The deed drifted eventu-
ally into the British Museum, and the present writer discovered the
Cornish verses on it, not wholly by accident, about nineteen years
ago.
ally into the British Museum, and the present writer discovered the
Cornish verses on it, not wholly by accident, about nineteen years
ago.
Warner - World's Best Literature - v06 - Cal to Chr
The original will be found in the second volume of the
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. "
Tales.
―
WⓇ
-
IN HEBRID SEAS
E 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!
## p. 3437 (#411) ###########################################
CELTIC LITERATURE
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) mori-
bund? 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 medieval scribes and scholars doctored the
older material which fell into their hands. But in Welsh, the sepa-
element is often even a
-
3437
ration of the primitive from the medieval
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 Caledo-
nius, 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
## p. 3438 (#412) ###########################################
3438
CELTIC LITERATURE
thereafter his bardic utterances assumed a more and more mystical
and oracular form. This, added to his mysterious and magnetic per-
sonality 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, dæmonic! 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 touch-
ing 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 imagina-
tion 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 dis-
puted 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.
## p. 3439 (#413) ###########################################
CELTIC LITERATURE
3439
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 Archæology,' 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
Villemarqué 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 mediæval 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 medieval, 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 medieval 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 mediæval art and mystic imagination. For
comparison let us take an early and a late poem, commonly gath-
ered, as in the 'Myvyrian Archæology,' 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 medieval and
modern imagination, is as wonderful a poem of its kind as any litera-
ture 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 spir-
ited 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:-
## p. 3440 (#414) ###########################################
3440
CELTIC LITERATURE
"Yn nrws rhyd gwelais i wyr lledruddion,
Eirf ddillwng y rhag blawr 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
their arms.
. .
their hands on the
warriors. »
the fort have I seen men, dyed with red, who hurtled
They fell to the ground together when the day was lost,
crucifix. And horror was in the pale face of the dead
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
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.
coast.
"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 he 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. ”
## p. 3441 (#415) ###########################################
CELTIC LITERATURE
3441
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. Fol-
lowing 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 trans-
lation 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'
VI-216
## p. 3442 (#416) ###########################################
3442
CELTIC LITERATURE
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 mediæval 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,' ‘Kil-
hwch 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
## p. 3443 (#417) ###########################################
CELTIC LITERATURE
3443
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 pro-
verbial 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 show-
ing 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 idio-
matic 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.
## p. 3444 (#418) ###########################################
CELTIC LITERATURE
3444
«<
Under happier conditions to-day, the latest expression of this vital
persistence of the Welsh in the quest of spiritual ideals is the move-
ment 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 Sil-
vain 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, Mabi-
nogion, and Taliesin. The Breton branch of Celtic literature will be treated
under the heading (Villemarqué,' 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, hold-
ing a middle position, philologically as well as geographically, between
Welsh and Breton, was the mother tongue of at any rate the peas-
antry 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
Christinas game," they were overruled by the forcible argument of
"apostolick blows and knocks," and had to submit. Then the lan-
guage 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 Pent-
reath, 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 dia-
lect 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.
## p. 3445 (#419) ###########################################
CELTIC LITERATURE
3445
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 fol-
lows:-
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 Nico-
demus 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 connect-
ing 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 gath-
ered 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 Beth-
esda, 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, per-
haps 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.
## p. 3446 (#420) ###########################################
3446
CELTIC LITERATURE
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 per-
haps 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 eventu-
ally 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 cen-
tury, 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 disserta-
tion 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 pos-
session of his descendants. Most of them have been printed by
Davies Gilbert (with the play of the 'Creation'), by William Pryce
## p. 3447 (#421) ###########################################
CELTIC LITERATURE
3447
in the Archæologia Cornu-Britannica' in 1790, by Mr. W. C. Bor-
lase in the Transactions of the Royal Institution of Cornwall, and
in a fragmentary way in a few other places. They are mostly trans-
lations 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 epi-
taph in the language; written while it was still just alive, and per-
haps 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
Is 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.
## p. 3448 (#422) ###########################################
3448
CELTIC LITERATURE
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?
Seth-
Cherubin
Seth-
Tell me anon.
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.
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.
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
## p. 3449 (#423) ###########################################
CELTIC LITERATURE
3449
Cherubin
Seth
-
Seth-
―――
Seth-
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.
O Seth, thou art come
Within the gate of Paradise:
Tell me what thou sawest.
All the beauty that I saw
Tongue of man can never tell,
Of good fruits and beauteous flowers,
Of minstrels and sweet song,
Cherubin-Look yet again within,
Cherubin
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.
