 Section 39 of Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Volume 8. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Read by Gareth Rowlands. Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Volume 8. Section 39, Celtic Literature by William Sharp and Ernest Reese. Section 2, Scottish. Early Celtic literature in Scotland is so intimately allied with the Irish that much of the previous section must be held to belong as much to the present one. We shall not need to recapitulate here what is there dealt with. The two Gaelic currents began to separate, if almost imperceptibly, even then, and only in century-long stages after passing the point marked by the medieval recapitulators of Oshin and St. Patrick. How closely intermingled these currents were up to that point may be learned from the evidence of such exquisite lines as those preserved by the Scottish Dean McGregor, entitled Oshin Song. Sweet is the voice of the land of gold, and sweeter the music of birds that soar when the cry of the heron is heard on the wold, and the waves break softly on Bundertroar. Down floats on the murmuring of the breeze, the call of the cuckoo from Cossahoon. The blackbird is wobbling among the trees, and soft is the kiss of the warming sun. The cry of the eagle in Assaroa, or the court of McMorne, to me is sweet, and sweet is the cry of the bird below where the waves and the wind and the tall cliff meet. Finn McCool is the father of me, whom seven battalions of Fenians fear. When he launches his hounds on the open lee, grand is their cry as they rouse the deer. The last verse is eloquent as to the common tradition of the Scots and Irish Gale. Oshin is dealt with separately under his own proper heading, however, and we need not discuss here his interest, literary and historical. Turning to St. Patrick, let us accept provisionally the account that makes him of Galo-Brithonic race, born about 387 AD at Kilpatrick on the Clyde. Strathclyde being an old famous region of the northern Brithonic stock. The remains in prose and verse of the early Scottish literature dealing with St. Patrick are of course not so numerous as the Irish, but as the two were freely interchangeable. Reader's note. Footnote A follows at the end of the paragraph. But as the two were freely interchangeable in the early period when his record was being written down, it follows that where Irish memoranda of his true and his legendary history, his hymns and so forth, existed, the Scottish chroniclers and bards would accept them without feeling the need of making a separate record. Nor must we forget, in speaking of St. Patrick, that the pre-christian romantic mythology with its firbolgs and ancient heroic gods, giants and men is just as much to be limbed into the background of the picture in the case of early Scottish as in that of Irish Gaelic tradition and its earliest scriptive forms. Footnote A. The early literature of the Scottish Gael says the reverend Nigel McNeill in his interesting work, The Literature of the Highlanders, cannot be well understood apart from early Irish literature. The ballads of the two countries describe the same struggles, the characters engaging in the strife are the same and bear the same names. End of footnote A. Curiously enough, if Scotland gave Ireland the saint that in course of time became almost its national symbol, Patrick, Ireland in turn give Scotland its dearest saint, Columba. He was born in 521 near Temple Douglas, Tulloch du Gleis. In 545 founded a church in Derry, later the famous church at Kells, and in 563 after some jealousy had been at work against him, he left for Ireland and after pausing at Columse, he went on to Aya, now known the world over as Iona. Iona has become now the locus classiki of the Gaelic, not to say the whole Scottish race. Recently a writer of profound imagination, Miss Fiona MacLeod, has dated from its lonely shores the dedication of that impressive book, The Sin Eater and Other Tales, showing how it still keeps for those of the true faith its old effect. Imokri di imokrai de, Isle of my heart, Isle of my love, as Columba is said to have called it. His followers, the little sacred circle of 12, the family of Iona, had to be militant with a vengeance. Milesian or soldiering as well as cleric in their work, and the old traditions are full of references to their fight against the fiend and the house of Oshin. But having so far prevailed as they did, they became in turn the chroniclers of the very thing they had fought against. And so, in a sense, and a very real one, Iona is the first centre of the literature of the Scottish Gael to which we can point. The total effect of Columba, or Columbseel upon Gaelic life and literature, Irish and Scots, was immense indeed. To gather whose force one must read in the Book of Deer and the old Irish manuscripts on the one hand, and the Latin hymnology of the Celtic Church on the other. But in speaking of Columba, let us not forget the tender and beautiful figure of St Bridget, another of that mysterious train, including Merlin and St Patrick, which is associations with Strathclyde. Bonnie, sweet Brydie of the yellow, yellow hair. St Bridget, the St Mary of the Gael, whose story has been retold by Miss Fiona MacLeod in The Washer of the Ford, may first be found depicted by the side of Patrick and Columba in the famous antique relic, the Dumnach Eiergied dating back to the 6th or 7th century. She appears constantly in Gaelic hagiology, and with poetic as well as saintly fame, casting a halo about her yellow hair. O'Curry's manuscript materials and other collections make it possible, luckily, for those other than purely Gaelic students to read of her as she appeared in early time. She is a peculiarly interesting figure because in the Celtic races women have always counted peculiarly, and there are signs that they will count even more so in time to come. St Bridget, Brigitte, Bride, Breed then, is the type for all time of the Celtic womanhood dowered with divine inspiration, poetry and charm. The following variant on an old Gaelic poem is by Miss Fiona MacLeod from The Hills of Dream. St Bridget's milking song. O sweet saint bride of the yellow, yellow hair, Paul said, and Peter said, and all the saints alive or dead, vowed she had the sweetest head, Bonnie, sweet bride of the yellow, yellow hair. White may my milking be, white as thee, Thy face is white, Thy neck is white, Thy hands are white, Thy feet are white, For thy sweet soul is shining bright, O dear to me, O dear to see, St Bridget white. Yellow may my butter be, soft and round, Thy breasts are sweet, soft, round and sweet, So may my butter be, so may my butter be, O Bridget sweet. Safe the way is safe, O safe, St Bridget, May my kai come home at even, none be fallen, none be leaving, Dusky even, breath sweet even, Here as there were, O St Bridget, Thou keepest trist with God in heaven, Seast the angels bow and souls be shriven, Here as there, Tis breath sweet even, far and wide, Singeth the little maid, safe in thy shade, Bridget bride. Passing from the early legendary hagiological chronicles of the Scot scales, we've come to a period when the reader must be content to go again to Irish sources for his knowledge of the continuators of Gaelic literature. What we have said previously of the Irish may be referred to here. The medieval scribes and bards busied themselves mainly with reproducing the past, though with a vivid colouring out of their own living present. When we have referred all of their subject matter dealing with the saints and heroic figures of primitive history to its own period, all that remains is curiously little. Unfortunately, it is less than it might have been if it had not been for the terrible and often wanton destruction of manuscripts which has bereft us in Scotland, especially of some of the richest treasures the Celtic genius has produced. It is only needed to instance the tailor who was found cutting up an ancient manuscript for patterns to show how almost inconceivably wholesale the havoc thus done has been in the last six centuries. Some of the most interesting and valuable of the Scottish contributions to Gaelic literature are in what we may call ballad form. Such is the tragic tale of Deirdre in the Glen Mason manuscript, 13th century, which is preserved in the Advocates Library, Edinburgh. Others again are versions of poems correspondent to those given, for instance, in the book of the Dean of Lismore. Of this heroic poetry much would have been lost if it had not been for the zeal of collectors who for the last five centuries have been collecting in old manuscripts or from the mouths of the Highlanders the ballads and tales of old time. The last and greatest