Matthew Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature [1865-66], 1891 edn.

‘Celtic poetry seems to make up to itself for being unable to master the world and give an adequate interpretation of it, by throwing all its forces into style, by bending language at any rate to its will, and expressing the ideas it has with unsurpassable intensity, elevation, and effect’ (p.144; The Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. R. H. Super, Super, Vol. 3, p.366.)

‘All Europe felt the power of that melancholy; but what I wish to point out is, that no nation of Europe so caught in its poetry the passionate penetrating accent of Celtic genius, its strain of Titanism, as the English’ (ibid., p.371.)

‘Magic is just the word for it—the magic of nature; not merely the beauty of nature—that the Greeks and the Latins had; but merely an honest smack of the soil, a faithful realism - that the Germans had; but the intimate life of nature, her weird power and her fairy charm’. [...] There will be a stamp of perfectness and inimitableness about it in the literatures where it is native’ (ibid., p.374.)

‘[S]o long as this mixed constitution of our nature possess us, we pay it tribute and serve it; so soon as we possess it, it pays tribute and serves us’ (ibid., p.380.)

‘[I]f we had been all Celtic, we might have been popular and agreeable; if we had all been Latinised, we might have governed Ireland as the French govern Alsace, without getting ourselves detested’ (ibid., p.382.)

‘But, at any rate, let us consider that of the shrunken and diminished remains of this great primitive race, all, with one insignificant exception, belongs to the English empire; only Brittany is not ours; we have Ireland, the Scotch Highlands, Wales, the Isle of Man, Cornwall. They are part of ourselves, we are deeply interested in knowing them, they are deeply interested in being known by us […]’ (ibid., p.384.)

‘Let us reunite ourselves with our better mind and with the world through science; and let it be one of our angelical revenges on the Philistines, who among their other sins are the guilty authors of Fenianism, to found at Oxford a chair of Celtic, and to send, through the gentle ministration of science, a message of peace to Ireland’ (ibid. p.386.)

‘[T]he Celtic genius, sentiment as its main bias, with the love of beauty, charm, spirituality for its excellence, [had] ineffectualness and self-will for its deficit’ (ibid., p.311.)

‘[…] chafing against the despotism of fact, its perpetual straining after mere emotion […] ineffectual in politics […N]o doubt the sensibility of the Celtic nature, its nervous exaltation, have something feminine in them, and the Celt is peculiarly disposed to feel the spell of the feminine idiosyncrasy; he has an affinity to it; he is not far from its secret’ (ibid., p.347.)

‘Then we may use German faithfulness to nature to give us science and to free us from insolence and self-will; we may use the Celtic quickness of perception to give us delicacy and to free us from hardness and Philistinism; we may use the Latin decisiveness to give us strenuous clear method and free us from fumbling and idling.’ (ibid., p.383.)

‘The fusion of all the inhabitants of these islands into a homogeneous, English-speaking whole, the breaking down of barriers between us, the swallowing up of separate provincial nationalities, is a consummation to which the natural course of things irresistibly tends; it is a necessity of what is called modern civilisation, and modern civilisation is a real, legitimate force […] There is nothing to hinder us from effacing the last poor material remains of that Celtic power which once was everywhere’ (Do., in Lectures & Essays in Criticism, Michigan UP 1962, p.292-98.)

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