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The wrack was dark an’ shiny where it floated in the sea,

There was no room in the brown boat but only him an’ me;

Him to cut the sea wrack—me to mind the boat,

An’ not a word between us the hours we were afloat.

The wet wrack,

The sea wrack,

The wrack was strong to cut.

We laid it on the grey rocks to wither in the sun;

An’ what should call my lad then to sail from Cushendun?

With a low moon, a full tide, a swell upon the deep,

Him to sail the old boat—me to fall asleep.

The dry wrack,

The sea wrack,

The wrack was dead so soon.

There’s a fire low upon the rocks to burn the wrack to kelp;

There’s a boat gone down upon the Moyle, an’ sorra one to help.

Him beneath the salt sea—me upon the shore—

By sunlight or moonlight we’ll lift the wrack no more.

The dark wrack,

The sea wrack,

The wrack may drift ashore.

When we come to examine the literature of the four great divisions of the Celtic race, a vast survey lies before us, with innumerable vistas. A lifetime might well be given to the study of any one of the ancient Erse, Alban-Gaelic, Cymric, and Armorican literatures: a lifetime that would yet have to leave much undiscovered, much unrelated. There is room for every student. In old Irish literature alone, though so many enthusiasts are now working towards its greater elucidation and the transference of the better part of it into Anglo-Celtic literature, there remain whole tracts, and even regions, of unexploited land. In a score of ways, pioneers have been clearing the ground for us: philologists like Windisch, Loth, Kuno Meyer, Whitley Stokes; literary scholars like S. Hayes O’Grady, Campbell of Islay, Cameron of Brodick, Dr Douglas Hyde; folklorists innumerable, in Scotland, Wales, and Ireland; romancists like Standish O’Grady, who write across the angle of the historic imagination, and romancists like W. B. Yeats, who write across the angle of the poetic imagination; and poets, an ever-growing band of sweet singers, who catch for us the fugitive airs, the exquisite fleeting cadences, the haunting, indefinable music of an earlier day.

From Ireland the Neo-Celtic Renascence has extended through Gaeldom. The concurrent Welsh development may be independent of this Irish influence, and probably is: largely because the poetic imagination of the Cymri of to-day was stirred from within, by the stimulus to the national genius through the world-wide attention drawn by the publication of the “Mabinogion,” as in turn the Gaelic imagination was stirred by the incalculable influence of “Ossian”—an influence so great, so deep, so wide-reaching, that, as already said, were Macpherson to be proved the sole author, were it convincingly demonstrable that he was, not a more or less confused and unscholarly interpreter, but himself a creator, himself “Ossian,” he would deserve to rank with the three or four great ancients and moderns who have dug, deep and wide, new channels for the surging flow of human thought. Possibly, at any rate, this may prove to be one good reason for the independence of the Welsh development from any Irish stimulus—an impulse from within always being more potent and enduring than one from without; but, fundamentally, this independence is due to an organic difference. In a word, the Celtic genius is broadly divisible, even at this day, into two great sections: the Goidelic and the Brythonic or Cymric—let us say, is represented by the Welsh Celt and the Gaelic Celt. Those readers or students who approach the literature of either, ancient or modern, but particularly the latter, and expect to find identity both of sentiment and in method of expression, will ultimately be as disappointed as one who should, with the same idea, approach Spanish and Portuguese, or Dutch and German, or Provençal and French. In every respect, save that of ancient kinship, the Welsh and the Gaels differ materially. There is, perhaps, more likeness between the Highlander and the Welshman than between the latter and the Irishman; but even here the distinctions are considerable, and the Gaelic islesman of Barra or Uist is as different a creature from the native of Glamorgan or Caermarthen as though no racial cousinship united them. But, in the instance of Welsh and Irish, the unlikeness is so marked that the best analogue is that of the Frenchman and the German. The Irish are the French of the Celtic races, the Welsh the Germans. The two people are distinct in their outer and inner life as well as in their literature; and for a Connaught man or a Hebridean to go through Wales would be as foreign an experience as for a Welshman to find himself among the Catholic islesmen of South Uist, or among the moorside villages of Connemara.