of the ballad and tale collectors, says Mr McNeil, was Mr Campbell, who in 1859-60 traversed the whole Gaelic area and assisted by intelligent Highlanders formed large collections of which he has given a considerable quantity to the world in his four volumes of tales. All these are genuine productions. We may quote further what the same writer says of the uncertain chronology of these ballads. They may have been composed centuries before they were committed to writing. We have fragments, such as the Glen Mason manuscripts, written as early as the 12th century in the hand and language common to the learned in both Albin and Erin at the time. The book of the Dean of Lismore, however, is written phonetically to represent the spoken language of his day and is mainly in the Perthshire dialect. Cochulin and many other of the heroes that we mentioned in our Irish article reappear in these ballads, and in them the fiend fight out their ancient battles to the bitter end. A new and rather different colouring is lent, too, to the Scottish ballads by the Norse element and the constant wars in which the Vikings and the Gales encountered time after time lend some of their finest episodes to this poetry. If we turn from the ballads to the prose tales and romances, we find the same strong resemblances and the same significant differences. The Irish have always the more fluent and eloquent faculty in prose and verse. Their adjectival energy is greater. They are more given to extravagances of style, both in point of sentiment and of humour. The scotch are, on the other hand, more simple and more terse, and they touch the deeper notes of pathos and of mystery more often. Nothing more instructive can be devised for the Celtic student than to take the volumes in verse and prose represented by the three Celtic lands, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and to compare their style, method and literary idiosyncrasies. In this comparison, Mr Campbell's wonderful Tales of the West Highlands in prose and in verse his Leivar na fine may be cited with works of Dr Hyde, Mr Standish Hayes O'Grady, Dr Joyce, in Irish, and in Welsh the Mabinogion in Lady Guest's Exquisite English Version, or the Mavarian Archaeology. In the 14th century, which gave Davydd ap Gwilym to Wales, we find Gaelic becoming more definitely a conscious literary language. But the Davydd of Scotland came more than a century earlier, being born at the end of the 12th century. This was the famous Myredoch, Albanach, Myrdoch the Scott, several of whose poems figure in the Dean of Lismore's book, and whose effect on succeeding bards was only less powerful than Davydd's on his Welsh successors. The Dean's book has poems too by two women poets, Efric, wife of the last of the famous MacNeils of Castle Sween, and Isabel, Countess of Argyll. Efric's lament for her husband contains some touching lines. For example, there's no heart among our women, at the sport no man is seen, like the sky when windless silent is the music of Denswene. Sir Duncan Campbell, Duncan MacCallum, The Good Knight, son of Sir Colin, is another of the poets in Dean McGregor's collection, but perhaps we ought to pause here to say a word of the Dean himself. Sailing in among the inner Hebridean Isles, says Mr. MacNeil, we find in the fertile island of Lismore, the Great Garden, a man in the 15th century, often referred to in Gaelic literature, the reverend Mr. James McGregor, a native of Perthshire, with a heart filled with the enthusiasm and perfivid spirit of his countrymen. He and his brother got up the collection of songs and ballads, to which we have had occasions so often to refer. But we must pass on now to the later period of Gaelic literature, in which the modern developments have their beginning. The Scotts Gale entered on a new phase, we are told, with Mary MacLeod, who was born at Harris in 1569 and died a centenarian in Skye in 1674. Mary was as perfect an example of the folk minstrel as Celtic literature can provide, for she could not even write, although her prosody is elaborate and her meters often intricate and original to a degree. The first of the distinctly Jacobite Bards, who flourished at the end of the 17th and through the 18th century, was John MacDonald, whose Battle of Inverlochie has been vigorously translated by Professor Blackie. Hector MacLean, Roderick Morrison, called Anclarse Erdal, or the Blind Harper, John MacLean, whose songs were heard by Dr. Samuel Johnson and Boswell on their journey to the Hebrides, and John MacCodrum, a poet whose wit and satiric powers remind us not a little of more than one of the Welsh satirical bards, are among the poets of this time who specially deserve note. In the 18th century, Gaelic Scotland produced some remarkable religious poets, including David McKellar, author of the well-known McKellar's hymn, John Mackay, Donald Matheson, who had satirical as well as religious power, Lachlan McClachlan, and Dougald Buchanan. The great link between the 18th and the 19th centuries is Duncan Ban MacIntyre, a name loved throughout the Highlands and Islands. The hunter-bad of Glenorchy, as he is often called, though his best title is the affectionate Gaelic, Duncan of the Songs, was born on the 20th of March 1724 at Drwym Lachart in Glenorchy, Argyll. His first song was composed on a sword with which he was armed at the Battle of Falkirk, where he served on the royalist side as substitute for a neighbouring gentleman. This sword says his biographer, Thomas Patterson, the poet lost or threw away in the retreat. On his return home, therefore, the gentleman to whom it belonged, and whose substitute he had been, refused to pay the sum for which he had engaged Duncan Ban to serve in his stead. Duncan consequently composed his song on the Battle of the Speckled Kirk, as Falkirk is called in Gaelic, in which he good-humidly satirises the gentleman who had sent him to the war and gives a woeful description of the black sword that worked the turmoil and whose loss, he says, made its owner as fierce and furious as a grey brock in his den. The song immediately became popular and incensed his employer so much that he suddenly fell upon the poor poet one day with his walking stick and striking him on the back bade him go and make a song about that. He was, however, afterwards compelled by the Earl of Bredelbein to pay the bard the sum of three hundred marks Scots, sixteen pounds, seventeen shillings, and sixpence, which was his legal due. Duncan ended his days in Edinburgh, where he died in 1812, one of the last links of the moving record of the early eighteenth century and its Jacobite associations. Duncan was a contemporary of McPherson's, and with McPherson and his oshen, to which a special article is devoted elsewhere, we may well leave our chronicle for bearing to touch on the debatable ground of later and contemporary Celtic literature in Scotland. Enough to say that Duncan Van McIntyre has no lack of worthy followers in Gaelic poetry, and that with the Anglo-Celtic development associated with such names as Dr Norman McCloud, Professor Blackie, Robert Buchanan, George MacDonald, William Black, and among newcomers Miss Fiona McCloud and Mr Neil Monroe, there seems every prospect that the Gaelic spirit promises to achieve greatly in the new centuries to come. The first selection is from the Sean Dana, or ancient poems, collected, or rather written, from oral legendary law and ballads, by Dr John Smith, late in the eighteenth century. Prologue to Gaul How mournful is the silence of night when she pours her dark clouds over the valleys, sleep has overcome the youth of the chase, he slumbers on the hearth and his dog at his knees, the children of the mountain he pursues in his dream, while sleep forsakes him. Slumber ye children of fatigue, star after star is now ascending the height, slumber thou swift dog and nimble, oshen will not arouse thee from thy repose, lonely I keep watch, and dear to me is the gloom of night when I travel from glen to glen with no hope to behold a mourning or brightness. Spare thy light, o sun, waste not thy lamps so fast, generous is thy soul as the king of morvins, but thy renown shall yet fade. Spare thy lamps of a thousand flames in thy blue hall when thou retirest under thy dark blue gates to sleep beneath the dark embraces of the storm. Spare them ere thou art forsaken for ever as I am without one whom I may love. Spare them, for there is not a hero now to behold the blue flames of the beautiful lamps. Ah, corner of the precious lights, thy lamps burn dimly now, thou art like a blasted oak, thy dwellings and thy people are gone east or west. On the face of thy mountain there shall be no more found of them but the