And all else thou shalt see
Before thou come from it.
I am happy to have leave;
I will go to the gate at once,
Cherubin - Dost thou see more now
That I may see further good.
[He goes and looks and returns.
Than what there was just now?
There is a serpent in the tree:
Truly a hideous beast is he.
Go yet the third time to it,
And look better at the tree.
Look what you can see on it
Besides roots and branches.
## p. 3450 (#424) ###########################################
3450
CELTIC LITERATURE
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.
William Sharpe
Emert
Rhys
## p. 3450 (#425) ###########################################
## p. 3450 (#426) ###########################################
CERVANTES.
## p. 3450 (#427) ###########################################
2451
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## p. 3450 (#428) ###########################################
S
2
衍
## p. 3451 (#429) ###########################################
3451
CERVANTES
(1547-1616)
BY GEORGE SANTAYANA
ERVANTES 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 uni-
versal 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 charac-
ters, 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 em-
bodied. His own last and most carefully written book, the Travails
of Persiles and Sigismunda,' is in many respects an imitation of
## p. 3452 (#430) ###########################################
CERVANTES
3452
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 situa-
tions. 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 narra-
tives 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
## p. 3453 (#431) ###########################################
CERVANTES
3453
1
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 extrava-
gances 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 concep-
tion 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 inti-
mately 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, indig-
nities, 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, cour-
ageous, 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
## p. 3454 (#432) ###########################################
3454
CERVANTES
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 gov-
ernorship 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 in-
telligence 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 hel-
met, 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 ac-
count 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 famili-
arity and commonness of the situations in which Don Quixote finds
himself, so that the absurdity of his pretensions may be overwhelm-
ingly shown. Critics are agreed in blaming the exceptions which
## p. 3455 (#433) ###########################################
CERVANTES
3455
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 co-
herence, 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 incomplete-
ness 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, with-
out 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 char-
acterization 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' continu-
ally provokes; seldom has it found its causes in such genuine fancy,
such profound and real contrast, and such victorious good-humor.
## p. 3456 (#434) ###########################################
3456
CERVANTES
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 will-
ingly the kind which habit has accustomed us to regard as inevi-
table, and which personal experience very probably has made an old
friend.
'Don Quixote' has accordingly enjoyed a universal popularity, and
has had the singular privilege of accomplishing the object for which
it was written, which was to recall fiction from the extravagances of
the books of chivalry to the study of real life. This is the simple
object which Cervantes had and avowed.
He was a literary man
with literary interests, and the idea which came to him was to ridi-
cule the absurdities of the prevalent literary mode. The rich vein
which he struck in the conception of Don Quixote's madness and
topsy-turvy adventures encouraged him to go on. The subject and
the characters deepened under his hands, until from a parody of a
certain kind of romances the story threatened to become a satire on
human idealism. At the same time Cervantes grew fond of his hero,
and made him, as we must feel, in some sort a representative of his
own chivalrous enthusiasms and constant disappointments.
Just as
We need not, however, see in this transformation any deep-laid
malice or remote significance. As the tale opened out before the
author's fancy and enlisted his closer and more loving attention, he
naturally enriched it with all the wealth of his experience.
he diversified it with pictures of common life and manners,
so he
weighted it with the burden of human tragedy. He left upon it an
impress of his own nobility and misfortunes side by side with a record
of his time and country. But in this there was nothing intentional.
He only spoke out of the fullness of his heart. The highest motives
and characters had been revealed to him by his own impulses, and
the lowest by his daily experience.
There is nothing in the book that suggests a premeditated satire
upon faith and enthusiasm in general. The author's evident purpose
is to amuse, not to upbraid or to discourage. There is no bitterness
in his pathos or despair in his disenchantment; partly because he
retains a healthy fondness for this naughty world, and partly because
his heart is profoundly and entirely Christian. He would have re-
jected with indignation an interpretation of his work that would
see in it an attack on religion or even on chivalry.
His birth and
## p. 3457 (#435) ###########################################
CERVANTES
3457
nurture had made him religious and chivalrous from the beginning,
and he remained so by conviction to the end. He was still full of
plans and hopes when death overtook him, but he greeted it with
perfect simplicity, without lamentations over the past or anxiety for
the future.
If we could have asked Cervantes what the moral of Don Quixote
was to his own mind, he would have told us perhaps that it was this:
that the force of idealism is wasted when it does not recognize the
reality of things. Neglect of the facts of daily life made the absurd-
ity of the romances of chivalry and of the enterprise of Don Quixote.
