W. B. Yeats, 'Celtic Element in Literature' (1897; rev. 1902)

Matthew Arnold, in The Study of Celtic Literature, has accepted this pasion for Nature, this imaginativeness, this melancholy, as Celtic characteristics, but has described them more elaborately [than Ernest Renan]. The Celtic passion for Nature comes almost more from a sense of her “mystery” than her “beauty”, and it adds “charm and magic” to Nature, and the Celtic imaginativeness and melancholy are alike “a passionate, turbulent, indomitable reaction against the despotism of fact”. Yeats, Essays & Introductions, 1961, p.173-88; p.173.)

How well one knows these sentences, better even than Renan’s, and how well one knows the passages of prose and verse which he used to prove that wherever English literature has the qualities these sentences describe, it has them from a Celtic source. Though I do not think any of us who write about Ireland have built any argument from them, it is well to consider them a little, and see where they are helpful and where they hurtful. If we do not, we may go mad some day, and the enemy root up our rose-garden and plant a cabbage-garden instead. Perhaps we may re-state a little Renan’s and Arnold’s argument. (p.174)

When [175] Matthew Arnold wrote, it was not easy to know as much as we know now of folk-song and folk-belief, and I do not think he understood that our “natural magic” is but the ancient religion of the world, the ancient world of Nature and that troubled ecstasy before her, that certainty of beautiful places being haunted, which it brought into men’s minds.’ (Ibid., p.175-76.)

Matthew Arnold asks how much of the Celt must one imagine in the ideal man of genius, I prefer to say, how much of the ancient hunters and fishers and of the ecstatic dancers among hills and woods must one imagine in the ideal man of genius? Certainly a thirst for unbounded emotion and a wild melancholy are troublesome things in the world, and do not make its life more easy or orderly, but it may be the arts are founded on the life beyond the world, and that they must cry in the ears of our penury until the world has been consumed and become a vision. Certainly, as Samuel Palmer wrote, excess is the vivifying spirit of the finest art, and we must always seek to make excess more abundantly excessive. Matthew Arnold has said that if he were asked “where English got its turn for natural magic”, he “would answer with little Fount that it got much of its melancholy from a Celtic source, with no doubt at all that from a Celtic source it got nearly all its natural magic.” (p.184.)

I will put this differently and say that literature dwindles to a mere chronicle of circumstances, or passionless fantasies, and passionless meditations, unless it is constantly flooded with the passions and beliefs of ancient times, and that of all the fountains of the passions and beliefs of ancient times in Europe, the Slavonic, the Finnish, the Scandinavian, and the Celtic, the Celtic alone has been for centuries close to the man river of European literature. It has again brought the “vivifying spirit” “of excess” [sic] into the arts of Europe. [Here Yeats cites Renan on the story of Lough Derg as providing the ‘framework’ of the Divine Comedy] The reaction against the rationalism of the eighteenth century and the symbolical movement, which has come to perfection in Germany with Wagner, in England in the Pre-Raphaelites, in France in Villiers de L’Isle Adam and Mallarmé, in Belgium in Maeterlinck, has stilled the imagination of Ibsen and D’Annunzio, is certain the only movement that is saying new things.’ (Ibid., p.185.)

1902 Postcript: I could have written this essay with much more precision and have much better illustrated my meaning [187] if I had waited until Lady Gregory had finished her book of legends, Cuchulain of Muirthemne, a books to set beside the Morte D’Arthur and the Mabinogion.

ENG310C1 : University of Ulster