trace. In Selma, Tara or Temora there is not a song, a shell or a harp, they have all become green mounds, their stones have fallen into their own meadows, the stranger from the deep or the desert will never behold them rise above the clouds. And, O Selma, home of my delight, is this heap my ruin where grows the thistle, the heather, and the wild grass? The following lines of St. Columba are taken from the Leira Celtica, cited above. Colum Sila fake it. St. Columba made it. Delightful would it be to me to be an ucht eilun on the pinnacle of a rock that I might often see the face of the ocean, that I might see its heaving waves over the wide ocean when they chant music to their father upon the world's course, that I might see its level sparkling strand, it would be no cause of sorrow, that I might hear the song of the wonderful birds, source of happiness, that I might hear the thunder of the crowding waves upon the rocks, that I might hear the roar by the side of the church of the surrounding sea, that I might see its noble flocks over the watery ocean, that I might see the sea-monsters, the greatest of all wonders, that I might see its ebb and flood in their career, that my mystical name might be, I say, cool re-air in, back turned to Ireland, that contrition might come upon my heart upon looking at her, that I might bewail my evils all, though it were difficult to compute them, that I might bless the Lord who conserves all heaven with its countless bright orders, land, strand, and flood, that I might search the books all that would be good for my soul, at times kneeling to beloved heaven, at times psalm singing, at times contemplating the king of heaven, holy the chief, at times at work without compulsion, this would be delightful, at times plucking dulsk from the rocks, at times at fishing, at times giving food to the poor, at times in a carcire, solitary cell. The best advice in the presence of God to me has often been vouchsafed, the king whose servant I am will not let anything deceive me. The third selection is an example of later Gaelic. This stirring Hebridean poem is sometimes spoken of as from the ancient Gaelic, probable by this is meant merely old Gaelic, medieval or even later. The translation is by Mr. Thomas Patterson and is included in his Gaelic Bards. He has the following note upon it. This effusion, though in its original form it is only a kind of wild chant, is indeed half prose, yet is the germ of the ballad. It occurs in many of the tales contained in that collection, the repository of old Gaelic lore, the popular tales of the West Highlands, sometimes more and sometimes less perfect. The original will be found in the second volume of the tales. The vigorous and elastic spirit that pervades these verses must have strung the heart of many a hardy mariner who loved to feel the fresh and briny breeze drive his snoring birlin bounding like a living creature over the tumbling billows of the inland Loch or the huge swell of the majestic main. In Hebride Seas we turned her prow into the sea, her stern into the shore and first we raised the tall tough masts and then the canvas whore. Fast filled our towering clouds like sails for the wind came from the land and such a wind as we might choose were the winds at our command. A breeze that rushing down the hill would strip the blooming heather or rustling through the green clad grove would whirl its leaves together. But when it seized the aged sow with the light locks of grey it tore away its ancient root and there the old trunk lay. It raised the thatch too from the roof and scattered it along then tossed and whirled it through the air singing a pleasant song. It leaped the ruins on the land though sire and sun stood by they could not help a fort but gaze with one and troubled eye. A flap, a flash, the green roll dashed and laughed against the red upon our boards now here now there knocked its foamy head. She could have split the slender straw so clean and well she went as still obedient to the helm her stately course she bent. We watched the big beast eat the small, the small beast nimbly fly and listened to the plowing eels, the seagulls clang on high. We had no other music to cheer us on our way till round those sheltering hills we passed and anchored in this bay. End of Section 39 Section 40 of Library of the World's Best Literature Ancient and Modern, Volume 8 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org read by Gareth Rowlands Library of the World's Best Literature Ancient and Modern, Volume 8 Section 40, Celtic Literature by William Sharp and Ernest Ries Section 3, Welsh The laws governing the life of languages are as elusive as those that decide the fate of races and empires. Why is the Welsh tongue still alive and vigorous and the Irish, Pachy Dr Douglas Hyde, moribund? It is a difficult question, but some light on it may be had by traversing the early history of Welsh literature. The like difficulty meets us in both Welsh and Irish, that of deciding how far the medieval scribes and scholars doctored the older material which fell into their hands. But in Welsh the separation of the primitive from the medieval element is often even a more difficult task than in Irish. In sketching the early course of Welsh literature we cannot do better than turn to the striking instance afforded by the name and fame of Merlin. In legendary Welsh history Merlin appears under almost as many guises as he does in the pages of Mallory's Mort D'Arthur, Merlin Emris, Ambrosius, Merlin Sylvester, Merlin the Wild, Merlin Ab Morfren or Merlin Caledonius. His name and fame vary according to the chronicler. Of these Merlin the son of Morfren, the most tangible in the list, was also known as Caledonius because the cumbry of the sixth century lived in that greater Wales which ranged as far north as the Caledonian Forest. After the terrible battle of Artered Merlin having seen his kindred all but obliterated was seized tradition tells us with a frenzy and thereafter his bardic utterances assumed a more and more mystical and oracular form. This added to his mysterious and magnetic personality and wildly impressive personal presence may well have led on in process of time by gradual legendary accretions to the final conception of a Merlin miraculous, supernatural, demonic. However this may be nothing can be more instructive than to compare the late Merlin with the early Merlin and to trace his phases in Welsh folktale and to define his poetry finally in the pages of the Black Book of Camarthen. The Black Book of Camarthen in its strikingly decorative black and red manuscript makes a wonderful testament of old Welsh poetry. If we could solve all its problems and read all that is written between its lines we should be very near the great secret of the druidic religion and of Celtic mythology as well as the secret of Merlin's actual and imaginary effect in Welsh literature. The battle of Artered has been cited above in the determining event in Merlin's history. The opening poem in the Black Book of Camarthen is a remarkable rhymed dialogue between Merlin and Taliesyn, some of whose lines are extremely imaginative and touching in their archaic simplicity. Merlin Begins How sad is Merlin now? How sad! Cadwyf and Cadwen? Are they dead? The furious slaughter filled the field and pierced was the druid shield. Taliesyn replies His house folk did not falter in the fight. So it goes on telling of the battle and its consequences until one reaches at the end that mysterious verse which haunts the imagination and the ear of the reader. Merlin again speaks. Seven score chieftains were turned into spirits. In the wood of Calathon were they transformed? The wood of Calathon is the Caledonian forest. So far as these excerpts go they might seem to be the writings of the real Merlin. There is internal evidence, however, that this poem, the much disputed poem of the Apple Trees and others that follow it in the Black Book were written not earlier than the 12th century. Stevens, usually an acute critic, imputes in his Literature of the Cummry these poems to Guelchmai and other bards of later date. But even so, these poets evidently founded their poems upon earlier ones traditionally handed on as Merlins. From such later sources as the Mavarian Archaeology or Skeen's Four Ancient Books of Wales and admirable Oxford texts edited by Professor Ries and Mr. Guenogvin Evans one can rehabilitate at will the Merlin of the Black Book of Camarthen much as Villa Mark has done after a fashion quite his own. Enough will so be certainly discovered to outline a primitive Merlin, an original 6th century Merlin, under the impressive medieval robes of the Latin Welsh romantic rulers and poets. Enough