What is needed is not, of course, that idealism should be surren-
dered, either in literature or in life; but that in both it should be
made efficacious by a better adjustment to the reality it would
transform.
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. "
Tales.
―
WⓇ
-
IN HEBRID SEAS
E 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!
## p. 3437 (#411) ###########################################
CELTIC LITERATURE
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) mori-
bund? 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 medieval scribes and scholars doctored the
older material which fell into their hands. But in Welsh, the sepa-
element is often even a
-
3437
ration of the primitive from the medieval
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 Caledo-
nius, 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
## p. 3438 (#412) ###########################################
3438
CELTIC LITERATURE
thereafter his bardic utterances assumed a more and more mystical
and oracular form. This, added to his mysterious and magnetic per-
sonality 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, dæmonic! 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 touch-
ing 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 imagina-
tion 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 dis-
puted 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.
## p. 3439 (#413) ###########################################
CELTIC LITERATURE
3439
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 Archæology,' 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
Villemarqué 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 mediæval 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 medieval, 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 medieval 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 mediæval art and mystic imagination. For
comparison let us take an early and a late poem, commonly gath-
ered, as in the 'Myvyrian Archæology,' 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 medieval and
modern imagination, is as wonderful a poem of its kind as any litera-
ture 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 spir-
ited 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:-
## p. 3440 (#414) ###########################################
3440
CELTIC LITERATURE
"Yn nrws rhyd gwelais i wyr lledruddion,
Eirf ddillwng y rhag blawr 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
their arms.
. .
their hands on the
warriors. »
the fort have I seen men, dyed with red, who hurtled
They fell to the ground together when the day was lost,
crucifix. And horror was in the pale face of the dead
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
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.
coast.
"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 he 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. ”
## p. 3441 (#415) ###########################################
CELTIC LITERATURE
3441
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. Fol-
lowing 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 trans-
lation 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'
VI-216
## p. 3442 (#416) ###########################################
3442
CELTIC LITERATURE
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 mediæval 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,' ‘Kil-
hwch 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
## p. 3443 (#417) ###########################################
CELTIC LITERATURE
3443
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 pro-
verbial 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 show-
ing 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 idio-
matic 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.
## p. 3444 (#418) ###########################################
CELTIC LITERATURE
3444
«<
Under happier conditions to-day, the latest expression of this vital
persistence of the Welsh in the quest of spiritual ideals is the move-
ment 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 Sil-
vain 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, Mabi-
nogion, and Taliesin. The Breton branch of Celtic literature will be treated
under the heading (Villemarqué,' 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, hold-
ing a middle position, philologically as well as geographically, between
Welsh and Breton, was the mother tongue of at any rate the peas-
antry 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
Christinas game," they were overruled by the forcible argument of
"apostolick blows and knocks," and had to submit. Then the lan-
guage 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 Pent-
reath, 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 dia-
lect 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.
## p. 3445 (#419) ###########################################
CELTIC LITERATURE
3445
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 fol-
lows:-
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 Nico-
demus 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 connect-
ing 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 gath-
ered 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 Beth-
esda, 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, per-
haps 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.
## p. 3446 (#420) ###########################################
3446
CELTIC LITERATURE
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 per-
haps 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 eventu-
ally 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 cen-
tury, 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 disserta-
tion 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 pos-
session of his descendants. Most of them have been printed by
Davies Gilbert (with the play of the 'Creation'), by William Pryce
## p. 3447 (#421) ###########################################
CELTIC LITERATURE
3447
in the Archæologia Cornu-Britannica' in 1790, by Mr. W. C. Bor-
lase in the Transactions of the Royal Institution of Cornwall, and
in a fragmentary way in a few other places. They are mostly trans-
lations 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 epi-
taph in the language; written while it was still just alive, and per-
haps 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
Is 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.
## p. 3448 (#422) ###########################################
3448
CELTIC LITERATURE
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?
Seth-
Cherubin
Seth-
Tell me anon.
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.
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.
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
## p. 3449 (#423) ###########################################
CELTIC LITERATURE
3449
Cherubin
Seth
-
Seth-
―――
Seth-
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.
O Seth, thou art come
Within the gate of Paradise:
Tell me what thou sawest.
All the beauty that I saw
Tongue of man can never tell,
Of good fruits and beauteous flowers,
Of minstrels and sweet song,
Cherubin-Look yet again within,
Cherubin
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.
And all else thou shalt see
Before thou come from it.
I am happy to have leave;
I will go to the gate at once,
Cherubin - Dost thou see more now
That I may see further good.