To-day the Gael and Cymri are foreigners. Strangely enough, the section of the Celtic race most akin to the Welsh is the Manx—a Goidelic people, and with a Gaelic dialect. The Gael himself, however, does not stand out distinctly. Although there is a far greater likeness between the Scoto-Celt and the Irish-Celt than between either and the Welshman, there are traits which unmistakably distinguish them. In Ireland itself, the Celt of the south-east and south differs in more respects than mere dialect from his kinsman by the Connaught shore or of the hills of Connemara; as, in Scotland, there is a marked distinction between the “Tuathach” (North Highlander) and the “Deasach” (the South and West Highlander). A Farquharson or a Gordon from Aberdeenshire has to shake hands across the arms of many a Mackenzie and Macgregor, many a Cameron and Macpherson, before he can link in brotherly grip with a MacNeill of Barra, a Macdonald of Skye, a Macleod of the Lewis. These distinctions, of course, are in their nature parochial rather than racial; but they are highly indicative of a fundamental weakness in the Celtic nature, and suggest a cogent reason for the failure of the race to cohere into one compact and indispersable nation, as the central Teutonic races merged into “Germany,” as Gauls, Normans, and Provençals merged into “France,” and as the Brythons, the Teutonic outlanders (Frisians, Angles, Jutes, &c.), Saxons, Danes, Normans, and Anglo-Celts merged into “England,” and, later, into “Great Britain,” into the “British Empire.”

The most marked Celtic national homogeneity is to be found in Wales. Wales has ever persisted, and still persists in her moat and her drawbridge. In the preservation of her language is her safeguard. Without Welsh, Wales would be as English as Cumberland or Cornwall. In this way only, knit indissolubly to the flank of England as she is, and without any natural eastern frontier of mountain range or sea, can she isolate herself; and I am convinced that herein we have one main reason for the passionate attachment of the Cymri of to-day to their ancient language—an attachment as strong among the unlettered as among ardent scholars, and even among those who have no heed for the beauty of traditional literature or, indeed, heed of any kind other than for the narrow personal interests of domesticity.

But this very isolation of Wales, through her language, has, no doubt, interfered materially with the development of her Anglo-Celtic literature. Contrasted with that of Ireland or that of Scotland, how astonishingly meagre it is. All Ireland is aflame with song; Scotland is again becoming the land of old romance. Here and there are a few writers, a poet-romancist like Mr Ernest Rhys, a poet like the late Emily Davis, a few novelists who are Welsh by the accident of birth rather than by the nationality of the brain. For, of course, Mr George Meredith stands so far above all localisation of this kind that it would be out of place to rank him merely as the head of contemporary Wales. He is the foremost Anglo-Celtic voice of to-day; so emphatically foremost, by the distinguishing qualities of his genius, that if to-morrow he were proved to be come of a stock of long unmixed Saxon ancestry never dissociated from that southern country of which he is by birth a native, we should be justified in abiding by the far more significant and important lineage of the brain.

But this great exception apart, the difference alluded to is extraordinary. Wales is so animated by national enthusiasms, pride, and incalculable hereditary uplift, that her silence—in English, that is—can hardly be accounted for away from the supposition that, in closing her ears against English, she has also set her lips against utterance in that tongue.

The Scoto-Celtic writers of to-day, both in prose and poetry, have produced more Anglo-Celtic literature than Wales has done since the beginning of the century, and with a range, a vitality, a beauty, far beyond anything that has come forth from modern Cymru; and Ireland, again, in poetry at any rate, has given us even more than Scotland.

The Celtic Renascence, of which so much has been written of late—that is, the re-birth of the Celtic genius in the brain of Anglo-Celtic poets and the brotherhood of dreamers—is, fundamentally, the outcome of “Ossian,” and, immediately, of the rising of the sap in the Irish nation.

Of the immense and never yet approximately defined Irish-Celtic influence in literature a fine and true word has been said by one of the ablest of the Irish fellowship; and I would strongly urge every reader to obtain Mr Stopford Brooke’s admirable and stimulating little essay “On the Need and Use of getting Irish Literature into the English Tongue.”[3] With its conclusion, every lover of English poetry and romance will agree.

“When we have got the old [Celtic] legendary tales rendered into fine prose and verse, I believe we shall open out English poetry to a new and exciting world, an immense range of subjects, entirely fresh and full of inspiration. Therefore, as I said, get them out into English, and then we may bring England and [Celtdom] into a union which never can suffer separation, and send another imaginative force on earth which may (like Arthur’s tale) create Poetry for another thousand years.”

These are inspiring words, and should find an eager response.