too will be made clear to show a basis of myth and prehistoric legend behind the remotest recorded name, time, or place that can be counted historical. The same is true of Taliesin who appears by the poetical remains attributed to him, some of them clearly medieval, others just as clearly primitive even more interesting as a poet than Merlin just as there are several Merlins however there are two Taliesins, there is the 5th century Taliesin and there is the pseudo Taliesin of the 12th, both are wonderful in their way and one knows not which to admire most, him who wrote the Battle of Gwynestrad which is undoubtedly a primitive war song or the medieval poet who chose to take the disguise of Taliesin and taking two probably some of the traditional fragments of his early poetry work them up a fresh with curious medieval art and mystic imagination, for comparison let us take an early and a late poem commonly gathered as in the Mavarian archeology under one head. Take first one of the later poems the mystical song to the wind which even in its English dress one Emerson's admiration and which if we allow for all differences between medieval and modern imagination is as wonderful a poem of its kind as any literature is likely to afford. As it is given among our selections it need not be quoted here in point of time it is usual to assign it as Stevens does to the 12th or 13th century but it seems to me to bear traces again of being an older more primitive poem retouched certainly and probably reshaped by a 12th century poet and now for a genuine Taliesin or what at any rate many critics think to be genuine. This you may have in the famous Gwaith Gwynestrad Battle of Gwynestrad one of the most spirited war poems in existence copied and recopied by a long succession of Cymruc scribes and which the writer came upon first in the manuscript collection of William Morris or Guy Gaby and Morn who flourished about 1758. Here are four lines of Morris's copy Litteratum which will give a better idea than any criticism of mine of the mingled realism and imagination of the poem. And here is a rough vigorous translation of these lines from the same volume. In the past of the fort have I seen men died with red who hurtled their arms they fell to the ground together when the day was lost their hands on the crucifix and horror was in the pale face of the dead warriors. Asa Gwynestrad, the author of the pale face of the dead warriors, a succeeding line, a guayar a old lie ar the tad and the blood was tangled in their clothing adds the last touch of dreadful sincerity to the account and in other primitive poems that we may ascribe to Taliesin are effects as convincing and vivid. But we must leave Taliesin and his difficulties to sketch briefly the course of poetry between his actual date in early time and his poetic resurrection in the Middle Ages. Not so interesting poetically but more important historically is the next of the Welsh Bards a Nairyn who wrote the Gododyn. This curious and interesting war poem tells of a foray made by the Ottadini an early Cymruc tribe living in the greater Wales of their time on the Northumbrian coast. Mr. Stevens imagines Catrife which figures as a central scene of the action of the poem to be cataric in Yorkshire and this we may provisionally accept. The Welshman went to Catrife and Mary marched the host but through drinking the gray mead the day the day was lost. The expedition was one of those which show the gradual session of greater Wales by the Welsh and their retreat to the lesser Wales that is still theirs. We may pause here to remark that the Bardic order was early constituted among the Welsh as among the Irish. In the laws of how well thou, how well the good, who flourished in the 10th century, we find very explicit provision made for the Bard. In case of fighting the Bard shall play the monarchy of Britain before the battle. His land shall be free. He shall have a horse from the king. He shall have a harp from the king and a gold ring from the queen when he is appointed. The harp he shall never part with. Unless, which is highly probable, we have lost some of the records of the 8th, 9th and 10th centuries. We have to conclude that Welsh poetry made small headway. The remarkable laws of how well thou are the monument of the 10th century. In the 11th we come upon the first signs of a revival in Mylir, who is historically interesting, and in his last poems shows himself a true poet. In the 12th we have to mark a distinct further step in Guelchmai, who is the first conscious poet of nature, and who may thus claim to be the founder of one of the finest traditions in all Welsh poetry. Following Guelchmai comes the princely poet Howell the Tall, son of Owen Gwynedd by an Irish lady, and who himself wore the crown of Gwynedd for a brief two years. He died in 1171 at 27 after a life of stormiest adventure. But in the intervals of battle he found time to write some of the loveliest love poems that all Welsh literature can boast. His death was lamented by Periv Ab Kedwoy in a much less conventional and more moving tone than the official bards generally troubled to use for such allergies. A century or so later, and we find Llywarch Ab Llywelyn, known as Pradedd Amoch, the poet of the pigs, writing a still finer and more ample lament on the last native Prince of Wales, Llywelyn Ab Griffith. Llywelyn Ewi Llyw Olav, as he is still fondly called. These two laments may be taken as typical of a wide selection of Welsh poetry, dealing with the deaths of heroes and princes, and ranging in date from the fifth or sixth century to the nineteenth. Llywelyn the last died in 1282, and thereafter began what has been well termed the Great Depression, agorthrum mawr, by which Norman and Saxon combined to crush the language and expropriate the people of the country, with the result of calling up at last Owen Glendauer's hot spirit to fight for the national cause. But it is remarkable that in this disastrous period arose some of the finest interpreters of her genius that the country was ever to find. Within its term were, without a doubt, carried to an approximate perfection those more native romances that we term Mabinogion, the most exquisite and exquisitely turned tales in point of art that the Celtic readers have ever produced. The late Lady Charlotte Guest's edition of the Mabinogion serves very well to convey in a translation of extreme felicity to non-Celtic readers the art and spirit of these tales. But it must be kept in mind that all she gives are not strictly Mabinogion. Several of them are more properly to be called romances as showing strong traces of Norman and French influence. The Mabinogi originally was a tale to be recited by a Mabinog, i.e. a prentice to the Bardic craft who had not yet obtained his full degree and with it the right of composing and reciting poetry. The idea which some critics have that the Mabinogion were boy's tales or still worse nursery tales is quite wrong. Let us remember that such tales were the delight of most of the princely halls and winter-hards of medieval Wales where they were left to the great banquets and on feast nights to the most critical audience that could be afforded. The dream of Ronabwy, Kelchuch and Alwyn and Math, son of Matharnwy may be mentioned as among the tales of Lady Guest's volume which are most natively original and we have chosen the portrait of Alwyn from the second of these for our selections to show the art and charm of the Welsh romancers in the Middle Ages. If the Mabinogion are fine as pros, we have an equally fine expression of this time in poetry in the poems of Rhys Gauch ap Rhaecart, Rhys the Red, son of Rhaecart and the ever-delightful Davydd ap Gwyllym who will be found treated separately. After Davydd, Welsh poetry was to enter upon a new phase not fortunate even in its immediate effects, disastrous in its ultimate ones. It was in the 14th century that Welsh prosody always intricate, finally waxed proud so to speak of its complexity and formed for itself a hide-bound code which was to become the bugbear of Welsh poetry in the following centuries. To give any adequate account of its complexities of technique and the whole letter of its syntax would require a long and tedious treatise in itself. Enough to say that the underlying principle was that of what is termed in Welsh anganedd or consonants by which rhymes within rhymes and echoes within echoes of certain dominant syllables were insisted upon arbitrarily until almost every word in every line was subject to a rigid and invincible rule. Art for art, insisted upon in this way, could only end in conventionalizing the very thing it was meant to assist. Poetry, too carefully nursed