


Produced by David Widger





CELT AND SAXON


By George Meredith


1910.




CONTENTS

  BOOK 1.
  I.        WHEREIN AN EXCURSION IS MADE IN A CELTIC MIND
  II.       MR. ADISTER
  III.      CAROLINE
  IV.       THE PRINCESS
  V.        AT THE PIANOS CHIEFLY WITHOUT MUSIC
  VI.       A CONSULTATION: WITH OPINIONS UPON WELSH WOMEN AND THE CAMBRIAN
            RACE
  VII.      THE MINIATURE
  VIII.     CAPTAIN CON AND MRS. ADISTER O'DONNELL
  IX.       THE CAPTAIN'S CABIN
  X.        THE BROTHERS
  XI.       INTRODUCING A NEW CHARACTER

  BOOK 2.
  XII.      MISS MATTOCK
  XIII.     THE DINNER-PARTY
  XIV.      OF ROCKNEY
  XV.       THE MATTOCK FAMILY
  XVI.      OF THE GREAT MR. BULL AND THE CELTIC AND SAXON VIEW OF HIM:
            AND SOMETHING OF RICHARD ROCKNEY
  XVII.     CROSSING THE RUBICON
  XVIII.    CAPTAIN CON'S LETTER
  XIX.      MARS CONVALESCENT




CHAPTER I. WHEREIN AN EXCURSION IS MADE IN A CELTIC MIND

A young Irish gentleman of the numerous clan O'Donnells, and a Patrick,
hardly a distinction of him until we know him, had bound himself, by
purchase of a railway-ticket, to travel direct to the borders of North
Wales, on a visit to a notable landowner of those marches, the Squire
Adister, whose family-seat was where the hills begin to lift and spy
into the heart of black mountains. Examining his ticket with an apparent
curiosity, the son of a greener island debated whether it would not be
better for him to follow his inclinations, now that he had gone so far
as to pay for the journey, and stay. But his inclinations were also
subject to question, upon his considering that he had expended pounds
English for the privilege of making the journey in this very train. He
asked himself earnestly what was the nature of the power which forced
him to do it--a bad genius or a good: and it seemed to him a sort of
answer, inasmuch as it silenced the contending parties, that he had been
the victim of an impetus. True; still his present position involved a
certain outlay of money simply, not at all his bondage to the instrument
it had procured for him, and that was true; nevertheless, to buy a
ticket to shy it away is an incident so uncommon, that if we can but
pause to dwell on the singularity of the act, we are unlikely to abjure
our fellowship with them who would not be guilty of it; and therefore,
by the aid of his reflections and a remainder of the impetus, Mr.
Patrick O'Donnell stepped into a carriage of the train like any
ordinary English traveller, between whom and his destination there is an
agreement to meet if they can.

It is an experience of hesitating minds, be they Saxon or others, that
when we have submitted our persons to the charge of public companies,
immediately, as if the renouncing of our independence into their
hands had given us a taste of a will of our own, we are eager for the
performance of their contract to do what we are only half inclined to;
the train cannot go fast enough to please us, though we could excuse
it for breaking down; stoppages at stations are impertinences, and the
delivery of us at last on the platform is an astonishment, for it is not
we who have done it--we have not even desired it. To be imperfectly in
accord with the velocity precipitating us upon a certain point, is to
be going without our heads, which have so much the habit of supposing
it must be whither we intend, when we go in a determined manner, that
a doubt of it distracts the understanding--decapitates us; suddenly
to alight, moreover, and find ourselves dropped at the heels of flying
Time, like an unconsidered bundle, is anything but a reconstruction of
the edifice. The natural revelry of the blood in speed suffers a violent
shock, not to speak of our notion of being left behind, quite isolated
and unsound. Or, if you insist, the condition shall be said to belong
exclusively to Celtic nature, seeing that it had been drawn directly
from a scion of one of those tribes.

Young Patrick jumped from the train as headless as good St. Denis. He
was a juvenile thinker, and to discover himself here, where he both
wished and wished not to be, now deeming the negative sternly in the
ascendant, flicked his imagination with awe of the influence of the
railway service upon the destinies of man. Settling a mental debate
about a backward flight, he drove across the land so foreign to his eyes
and affections, and breasted a strong tide of wishes that it were in a
contrary direction. He would rather have looked upon the desert under
a sand-storm, or upon a London suburb yet he looked thirstingly. Each
variation of landscape of the curved highway offered him in a moment
decisive features: he fitted them to a story he knew: the whole circle
was animated by a couple of pale mounted figures beneath no happy light.
For this was the air once breathed by Adiante Adister, his elder brother
Philip's love and lost love: here she had been to Philip flame along
the hill-ridges, his rose-world in the dust-world, the saintly in his
earthly. And how had she rewarded him for that reverential love of her?
She had forborne to kill him. The bitter sylph of the mountain lures men
to climb