Britain (the Gaelic Celts) to join their countrymen across the Irish Sea. Soon, however, the Teutons, who had formed a Belgic Gaul, crossed the English Channel, and were strong enough to form a Belgic England; and from all lands opposite the eastern coast of Britain, the Teutons kept coming over as colonists. 3. This process of change was continuous, and may have been so for some centuries before the hundred years between the middle of the fifth and the middle of the sixth century after Christ, during which there were six Teutonic settlements thought worthy of especial record. The six settlements were thus distinguished because they established sovereignties, and began the strong uprearing of the nation which took from a great immigrant Teutonic tribe its name of English. The First English, who are commonly known by the schoolname of Anglo-Saxons, but who even then called themselves the English people (Englisc folc), were formed by a gradual blending of Teutonic tribes. They came, at different times and in different generations, from different parts of the opposite coast. On the eastern shores, from the Moray Firth to below Whitby, the land lay readiest of access to men from the opposite side of the North Sea, among whom Scandinavians were numerous; accordingly the Scandinavian element is chiefly represented in the character, form, face, and provincial dialects of the north country. The part of the east coast belonging now to Lincolnshire was readiest of access to the Danes; and in Lincolnshire the Danish element is strongly represented. Farther south, the coast was opposite the Frisian settlements; therefore, among the immigrants over the North Sea to Southern England, the Frisians, forefathers of the modern Dutchmen, would predominate. Adventurers of many tribes might join in any single expedition. When they had formed their settlements, the Teutonic spirit of co-operation, and the social progress that came of it, produced changes of home, intermarriages, community of interests, community of speech in a language proper to the cultivated men of the whole country. This manner of speech, First English (or Anglo-Saxon), was not brought complete from any place upon the Continent, but it was formed here by a fusion of the closely-related languages or dialects of the Teutonic immigrants. 4 Thus we see that by the year 670, at about which time the first writing in English literature was produced, there was in the British Isles a population consisting in part of Celts, and in part of Teutons; and it is from a blending .of these tribes during the twelve centuries that have elapsed since then, that the present English-speaking race have derived their physical and spiritual qualities. English literature from the seventh century to the nineteenth is a continuous expression of those qualities, both spiritual and physical. 5. First we desire to know what qualities have been contributed to the common stock by the Celt; for his influence on English literature proceeds not from example set by one people, and followed by another, but, in the way of nature, by establishment of blood-relationship and the transmission of modified and blended character to a succeeding generation. The Gaelic Celt now represented by the Irish and the Highland Scotchwas at his best an artist. He had a sense of literature; he had active and bold imagination, joy in bright color, skill in music, touches of a keen sense of honor in most savage times, and in religion fervent and self-sacrificing zeal. In the Cymric Celt-now represented by the Welsh there was the same artist nature. By natural difference, and partly, no doubt, because their first known poets learned in suffering what they taught in song, the oldest Cymric music comes to us, not like the music of the Irish harp, in throbbings of a pleasant tunefulness, but as a wail that beats again, again, and again some iterated burden on the ear. In the fusion of the two races, the Celtic and Teutonic, which slowly began among the hills and valleys of the north and west of England, where the populations came most freely into contact, the gift of genius was the contribution of the Celt. "The true glory of the Celt in Europe," says James Fergusson, "is his artistic eminence. It is not, perhaps, too much to assert, that, without his intervention, we should not have possessed in modern times a church worthy of ad miration, or a picture or a statue we could look at without shame." The sense of literature was shown in the earliest times by the support of a distinct literary class among the Celts, who then possessed England. In Erin, the first headquarters of song and story, even in the third century there was the poet with his staff of office, a square tablet staff, on the four sides of which he cut his verse; and there were degrees in literature. There was the Ollamh, or perfect doctor, who could recite seven fifties of historic tales; and there were others, down to the Driseg, who could tell but twenty. As we travel down from the remotest time of which there can be doubtful record, we find the profession of historian to be a recognized calling, transmitted in one family from generation to generation, and these later professors of history still bore the name of Ollamhs. Of the active and bold fancy that accompanied this Celtic sense of literature as an art, and of the Celt's delight in bright color, almost any one of the old Gaelic poems will bear witness. The delight in color is less manifest in the first poems of the Cymry. For them the one color was that of blood: they are of the sixth century, and sing of men who died in the vain fight against the spreading power of the Teuton. Of those Gaels, who were known as Gauls to Rome, Diodorus the Sicilian told, three centuries before the time of Fionn and Oisin, how they wore bracelets and costly finger-rings, gold corselets, and dyed tunics flowered with colors of every kind, trews, striped cloaks fastened with a brooch, and divided into many party-colored squares, a taste still represented by the Highland plaid. In the old Gaelic tale of the "Tain Bo" men are described marching: "Some are with red cloaks; others with light-blue cloaks; others with deep-blue cloaks; others with green, or gray, or white, or yellow cloaks, bright and fluttering about them. There is a young, red-freckled lad, with a crimson cloak, in the midst of them; a golden brooch in that cloak at his breast." Even the ghost of a Celt, if it dropped the substance, retained all the coloring of life. The vivacity of Celtic fancy is shown also by an outpouring of bold metaphor and effective simile: : "Both shoulders covered with his painted shield, Here, in a mere average stanza, containing one of the ninety celebrations of the Cymric chiefs who fell at Cattraeth, we have more similes than in the six thousand and odd lines (English measure) of Beowulf," the first heroic poem of the Teutonic section of our people. The delight in music among the old Irish Celts in the music of the harp and tabor, among the old Welsh Celts in the music of the harp, the pipe, and the crowd - is another characteristic. It is noted also that the music of the Gaels was sweet, lively, and rapid, and that the music of the Cymry was slower and more monotonous. sense. 6. But what, we ask in the second place, are the qualities contributed to the common English stock by the Teutons? They were wanting in vivacity of genius. They were practical, earnest, social, true to a high sense of duty, and had faith in God. They used few similes, and, although their poetry is sometimes said to abound in metaphor, its metaphors were few and obvious. By metaphor a word is turned out of its natural There is little of metaphor in calling the sea the waterstreet, the whale-road, or the swan-road; the ship, a wave-traverser, the sea-wood, or the floating-wood; a chief's retainers, his hearth-sharers; or night, the shadow-covering of creatures. This kind of poetical periphrasis abounds in First English poetry; but it proceeds from the thoughtful habit of realization, which extends also to a representation of the sense of words by some literal suggestion that will bring them quickened with a familiar experience or human association to the mind. There is in the unmixed English an imagination with deep roots and little flower, solid stem and no luxuriance of foliage. That which it was in a poet's mind to say was realized first, and then uttered with a direct earnestness which carried every thought straight home to the apprehension of the listener. The descendants of those Frisians who did not cross to England resemble the First English before they had been quickened with a dash of Celtic blood. Both Dutch and English, when the seed of Christianity struck root among them, mastered the first conditions of a full development of its grand truths with the same solid earnestness, and carried their convictions out to the same practical result. Holland, indeed, has been, not less than England, a battle-ground of civil and religious liberty. The power of the English character, and therefore of the literature that expresses it, lies in this energetic sense of truth, and this firm habit of looking to the end. Christianity having been once accepted, aided as it was greatly in its first establishment among us by zeal of the Gael and Cymry, the First English writers fastened upon it, and throughout the whole subsequent history of our literature, varied and enlivened by the diverse blending of the races that joined in the forming of the nation, its religious energy has been the centre of its life. |