

Transcribed from the 1891 Smith, Elder and Co. edition by David Price,
email ccx074@pglaf.org

                          [Picture: Book cover]





                                THE STUDY
                                    OF
                            CELTIC LITERATURE


                                * * * * *

                                    BY

                              MATTHEW ARNOLD

                                * * * * *

                             Popular Edition

                                * * * * *

                                  LONDON

                  SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 WATERLOO PLACE
                                   1891

                         [_All rights reserved_]




INTRODUCTION.


THE following remarks on the study of Celtic Literature formed the
substance of four lectures given by me in the chair of poetry at Oxford.
They were first published in the _Cornhill Magazine_, and are now
reprinted from thence.  Again and again, in the course of them, I have
marked the very humble scope intended; which is, not to treat any special
branch of scientific Celtic studies (a task for which I am quite
incompetent), but to point out the many directions in which the results
of those studies offer matter of general interest, and to insist on the
benefit we may all derive from knowing the Celt and things Celtic more
thoroughly.  It was impossible, however, to avoid touching on certain
points of ethnology and philology, which can be securely handled only by
those who have made these sciences the object of special study.  Here the
mere literary critic must owe his whole safety to his tact in choosing
authorities to follow, and whatever he advances must be understood as
advanced with a sense of the insecurity which, after all, attaches to
such a mode of proceeding, and as put forward provisionally, by way of
hypothesis rather than of confident assertion.

To mark clearly to the reader both this provisional character of 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, notes and comments with which
Lord Strangford has kindly furnished me.  Lord Strangford is hardly less
distinguished for knowing ethnology and languages so scientifically than
for knowing so much of them; and his interest, even from the
vantage-ground of his scientific knowledge, and after making all due
reserves on points of scientific detail, in my treatment,—with merely the
resources and point of view of a literary critic at my command,—of such a
subject as the study of Celtic Literature, is the most encouraging
assurance I could have received that my attempt is not altogether a vain
one.

Both Lord Strangford and others whose opinion I respect have said that I
am unjust in calling Mr. Nash, the acute and learned author of
_Taliesin_, _or the Bards and Druids of Britain_, a ‘Celt-hater.’  ‘He is
a denouncer,’ says Lord Strangford in a note on this expression, ‘of
Celtic extravagance, that is all; he is an anti-Philocelt, a very
different thing from an anti-Celt, and quite indispensable in scientific
inquiry.  As Philoceltism has hitherto,—hitherto, remember,—meant nothing
but uncritical acceptance and irrational admiration of the beloved
object’s sayings and doings, without reference to truth one way or the
other, it is surely in the interest of science to support him in the
main.  In tracing the workings of old Celtic leaven in poems which embody
the Celtic soul of all time in a mediæval form, I do not see that you
come into any necessary opposition with him, for your concern is with the
spirit, his with the substance only.’  I entirely agree with almost all
which Lord Strangford here urges, and indeed, so sincere is my respect
for Mr. Nash’s critical discernment and learning, and so unhesitating my
recognition of the usefulness, in many respects, of the work of
demolition performed by him, that in originally designating him as a
Celt-hater, I hastened to add, as the reader will see by referring to the
passage, {0a} words of explanation and apology for so calling him.  But I
thought then, and I think still, that Mr. Nash, in pursuing his work of
demolition, too much puts out of sight the positive and constructive
performance for which this work of demolition is to clear the ground.  I
thought then, and I think still, that in this Celtic controversy, as in
other controversies, it is most desirable both to believe and to profess
that the work of construction is the fruitful and important work, and
that we are demolishing only to prepare for it.  Mr. Nash’s scepticism
seems to me,—in the aspect in which his work, on the whole, shows it,—too
absolute, too stationary, too much without a future; and this tends to
make it, for the non-Celtic part of his readers, less fruitful than it
otherwise would be, and for his Celtic readers, harsh and repellent.  I
have therefore suffered my remarks on Mr. Nash still to stand, though
with a little modification; but I hope he will read them by