NOTES

New Zealand Tablet, 27 April 1922, Page 26

NOTES

The Celtic Note „ Renan, a Celt himself, wrote a beautiful book on the Poetry of the Celtic Races, in which he analysed in every detail the Celtic love of nature, the falling for nature's magic, the pure realistic naturalism. "Compared with the classical imagination," he says, "the Celtic imagination is indeed the infinite contrasted with the finite. . .Its history is one long lament, it still recalls its exiles, its fights across the seas. . . If at times it seems to be cheerful, its tear is not slow to glisten behind the smile. Its songs of joy end as elegies; there is nothing to equal the delightful sadness of its national melodies." The Celts are an exiled race. It has been said of' them that their centre of gravity is not in this world. Beneath their joyousness and youthful courage there is always the wistful note of longing. It is not the Roman's atra cur a p o equitem the dull care behind the horseman—nor the taedium vitae, the Weltschmerz, the pessimism which is a modern disease peculiar to those who try too much to fix their centre of gravity on this earth; the Celtic melancholy springs rather from their spiritual nature and from their vision of things unseen but known enough to bring longing for another world. Renan's observation that the best of our lyrics are sad is quite true. Take any of them—Scottish, Irish, Welsh, or French—and you feel the minor chords vibrating with pity and pathos: in Ye Banks and Braes, in Eileen Alanna, in The Coiilin-, the note is always there. Arnold's View Renan wrote of something within his own soul, and analysis of what is within ourselves is always difficult, as every student of psychology can tell you. Matthew Arnold, writing with the detachment of an outsider and an impartial observer, was more helpful and less vague in his notes. He finds that the Celtic passion for nature comes almost more from a sense of her mystery than of her beauty, and that it adds charm and magic to nature. He tells us that the Celtic imagination and melancholy are "a passionate, turbulent, indomitable reaction against the despotism of fact" ; and, moreover, that whenever we find in English literature the qualities of charm and magic it is due to Celtic inspiration. . Yeats points out that Arnold did not know as much as we know now" about Celtic folk-songs and folk-belief, and that he did not appear to understand that the Celt's natural magic is but the heritage of the ancient pagan religion, of that natureworship and the troubled ecstasy and reverence it begot, with the certainty that all beautiful places were haunted, peculiar to the ancient Celtic races. Arnold's passages to show the Celtic magic and the intensity arising from delight in nature are well chosen. In "Magic casements opening on the foam of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn"; in "moving waters at their priest-like task of pure ablution round earth's human shore" : in "the floor of heaven . . . inlaid with patens of bright gold"; in the description of Dido standing on "the wild sea banks, a willow in her hand," the Celtic note is unmistakable. In the Mabinogion we find that delight expressed in the description of Olwen: "More yellow was her hair than the flower of the broom, and her skin was whiter than the foam of the wave, and fairer were her hands and her fingers than the blossoms of the wood-anemone amidst the spray of the meadow fountains." The Greeks, as Arnold tells us, looked at nature in its light and brightness—"without esctasy but with affection," Yeats adds. And the example from Keats of this Greek wav of writing strikes us as being .particularly happy: there is a throb of Homer's lyre What little town by river or sea-shore Or mountain built with quist citadel, Is emptied of its folk this pious morn ? They looked at nature calmly and happily; they did

not see it with the religious eye of the Celt nor feel its symbolism. The Sorrowful Lament for Ireland Some two hundred years ago an unknown priest wrote in Gaelic a poem which Lady Gregory has given us in passionate English prose. We bring it under the notice of our readers as a fine sample of that emotional, intense Irish poetry which is becoming the inspiration of the singers of Eire Og now: I do not know of anything under the sky That is friendly or favorable to the Gael, But only the sea that our need brings us to Or the wind that blows to the harbor The ship that is bearing us away from Ireland ; And there is reason that these are reconciled with us, For we increase the sea with our tears, And the wandering wind with our sighs. If you can feel the burning fire of that little poem, its beauty and its loveliness, you will do well to pass on to a study of Douglas Hyde's translations of the old songs of Connacht. If your taste is for Kipling let them alone, for they would be wasted on you, and you would never understand their language. Credhe's Lament £or Cail. Here is another little poem in which the Celtic love of nature is found in all its allusive and suggestive symbolism : I O'er thy chief, thy rushing- chief, Loch da Conn, Loud the haven is roaring; All too late, her deadly hate for Crimtha's son Yonder deep is deploring. Small comfort I trow to Credhe is her wail, Slender solace now, oh, my Cail! Ochone! och wirrastrue! can she who slew Bid thee back, Spirit soaring! Hark, the thrush from out Drumqueen lifts his keen Through the choir of the thrushes, With his mate, his screaming mate o'er the green See! the red weasel rushes. Crushed on the crag lies Glensilen's doe, O'er her yon stag tells his woe, Thus, Cail, och, ochone! for thee, for thee My soul's sorrow gushes. 0, the thrush, the mourning thrush, mating shall sing, When the furze bloom is yellow; 0, the stag, the grieving stag in the spring With a fresh doe shall fellow! But love for me 'neath the ever moving mound Of the scowling sea lieth drowned; While, och, och ollagone! the sea fowl moan And the sea beats bellow.

What is Civilisation? Dr. C. H. Wang, a member of the Chinese delegation at Washington, the other' day passed the following stricture : "We are all aware that nations have been accustomed to deal with one another in a manner in which no decent man dares to deal with his neighbors. Extortion is illegal and immoral, but as between nations it is dignified by the Latin word ultimatum. If two men agree among themselves to do something illegal to a third person, it is conspiracy; but in international dealings this is known as a treaty of international understanding." Apropos of the foregoing criticism of our national morality, the following from Mahatma Gandhi, the Indian leader, is an interesting parallel: "Formerly when people wanted to fight one another, they measured between them their bodily strength; now it is possible to take away thousands of lives by one man working behind a hill from a gun. This is civilisation. Formerly, men worked in the open air only so much as they liked. Now, thousands of workmen meet together and for the sake of maintenance work in factories and mines. Their condition is worse than that of beasts. They are obliged to work, at the risk of their lives, at most dangerous occupations, for the sake of millionaires. . . This civilisation is such that one has only to be patient and it will be -destroyed." ~.v i