and housed, thus fell into a bad way, but luckily, meanwhile, a new literature was to begin for Wales along quite other lines with the Reformation. The translation of the Bible into Welsh by Bishop Morgan in the 16th century marks an epoch in the life of the Welsh people and their literature. Therewith the history of the princes and the great lords ends, and the history of the people, and a people mainly peasant, let us remark, begins. Its profound moral force apart, and judged purely by literary force, the Bible admirably and idiomatically translated, had an incalculable effect. It set a fine and high and yet simple standard of prose, much as the English Bible does, and taught the possibilities of his tongue to the poorest Welsh peasant. One finds its influence strong in almost every prose work of any note published in the last three centuries and in a great proportion of the poetry. It did more than anything of later times to save the language, and here is the simple explanation of the extraordinary difference between the fortunes of the Welsh and the Irish tongue. Wales, the Wales of the people, became profoundly impressed by the religious sentiment and the heroic and profound poetry of the Hebrews and gained from them a new stimulus to express itself and its needs and aspirations in its own native way and in its own tongue. A characteristic expression of the homelier moral humour of the Welsh is to be had in the Canoil Acomri, Candle of Wales, by Rys Prichard, the famous Elizabethan vicar of Llandewry, which for two centuries was the most popular book in Wales after the Bible. Its simple rhymed didactics do not often rise into poetry, but they are full of human feeling expressed in a terse and proverbial with distinct individuality. The book easily leads one on to the very remarkable bound of hymn writers from Ann Griffith to William's Pontacilin, who have flourished in Wales. These and some score beside really rank by their imaginative fervour and inspiration as true poets. In quite another vein, but probably a very ancient and traditional one in Welsh, we have the homely interludes of Tom Ornant who was born about 1750 of whose life George Burrow gives a very vigorous account in wild Wales. A greater than Tom Ornant and born a generation earlier Grone Owen, a man of the finest poetic genius, ought to have a special interest for American readers because he was practically exiled from his beloved Anglesey by the ungrateful church he served, and died poor and broken-hearted in New Brunswick about the year 1780. His Cawydd Avari, owed to the day of judgment, his touching lines to his little daughter Elin, or his Hogarthian lines upon the London Garrett in which he lived for a time, may be cited as showing the various sides of his poetry, of which unluckily there are no adequate translations yet forthcoming. In prose we must not omit to mention the Barth Cusk, the sleeping bard of Ellis Wynne, a very imaginative and idiomatic prose epic in little, describing the bard's vision of a curiously Welsh inferno. Wynne's prose style is remarkably fine and pure, modeled on the best Biblical standard of a Welsh without English admixture. Welsh prose has been admirably handled too by some of the Americans who have flourished within the past two centuries and who have not confined their eloquence to the pulpit. Even when the State Church had no sympathy with the Welsh people and their language, many of its individual members did much to keep the spirit of literature alive, while the nonconformist ministers of Wales have always been vigorously and eminently devoted to the same cause. The vital persistence of the Welsh in the quest of spiritual ideals is the movement that has carried the new national university to completion and rallied the younger generation under the banner of Cymru Vithe, Young Wales. The songs of Caryog Hughes, the poems of Islwyn, the works of scholars like Professor John Rhys, Canon Sylvain Evans and Mr Gwynog Vyn Evans, the ardent writing and editing of Mr Owen M. Edwards in his innumerable magazines and other adventures and the novels of Daniel Owen, these may be named as among the influences that count most to the Wales of the 19th century's end. Note, for citations from Welsh literature see articles on Aniryn, Mabinogion and Taliesyn. The Breton branch of Celtic literature will be treated under the heading Villa Marc, the celebrated collector of Barzars Bridge. End of Section 40 Section 41 of Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern Volume 8 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Sonia Library of the World's Best Literature Ancient and Modern Volume 8 Section 41 Celtic literature Bar-William Sharp and Ernest Ries Section 4 Cornish The literature of a single county of England is not likely to be very extensive and when that literature and its language died for good and all a century ago it becomes still more limited until the reign of Henry VIII though for some time English had been really spoken throughout the county the old Celtic Cornish holding a middle position philologically as well as geographically between Welsh and Breton was the mother tongue of at any rate the peasantry as far east as the Tamar. The great ecclesiastical revolution of that period helped to destroy it. Neither prayer book nor Bible was translated into it and though the ardently Catholic Cornish at first would have none of the former was but like a Christmas game they were overruled by the forcible argument of apostolic blows and knocks and had to submit. Then the language receded rapidly by the time of the great rebellion Truro was its eastern limit early in the 18th century only the two western claw-like promontories retained it and though Dolly Pantry's who died in 1778 was not really the last person who spoke it, it was dead before the present century was born. A few traditional sentences the numerals up to twenty and some stray words lingered on until our own day. Twenty years ago the present writer took down a fair collection from the mouth of ancient mariners in Mounds Bay and a few words are still mixed with the local dialect of English but as a language Cornish is dead though its ghost still haunts its old dwelling in the names of villages, houses, woods, valleys, wells and rocks from Tamar to Penworth. As may be expected a great proportion of the literature is in verse and most of that is in dramatic form. So little is there that an exhaustive list of what survives is quite possible. It is as follows 1. The poem of the Passion A versified account of the passion of our Lord recounting the events from Palm Sunday to Easter with the addition of many legendary incidents from the Gospel of Nicodemus and other similar sources. The earliest manuscript in the British Museum is of the 15th century which is probably the date of its composition. It has been twice printed once by Davies Gilbert with a translation by John Cagwin in 1826 and by Dr. Whitley Stokes in 1862. 2. The Ordinalia Three connected dramas known collectively under this title the first recounts the creation and the history of the world as far as Noah's flood. The second act of this gives the story of Moses and of David and the building of Solomon's temple ending with the curiously incongruous episode of the martyrdom of St. Maximilla as a Christian by the bishop placed in charge of the Temple of Solomon. The second play represents the death of our Lord from the temptation to the crucifixion and this goes on without a break into the third play which gives the story of the resurrection and the Sangeon and the legend of the death of Pilate. The connecting link between the three is the legend of the Wood of the Cross. This well-known story most of which is interwoven with the whole trilogy is as follows Seth was sent by his dying father to beg the promised oil of mercy the angel who guarded Paradise gave him three seeds or according to the play and when he returned and found his father already dead he placed them in Adam's mouth and buried him on Mount Moriah. In process of time the three seeds grew into three trees and from them Abraham gathered the wood for the sacrifice of Isaac and Moses got his rod wherewith he smote the sea and the rock. Later the three trees to symbolize the trinity grew into one tree and David set under it to bewail his sin but Solomon cut it down to make a beam for the temple and since it would in no wise fit into any place he cast it out and set it as a bridge over Cedron. Later on he buried it and from the place where it lay there sprang the healing spring of Bethesda to the surface of which it miraculously floated up and the Jews found it on the cross of Calvary. These plays were probably written