More and more we may hope that the beautiful poetry of Ireland, ancient and modern, with its incommunicable charm and exquisite spontaneity; that the strange, elemental, sombre imagination of the West Highlander and of the Gael of the Isles; and that the vivid spell of the old Welsh bards, will, before long, become a still greater, a still more regenerating, and a lasting force and influence in our English literature.

In the Notes I have something to say concerning each of the many ancient and modern writers drawn upon for this representative anthology, so need not here enter into further detail of the kind.

Obviously, it would be impossible to make a work of this nature as welcome to the Celtic scholar as to the general reader. No one in the least degree acquainted with ancient Gaelic and Cymric literature could fail to note how merely superficial this section of “Lyra Celtica” is. Therefore, let me again aver that this anthology has been compiled, not for the specialist, but for the lover of poetry; and to serve, for the many who have no knowledge of “Anglo-Celtic” as distinct from “Anglo-Saxon” poetry, as a small Pisgah whence to gain a glimpse into a strange and beautiful land, a land wherein, as in a certain design by William Blake, the sun, the moon, and the morning star all shine together, and where the horizons are spanned by fugitive rainbows ever marvellously dissolving and more marvellously re-forming.

The effort of the Editor has been to give, not always the finest or most unquestionably authentic examples of early Celtic poetry, but the most characteristic. Thus only could some idea be conveyed of the physiognomy of this ancient literature.

In the first section, that representative of Early Gaelic, a long period of time is covered. A whole heroic age lies between that strange pantheistic utterance of Amergin, who is now accepted as the earliest Erse poet of whom we have authentic record, and the hymns of Columba: and the quaint “Shaving Hymn” of Murdoch the Monk, though it precedes the Ossianic fragments, relates to a much nearer period of history than they do. Of these Ossianic fragments, it is not needful to say more here than that, in their actual form, they are no more genuinely old than, for example, are many of the lovely fantasias on old themes by modern Irish poets. They are, at most, fundamentally ancient, and are given here on this plea, and not as the translations of Macpherson. The day is gone when the stupid outcry against Macpherson’s “Ossian,” as no more than a gigantic fraud, finds a response among lovers of literature. We all know, now, that Macpherson’s “Ossian” is not a genuine translation of authentic Dana Oisìn mhic Fhionn, but, for all its great and enduring beauty, a clumsily-constructed, self-contradictory, and sometimes grotesquely impossible rendering of disconnected, fugitive, and, for the most part, oral lore. Of the genuineness of this legendary lore there is no longer any doubt in the minds of those native and alien students, who alone are qualified to pronounce a definite verdict on this long disputed point. It would have been easy to select other Ossianic fragments; but as, in this anthology, the spirit and not the letter was everything, it was considered advisable to make as apt a compromise with Macpherson’s “Ossian” as practicable. Ancient poetry of the nature of pieces such as “The Song of Fionn” (page 4) convey little to the ordinary reader, not only on account of their puzzling allusions to events and persons of whom the Englishman is not likely to have heard, or from the strangeness of their style, as because of the remoteness of the underlying sentiment and mental standpoint. And of this there can be no question: that the ancient poetry, the antique spirit, breathes throughout this eighteenth-century restoration, and gives it enduring life, charm, and all the spell of cosmic imagination. It may well be, indeed, that the literary historian has another signal discovery to make, and, in definitively dissociating Oisìn of the Féinn and Ossian of Badenoch, prove convincingly that James Macpherson was not even the author (of the greater part at any rate) of the matter that has been interpolated into the original, inchoate, traditional bardic lore.

However much or little appeal “Ossian” may have for English readers of to-day, there can surely be no doubt that all who have the spirit of poetry must recognise the charm of the ancient Celtic imagination in compositions such as “Credhe’s Lament” (page 5). This lovely haunting lament, from the “Book of Lismore,” comes in its English form from that invaluable work of Mr S. Hayes O’Grady, “Silva Gadelica.” Of how much Celtic poetry, modern as well as ancient, is not this, though variously expressed, the refrain: “Melodious is the crane, and O melodious is the crane, in the marshlands of Druim-dá-thrén! ’tis she that may not save her brood alive!”

For the remarkable continuity of both expression and sentiment which characterises Celtic poetry, ancient and modern, let the student turn, for example, to the most famous Gaelic poem in Scotland to-day, Duncan Bàn Macintyre’s “Ben Dorain,” and compare it with this “Lay of Arran” by Caeilte, the Ossianic bard—Arran, no longer Arran of the many stags, but still one of the loveliest of the Scottish isles, and touched on every headland and hill with the sunset glamour of the past.