Transcribed from the 1891 Smith, Elder and Co. edition byDavid Price,
THE STUDY
OF
CELTIC LITERATURE
BY
MATTHEW ARNOLD
Popular Edition
LONDON
SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15WATERLOO PLACE
1891
[All rights reserved]
INTRODUCTION.
The following remarks on the studyof Celtic Literature formed the substance of four lectures givenby me in the chair of poetry at Oxford. They were firstpublished in the Cornhill Magazine, and are now reprintedfrom thence. Again and again, in the course of them, I havemarked the very humble scope intended; which is, not to treat anyspecial branch of scientific Celtic studies (a task for which Iam quite incompetent), but to point out the many directions inwhich the results of those studies offer matter of generalinterest, and to insist on the benefit we may all derive fromknowing the Celt and things Celtic more thoroughly. It wasimpossible, however, to avoid touching on certain points ofethnology and philology, which can be securely handled only bythose who have made these sciences the object of specialstudy. Here the mere literary critic must owe his wholesafety to his tact in choosing authorities to follow, andwhatever he advances must be understood as advanced with a senseof the insecurity which, after all, attaches to such a mode ofproceeding, and as put forward provisionally, by way ofhypothesis rather than of confident assertion.
To mark clearly to the reader both this provisional characterof much which I advance, and my own sense of it, I have inserted,as a check upon some of the positions adopted in the text, notesand comments with which Lord Strangford has kindly furnishedme. Lord Strangford is hardly less distinguished forknowing ethnology and languages so scientifically than forknowing so much of them; and his interest, even from thevantage-ground of his scientific knowledge, and after making alldue reserves on points of scientific detail, in mytreatment,—with merely the resources and point of view of aliterary critic at my command,—of such a subject as thestudy of Celtic Literature, is the most encouraging assurance Icould have received that my attempt is not altogether a vainone.
Both Lord Strangford and others whose opinion I respect havesaid that I am unjust in calling Mr. Nash, the acute and learnedauthor of Taliesin, or the Bards and Druids ofBritain, a ‘Celt-hater.’ ‘He is adenouncer,’ says Lord Strangford in a note on thisexpression, ‘of Celtic extravagance, that is all; he is ananti-Philocelt, a very different thing from an anti-Celt, andquite indispensable in scientific inquiry. As Philoceltismhas hitherto,—hitherto, remember,—meant nothing butuncritical acceptance and irrational admiration of the belovedobject’s sayings and doings, without reference to truth oneway or the other, it is surely in the interest of science tosupport him in the main. In tracing the workings of oldCeltic leaven in poems which embody the Celtic soul of all timein a mediæval form, I do not see that you come into anynecessary opposition with him, for your concern is with thespirit, his with the substance only.’ I ent