in the 15th century perhaps by one of the priests of Glasney College near Falmouth and were acted with others that are now lost in the places called Plan Anguare the Plane of the Play of which several still remain. The Ordinalia were published with a translation by Edwin Norris in 1859. Three were published version of the first act of the first of the Ordinalia trilogy. It was written by William Jordan of Halston in 1611 but the author has borrowed whole passages of considerable length from the older play. The language represents a later period of Cornish and occasionally several lines of English are introduced. Perhaps by a natural Celtic antipathy to the Saxon these are generally put into the mouth of Lucifer and his angels in a good deal of the comic part of the piece. This play was published by Davies Gilbert in 1827 and by Dr. Whitley Stokes in 1864. Four The Life of St. Maryasek This play, written in 1504 is perhaps the most interesting of the batch. The story at least of the others contains nothing very new to most people but St. Maryasek or Maryadoc to give him his Breton name The patron of Camborn is not a well-known character and his life, full as it is of allusions and incidents of a misty period of Cornish history is most curious and interesting. It is not perhaps simplified by being mixed up in the wildest manner with the legend of Constantine and Saint Sylvester and the scenes shift about from Cornwell or Brittany to Rome and from the force to the heaven-nose-what century with bewildering frequency. There are also certain other legends interwoven with the story and it seems probable that at least three plays have been, as Dr. Whitley Stokes expresses it, unskillfully pieced together. Yet there are many passages of considerable literary merit. The only existing manuscript of this play is in the Hangward Collection at Paniarth and it was edited and translated by Dr. Stokes in 1872. Five there were probably many other plays which have perished, but one other there certainly was, of which a fragment exists. What it was called or what it was about, no one knows but an actor in it, setting about to learn his own part in it wrote that short piece of 36 lines on the back of a title deed of some land in the parish of St. Stephen near Bodmin. The deed drifted eventually into the British Museum and the present writer discovered the Cornish verses on it not wholly by accident, about 19 years ago. The writing belongs to the latter part of the 14th century and is therefore the earliest literary fragment of the language. Six The rest of the literature of the Cornish language consists of a few songs, epigrams, motos, proverbs and the like, a short dissertation on the language and the tale of John of Kean-Hul, a widely known folk tale. These are mostly in the latest form of Cornish and are contained in the manuscript collection of William Gwavers in the British Museum and in that of Dr. Borlaze until lately in the possession of his descendants. Most of them have been printed by Davis Gilbert with the play of the creation, by William Price in the archaeology Cornu Britannica in 1790, by Mr. W. C. Borlaze in the transactions of the Royal Institution of Cornwall and in a fragmentary way in a few other places. They are mostly translations or adaptations from the English, but a few such as the rather dog-roll-piltured fishing song are originals. Lastly, in the Church of St. Paul, near Pansons, there is the one solitary epitaph in the language, written while it was still just alive and perhaps the last composition in it. The versions given of these specimens of Cornish literature are founded on those of Dr. Whitley Stokes and Dr. E. Norris. The phraseology has been to some extent altered, but the renderings are almost all the same. From the poem of the Passion, the Death of Our Lord on the Cross. His pain was strong and sharp, so that he could not live, but must yield up his white soul ever purely had he lived and Christ prayed as thus in many a place we read, My soul I do commend, O Lord, between thy hands. For weakly he breathed, being constrained, so that he could not rest. On nothing could he lean his head for the garland that he wore. If he leaned to one side, for his shoulder it grieved him, and the treated yet worse if he said it backwards. Nor could he lean forward for fear of being choked. Then was it, as we read in books, as it is written, to make their nests, places are prepared, but for Christ where he may lay his head, no place is found. But now must he needs leave his head to Hain, for his blood was all gone from him, and he could not live. To the side of the mother that owned him, his head he would hold, and his soul went from him, with chilling shriek and shrill cry. Beside the cross of Jesus was a man hide century, and when he saw the wondrous thing that happened at Christ's death, and how his soul he yielded against nature with a cry, he said without scorning, this truly was God's son, and many were there with him that testimony bore. Now was it midday in the land, or later as is written, earthquake there was and lightning, and darkness overall, the temple veil was rent in twain, and to the ground it fell, and likewise broken were the stones so strong and hard. Graves in many places were opened wide, and the bodies that were in them were raised up, and went straight way to the city, by many were they seen, to bear witness that it was God's son that was slain. Water, earth and fire, and wind, sun, moon and stars likewise, at Christ's suffering death knew sorrow. Nature will cause, I trow, if the good Lord be pained, all his subjects even saints, to be grieved for his pain. From Origo Mundi in the Ordinalia Seth being sent to fetch the oil of mercy from paradise for his dying father comes to the guardian Cherub. Cherubin. Seth, what is thine errand that thou comest so far? Tell me anon. Seth. O angel, I will tell thee, my father is old and weary, he wishes no longer to live, and through me he pray thee to tell the truth of the oil of mercy promised to him at the last day. Cherubin. Within the gate put thou thy head, and behold it all, thou seest, and look on all sides, spy out every detail, search out everything carefully. Seth. Very gladly I will do it, I am glad to have permission to know what is there, and tell it to my father. And he looks and turns round saying, fair field to behold is this hapless he who lost the land, but for the tree I wonder greatly that it should be dry, but I throw that it went dry and all was made bare for the sin which my father and mother sinned, like the prince of their feet they all became dry as herbs, alas, when the morsel was eaten. Cherubin. O Seth, thou art come within the gate of paradise, tell me what thou soest. Seth. I saw, tongue of man can never tell, of good fruits and beauty's flowers, of minstrels and sweet song, a fountain bright as silver, and flowing from it four great streams, that there is a desire to gaze upon them. In it there is a tree, high and with many boughs, but they are bare and leafless. Bark there is none around it, from the stem to the head all its branches are bare, and below when I looked I saw its roots even into hell descending in the midst of great darkness, and its branches growing up even to heaven high in light, and it was holy without bark, both the head and the boughs. Cherubin. Look yet again within, and all else thou shall see before thou come from it. Seth. If I have leave, I will go to the gate at once, that I may see further good. He goes and looks and returns. Cherubin. Thou shalt see more now than what there was just now? Seth. There is a serpent in the tree, truly a hideous beast as he. Cherubin. Go yet the third time to it, and look better at the tree. You can see on it besides roots and branches. Seth. Cherubin, angel of the God of grace, hide in the branches of the tree I saw a newborn child wrapped in swaddling clothes and bound with bands. Cherubin. It was God's son that thou sawest, like a child in swaddling clothes. He will redeem Adam thy father with his flesh and blood otherwise, when the time is come and thy mother and all good people, he is the oil of mercy which was promised to thy father, through his death truly shall all the world be saved. End of Section 41 Section 42 of Library of the World's Best Literature Ancient and Modern, Volume 8 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Bruce Peary Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern Volume 8, Section 42 Biographical Note on Cervantes, 1547-1616 by George Santayana Cervantes is known to the world as the author of Don Quixote, whose other works are numerous and creditable, and his pathetic life is carefully recorded, yet it is