived partly in the English capital and partly in the Irish. His aim in promoting the Irish Literary movement was the outcome of the idea that for Ireland “a national drama or literature must spring from a native interest in life and its problems, and a strong capacity for life among the people.” So by studying and translating the Gaelic legends, rescuing and recording in literary form the folk-tales of the countryside, and inspiring Irish writers and artists to interpret the national individuality rather than that of alien lands, he hoped to crystallise the scattered forces of Gaelic energy, and thus make a literature that would stand towards Ireland as the literature of the Shakespearean period stands towards England. To make, in short, the literature and art of Ireland both national and quick with a life that might be felt not merely by a select coterie of cultured enthusiasts, but by the whole nation.

Working for this idea, Yeats gathered around him, as we have seen, all that was most hopeful in modern Irish letters. The result to-day is that Ireland is no longer a geographical expression with a clamorous voice; Ireland to-day stands among the nations as a race with a literature and drama expressing its inmost spiritual, intellectual and social needs. In all save the fact that this literature and drama uses a language which Ireland, with the rest of the British Empire and America, owes to the Anglo-Saxon, it is essentially Irish in aim and expression. And, incidentally, it has gone a long way towards exploding the idea that the genius of Ireland found complete expression in the _Irish Melodies_ of Tom Moore and the melodramatic heroes of Dion Boucicault. “Our legends,” says W. B. Yeats, “are always associated with places, and not merely every mountain and valley, but every strange stone and little coppice has its legend, preserved in written or unwritten tradition. Our Irish romantic movement has arisen out of this tradition, and should always, even when it makes new legends about traditional people and things, be haunted by people and places. It should make Ireland, as Ireland and all other lands were in ancient times, a holy land to her own people.”

Yeats, with Maeterlinck, and other foreign symbolists, filled his song and drama with the possibility of unexpected happenings. These works are steeped in a different atmosphere from that in which we ordinarily move. They dare to be unreasonable; to go where Caolte “tosses his burning hair,” and Niam calls:

“Away, come away;
And brood no more where the fire is bright;
Filling thy heart with a mortal dream;
For breasts are heaving and eyes a-gleam;
Away, come away, to the dim twilight.”

In such imaginative abandon there is possibility of discovery and adventure. America was not discovered by Columbus sailing into uncharted seas, but by the imaginative impulse that foretold continents over the rim of the known world. So it is that the Celtic dreaming, made articulate by Yeats and others, contains in its suggestive darknesses more wisdom than subservience to known things and known experiences have contributed to men. The Celts have realised, by intuition rather than by reason, what all people of simple imagination have realised, that life, as Renan says of the Breton, is not a personal adventure undertaken by each man on his own account, but a link in a long chain, a gift received and handed on. In addition to this idea of tradition, the British Celt has realised and reasserted the further idea of experience by individual adventure. W. B. Yeats is distinguished among Celtic writers because of this sense of individuality. His work is not merely pensive and wonder-stricken in the manner of much traditional Celtic art; it is thoughtful and joyful, possessing a strength born of personal happiness and individual wonder. In the retelling of the tales of his nation he has added much of himself to that which “it has taken generations to invent,” and he has come nearer towards stimulating the creation of a noble popular literature than anyone in Ireland since the simple tales and legends of Finn and Oisin were the commonplaces of the national mind.

There was a wizardry about his songs quite new to contemporary Ireland. His choice of words was full of a vague glimmering of unknown things, while his rhythm haunted the mind with the peculiar insistence of songs which have stood age-long tests of familiarity. But the matter was strange to customary hearing, it was redolent of

“The dim wisdoms old and deep
That God gives unto men in sleep.”

Celtic dependence upon the intimation of the inner consciousness, however, did not draw him away from familiar things and more obvious but none the less profound sensations. He was engaged quite as often with the simpler concerns of sentiment, with the home and the affections of the more human among human beings, with “the cry of a child by the roadway, the creak of a lumbering cart, the heavy steps of the ploughman, splashing the wintry mould.”

His tales, like his verses, are coloured by myth and folklore, mysticism and magic. All the stories in _The Secret Rose_ and _The Celtic Twilight_ hinge their interest upon something outside mundane experiences. Many are little more than simple records of tales he has been told by the country folk in the more remote districts of Ireland. “I have written down accurately and candidly,” he says, in the preface to _The Celtic Twilight_, “as much as I have heard and seen and, except by way of commentary, nothing that I have merely imagined. I have been at no pains to separate my own beliefs from those of the peasantry, but have rather let my men and women, ghouls and faeries, go their way unoffended or defended by any argument of mine. The things a man has heard and seen are threads of life, and if he pulled them carefully from the confused distaff of memory, any who will can weave them into whatever garment of belief please them best.” The garment of belief which the poet has woven about these old tales is one of the most successful expressions of the literary renaissance of the Nineties.

Anglo-Saxons are not usually interested in a peasant’s vague experiences in the twilight margin of the West, but they are concerned as to the nature of such experiences. They appreciate the unreal in the dullest ghost story. They recognise the thrill in the shallowest yarn of the ghost-seer, even though the cause be no more mysterious than the desire of a domestic animal for human society, or some white-smocked and bibulous peasant mistaking the churchyard for the king’s highway. But to hear of the doings of Celtic peasants in the language of W. B. Yeats is to hear something that interests beyond the limits of a mere tale. Some of his stories deal frankly with the mysterious as it appeals to the devotee of magic, and some of them have an imaginative atmosphere recalling Edgar Allan Poe. Such are the stories of Michael Robartes in _The Secret Rose_ and _The Tables of the Law_. In the plays, also, similar themes recur, expressed in the drama’s convention of conflict between experience and idea. Here Yeats is more akin to Maeterlinck, although there is always that national note which is nowhere apparent in the work of the Belgian symbolist. _Pelleas and Mélisande_ belongs to no country and all countries, but _The Countess Kathleen_ belongs first to Ireland--and then to humanity.