[He goes and looks and returns.
Than what there was just now?
There is a serpent in the tree:
Truly a hideous beast is he.
Go yet the third time to it,
And look better at the tree.
Look what you can see on it
Besides roots and branches.
## p. 3450 (#424) ###########################################
3450
CELTIC LITERATURE
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.
William Sharpe
Emert
Rhys
## p. 3450 (#425) ###########################################
## p. 3450 (#426) ###########################################
CERVANTES.
## p. 3450 (#427) ###########################################
2451
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## p. 3450 (#428) ###########################################
S
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## p. 3451 (#429) ###########################################
3451
CERVANTES
(1547-1616)
BY GEORGE SANTAYANA
ERVANTES 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 uni-
versal 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 charac-
ters, 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 em-
bodied. His own last and most carefully written book, the Travails
of Persiles and Sigismunda,' is in many respects an imitation of
## p. 3452 (#430) ###########################################
CERVANTES
3452
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 situa-
tions. 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 narra-
tives 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
## p. 3453 (#431) ###########################################
CERVANTES
3453
1
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 extrava-
gances 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 concep-
tion 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 inti-
mately 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, indig-
nities, 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, cour-
ageous, 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
## p. 3454 (#432) ###########################################
3454
CERVANTES
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 gov-
ernorship 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 in-
telligence 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 hel-
met, 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 ac-
count 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 famili-
arity and commonness of the situations in which Don Quixote finds
himself, so that the absurdity of his pretensions may be overwhelm-
ingly shown. Critics are agreed in blaming the exceptions which
## p. 3455 (#433) ###########################################
CERVANTES
3455
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 co-
herence, 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 incomplete-
ness 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, with-
out 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 char-
acterization 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' continu-
ally provokes; seldom has it found its causes in such genuine fancy,
such profound and real contrast, and such victorious good-humor.
## p. 3456 (#434) ###########################################
3456
CERVANTES
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 will-
ingly the kind which habit has accustomed us to regard as inevi-
table, and which personal experience very probably has made an old
friend.
'Don Quixote' has accordingly enjoyed a universal popularity, and
has had the singular privilege of accomplishing the object for which
it was written, which was to recall fiction from the extravagances of
the books of chivalry to the study of real life. This is the simple
object which Cervantes had and avowed.
He was a literary man
with literary interests, and the idea which came to him was to ridi-
cule the absurdities of the prevalent literary mode. The rich vein
which he struck in the conception of Don Quixote's madness and
topsy-turvy adventures encouraged him to go on. The subject and
the characters deepened under his hands, until from a parody of a
certain kind of romances the story threatened to become a satire on
human idealism. At the same time Cervantes grew fond of his hero,
and made him, as we must feel, in some sort a representative of his
own chivalrous enthusiasms and constant disappointments.
Just as
We need not, however, see in this transformation any deep-laid
malice or remote significance. As the tale opened out before the
author's fancy and enlisted his closer and more loving attention, he
naturally enriched it with all the wealth of his experience.
he diversified it with pictures of common life and manners,
so he
weighted it with the burden of human tragedy. He left upon it an
impress of his own nobility and misfortunes side by side with a record
of his time and country. But in this there was nothing intentional.
He only spoke out of the fullness of his heart. The highest motives
and characters had been revealed to him by his own impulses, and
the lowest by his daily experience.
There is nothing in the book that suggests a premeditated satire
upon faith and enthusiasm in general. The author's evident purpose
is to amuse, not to upbraid or to discourage. There is no bitterness
in his pathos or despair in his disenchantment; partly because he
retains a healthy fondness for this naughty world, and partly because
his heart is profoundly and entirely Christian. He would have re-
jected with indignation an interpretation of his work that would
see in it an attack on religion or even on chivalry.
His birth and
## p. 3457 (#435) ###########################################
CERVANTES
3457
nurture had made him religious and chivalrous from the beginning,
and he remained so by conviction to the end. He was still full of
plans and hopes when death overtook him, but he greeted it with
perfect simplicity, without lamentations over the past or anxiety for
the future.
If we could have asked Cervantes what the moral of Don Quixote
was to his own mind, he would have told us perhaps that it was this:
that the force of idealism is wasted when it does not recognize the
reality of things. Neglect of the facts of daily life made the absurd-
ity of the romances of chivalry and of the enterprise of Don Quixote.
What is needed is not, of course, that idealism should be surren-
dered, either in literature or in life; but that in both it should be
made efficacious by a better adjustment to the reality it would
transform.