as the author of Don Quixote alone that he deserves to be generally known or considered. Had his wit not come by chance on the idea of the ingenious Hidalgo, Cervantes would never have attained his universal renown, even if his other works and the interest of his career should have sufficed to give him a place in the literary history Here, then, where our task is to present in miniature only what has the greatest and most universal value, we may treat our author as playwrights are advised to treat their heroes, saying of him only what is necessary to the understanding of the single action with which we are concerned. This single action is the writing of Don Quixote, and what we shall try to understand is what there was in the life of Cervantes that enabled him to compose that great book, and that remained embedded in its characters, its episodes and its moral. There was in vogue in the Spain of the sixteenth century a species of romance called Books of Chivalry. They were developments of the legends dealing with King Arthur and the knights of the table around, and their numerous descendants and emulators. These stories had appealed in the first place to what we should still think of as the spirit of chivalry. They were full of turnies and single combats, desperate adventures and romantic loves. The setting was in the same vague and wonderful region as the coast of Bohemia, where to the known mountains, seas and cities that have poetic names was added a prodigious number of caverns, castles, islands and forests of the romances invention. With time and popularity this kind of story had naturally intensified its characteristics until it had reached the greatest extravagance and absurdity and combined in a way the unreality of the fairy tale with the bombast of the melodrama. Cervantes had apparently read these books with avidity and was not without a great sympathy with the kind of imagination they embodied. His own last and most carefully written book, The Traveils of Purcellies and Sahismunda is in many respects an imitation of them. It abounds in savage islands, furious tyrants, prodigious feats of arms, disguised maidens whose discretion is as marvelous as their beauty and happy deliverances from intricate and hopeless situations. His first book also, The Galatia was an embodiment of a kind of pastoral idealism sentimental verses being interspersed with euphuistic prose the whole describing the lovelorn shepherds and heartless shepherdesses of Arcadia. But while these books which were the author's favourites among his own works expressed perhaps Cervantes' natural taste and ambition, the events of his life and the real bent of his talent which in time he came himself to recognize drove him to a very different sort of composition. His family was ancient but impoverished and he was forced throughout his life to turn his hand to anything that could promise him a livelihood. His existence was a continuous series of experiments, vexations and disappointments. He adopted at first the profession of arms and followed his colours as a private soldier upon several foreign expeditions. He was long quartered in Italy. He fought at La Panto against the Turks, where among other wounds he received one that maimed his left hand to the greater glory as he tells us of his right. He was captured by Barbary pirates and remained for five years a slave in Algiers. He was ransomed and returned to Spain only to find official soldiers and recognitions denied him and finally at the age of thirty-seven he abandoned the army for literature. His first thought as a writer does not seem to have been to make direct use of his rich experience and varied observation. He was rather possessed by an obstinate longing for that poetic gift which as he confesses in one place heaven had denied him. He was a man with the idyllic romance, the galatea already mentioned, and at various times during the rest of his life wrote poems, plays, and stories of a romantic and sentimental type. In the course of these labours however he struck one vein of much richer promise. It was what the Spanish call the picaresque, that is the description of the life and character of rogues, and all those wretches and sorry wits that might be found about the highways in the country-ins or in the slums of cities. Of this kind is much of what is best in his collected stories the Nobelus exemplares. The talent and the experience which he betrays in these amusing narratives were to be invaluable to him later as the author of Gankijote where they enabled him to supply a foil to the fine world of his poor hero's imagination. We have now mentioned what were perhaps the chief elements of the preparation of Cervantes for his great task. They were a great familiarity with the romances of chivalry and a natural liking for them, a life of honourable but unrewarded endeavour both in war and in the higher literature, and much experience of vagabondia with the art of taking down and reproducing in amusing profusion the typical scenes and languages of low life. Out of these elements a single spark which we may attribute to genius to chance or to inspiration was enough to produce a new and happy conception that of a parody on the romances of chivalry in which the extravagances of the fables of knighthood should be contrasted with the unrewarded realities of life. This is done by the ingenious device of representing a country gentleman whose naturally generous mind, unhinged by much reading of the books of chivalry, should lead him to undertake the office of knight errant and induce him to write about the country clad in ancient armour, to right wrongs, to suck or defenceless maidens, to kill giants and to win empires at least as fast as that of Alexander. This is the subject of Don Quixote. But, happy as the conception is it could not have produced a book of enduring charm and well-seasoned wisdom had it not been filled in with a great number of amusing and life-like episodes and verified by two admirable figures Don Quixote and Sancho Pansa characters at once intimately individual and truly universal. Don Quixote at first appears to the reader and probably appeared to the author as well as primarily a madman, a thin and gaunt old village squire whose brain has been turned by the nonsense he has read and taken for gospel truth and who is punished for his ridiculous mania by an uninterrupted series of beatings falls and dignities and insults. But the hero and the author together with the ingenuity proper to madness and the inevitableness proper to genius soon begin to disclose the fund of intelligence and ideal passion which underlies this superficial insanity. We see that Don Quixote is only mad north-northwest when the wind blows from the quarter of his chivalrous preoccupation. At other times he shows himself a man of great goodness and fineness of wit, virtuous, courageous, courteous and generous, and in fact the perfect ideal of a gentleman. When he takes, for instance, a handful of acorns from the Goetheurd's table and begins a grand eloquent discourse upon the golden age we feel how cultivated the man is, how easily the little things of life suggest to him the great things and with what delight he dwells on what is beautiful and happy. The truth and pathos of the character become all the more compelling when we consider how naturally the hero's madness and calamities flow from this same exquisite sense of what is good. The contrast to this figure is furnished by that of Sancho Penza, who is all that is matter of fact, gross and plebeian. Yet he is willing to become Don Quixote's Esquire and by his credulity and devotion shows what an ascendancy, a heroic and enthusiastic nature can gain over the most sluggish of men. Sancho has none of the instincts of his master. He never read the books of chivalry or desired to right the wrongs he is naturally satisfied with his crust and his onions if they can be washed down with enough bad wine. His good dredge of a wife never transformed herself in his fancy into a peerless dulcinea. Yet Sancho follows his master into every danger, shares his discomforture and the many blows that rain down upon him and hopes to the end for the governorship of that insila with which Don Quixote is someday to reward his faithful Esquire. As the madness of Don Quixote is humanized by his natural intelligence and courage, so the grossness and credulity of Sancho are relieved by his homely wit. He abounds in proverbs. He never fails to see the reality of a situation and to protest doggedly against his master's visionary flights. He holds fast as long as he can to the evidence of his senses and to his little weaknesses of flesh and spirit. But, finally, he surrenders to the authority of Don Quixote and of the historians of chivalry, although not without a certain reluctance and some surviving doubts. The character of Sancho is admirable for the veracity with which its details are drawn. The traits of the boor, the glutton, and the coward come most naturally to the surface upon occasion, yet Sancho remains a patient, good-natured peasant, a devoted servant, and a humble Christian. Under the cover of such lifelike incongruities and of a pervasive humor, the author has given us a satirical picture of human nature not inferior, perhaps, to that furnished by Don Quixote himself. For instance, Don Quixote, after mending his helmet, tries its strength with a blow that smashes it to pieces. He mends it a second time, but now, without trial, deputes it to be henceforth a strong and perfect helmet. Sancho, when he is sent to bear a letter to Dulcinea, neglects to deliver it and invents an account of his interview with the imaginary for the satisfaction of his master. But before long, by dint of repeating the story, he comes himself to believe his own lies. Thus, self-deception in the night is the ridiculous effect of courage, and in the Esquire the not less ridiculous effect of sloth. The adventures these two heroes encounter are naturally only such as travelers along the Spanish roads would then have been likely to come upon. The point of the story depends on the familiarity and commonness of the situations in which Don Quixote finds himself so that the absurdity of his pretensions may be overwhelmingly shown. Critics are agreed in blaming the exceptions which Cervantes allowed himself to make to the realism of his scenes where he introduced romantic tales into the narrative of the first part. The tales are in themselves unworthy of their setting and contrary to the spirit of the whole book. Cervantes doubtless yielded here partly to his storytelling habits partly to a fear of monotony in the uninterrupted description of Don Quixote's adventures. He avoided this mistake in the second part and devised the visit to the Duke's palace and the intentional sport they're made of the hero to give variety to the story. More variety and more unity may still, perhaps, seem desirable in the book. The episodes are strung together without much coherence and without any attempt to develop either the plot or the characters. Sancho, to be sure, at last tastes the governorship of his insula and Don Quixote on his deathbed recovers his wits. This conclusion, appropriate and touching as it is, might have come almost anywhere in the course of the story. The whole book has, in fact, rather the quality of an improvisation. The episodes suggest themselves to the author's fancy as he proceeds, a fact which gives them the same unexpectedness and sometimes the same incompleteness which the events of a journey naturally have. It is in the genius of this kind of narrative to be a sort of imaginary diary without a general dramatic structure. The interest depends on the characters and the incidents alone, on the fertility of the author's intervention, on the ingenuity of the turns he gives to the story, and on the incidental scenes and figures he describes. When we have once accepted this manner of writing fiction, which might be called novelist before the days of the novel, we can only admire the execution of Don Quixote as masterly in its kind. We find here an abundance of fancy that is never at a loss for some probable and interesting incident. We find a graphic power that makes living and unforgettable many a minor character, even if slightly sketched. We find the charm of the country by little touches, without any formal descriptions, and we find a humorous and minute reproduction of the manners of the time. All this is rendered in a flowing and easy style, abounding in both characterization and parody of diverse types of speech and composition, and the whole is still but the background for the figures of Don Quixote and Sancho, and for their pleasant discourse, the quality and savor of which is maintained to the end. These excellences unite to make the book one of the most permanently delightful in the world, as well as one of the most diverting. seldom has laughter been so well justified as that which the reading of Don Quixote continually provokes. seldom has it found its causes in such genuine fancy, such profound and real contrast, and such victorious good humor. We sometimes wish, perhaps, that our heroes were spared some of their bruises and that we were not asked to delight so much in promiscuous beatings and floggings. But we must remember that these 300 years have made the European race much more sensitive to physical suffering. Our ancestors took that doubtful pleasure in the idea of moral writhings which we still take in the description of the tortures of the spirit. The idea of both evils is naturally distasteful to a refined mind, but we admit more willingly the kind which habit has accustomed us to regard as inevitable, and which personal experience very probably has made an old friend. Don Quixote has accordingly enjoyed a universal similarity, and has had the singular privilege of accomplishing the object for which it was written, which was to recall fiction from the extravagances of the books of chivalry to the study of real life. This is the simple object which Cervantes had and avowed. He was a literary man with literary interests, and the idea which came to him was to ridicule the absurdities of violent literary mode. The rich vein which he struck in the conception of Don Quixote's madness and topsy-turvy adventures encouraged him to go on. The subject and the characters deepened under his hands until from a parody of a certain kind of romances the story threatened to become a satire on human idealism. At the same time Cervantes grew fond of his hero and made him, as we must feel, in some sort a representative of his own chivalrous enthusiasm and constant disappointments. We need not, however, see in this transformation any deeply malice or remote significance. As the tale opened out before the author's fancy and enlisted his closer and more loving attention, he naturally enriched it with all the wealth of his experience. Just as he diversified it with pictures of common life and manners, so he waited it with the burden of human tragedy. He left upon it an impress of his own nobility and misfortunes side by side with a record of his time and country. But in this there was nothing intentional. He only spoke out of the fullness of his heart. The highest motives and characters were revealed to him by his own impulses and the lowest by his daily experience. There is nothing in the book that suggests a premeditated satire upon faith and enthusiasm in general. The author's evident purpose is to amuse, not to upgrade or to discourage. There is no bitterness in his pathos or despair in his disenchantment. Partly because he retains a fondness for this naughty world and partly because his heart is profoundly and entirely Christian. He would have rejected with indignation an interpretation of his work that would see in it an attack on religion or even on chivalry. His birth and nurture had made him religious and chivalrous from the beginning and he remained so by conviction to the end. He was still full of plans that overtook him, but he greeted it with perfect simplicity without lamentations over the past or anxiety for the future. If we could have asked Cervantes what the moral of Don Quixote was to his own mind he would have told us, perhaps, that it was this, that the force of idealism is wasted when it does not recognize the reality of things, neglect of the facts of daily life made the absurdity of the romances of chivalry and of the enterprise of Don Quixote. What is needed is not, of course, that idealism should be surrendered either in literature or in life, but that in both it should be made efficacious by a better adjustment to the reality it would transform. Something of this kind would have been we may believe Cervantes' own reading of his parable. But when parables are such direct and full transcripts of life, as is the story of Don Quixote, they offer almost as much occasion for diversity of interpretation as does the personal experience of men in the world, that the moral of Don Quixote should be doubtful and that each man should be tempted to see in it the expression of his own convictions all the greatest possible encomium of the book. For we may infer that the truth has been rendered in it, and that men may return to it always as to nature herself to renew their theories or to forget them and to refresh their fancy with the spectacle of a living world. End of section 42