CREATING CELTIC STUDIES: ROMANTICISM AND RATIONALISM
IN LATE NINETEENTH-CENTURY CELTIC SCHOLARSHIP
Donald E. Meek
The creation of what we
conveniently call today 'Celtic Studies' has been a complex process, operating
over some four centuries. In the course
of these centuries, numerous different strata have been laid down - linguistic,
literary, ideological, archaeological, to name but a few - and they have
interacted to a considerable extent, with the appearance of faultlines and
occasional earthquakes. The discipline
which emerged from the primordial turmoil was partly a hybrid, deriving
theories, insights and skills from Oriental and Classical studies (among
others), but it also had its own distinctive concerns, based on close study of
Celtic languages. The formation of the
discipline within our modern universities occurred in the nineteenth century,
and particularly (in Britain and Ireland) in the last quarter of that century.
This period was noteworthy for its strong emphasis on discovering the historical
roots of the Celtic languages. This is the movement which I have termed
'rationalism', though I recognise that this is not a wholly satisfactory
designation; 'philological rationalism' may be nearer the mark. Prior to the formal creation of Celtic Studies,
however, we can also discern a long gestation period, covering most of the
eighteenth century, from at least the time of Edward Lhuyd in the late
seventeenth century, when the first sense of a Celtic language family emerged,
to the positioning of 'Celtick' within a wider language family by Sir William
('Oriental') Jones in 1786.
From about 1760, a strongly
romantic interest in the literatures of the countries that we now call 'Celtic'
(by extension of the term) emerged in the British Isles, and spread far beyond
their shores. Romantic Celticism has
frequently given Celtic Studies an important boost. Its later manifestations, however, have also
given the discipline something of a bad name, by contributing a great deal of
confusion to the nuances of the word 'Celtic', and applying it to a wide range
of political and other ideological causes, often in a context divorced from the
Celtic languages themselves.
Today we may feel curiously
torn between the romantic and rationalist dimensions of the discipline. In a climate which so often encourages happy
inclusiveness, we can easily forget the rationalist dimension or feel
embarrassed about it. Romanticism has
its charms, and we ourselves can quite easily fall victim. That strand of romanticism, however, does
not allow us to abandon reason, nor are we permitted, as we see fit, to welcome
excessive or groundless illusions based on wishful thinking about 'Celts' and
'Celtic fringes'. On the other hand, we can espouse a very hard-headed
rationalism, while forgetting that our discipline has a powerfully romantic
strand within it. In short, we have to
know how to deal with our emotions, and to be prepared to subject them to the
demands of reason - to sources and to evidence, whether linguistic, historical or
literary. And it is useful to reflect
sensibly on how romanticism and rationalism have interacted across the
centuries, and particularly in the nineteenth century, when the foundations of
the modern discipline were securely laid.
The emergence of romanticism
In acknowledging both the
romantic and rationalist dimensions of the discipline, while rejecting
nonsensical claims, we follow in the footsteps of the founding fathers (and
they were male, not female) of Celtic Studies.
The polarities with which they wrestled, and we continue to wrestle,
have a long history. The movement which
we designate 'romanticism' goes back to the publication of James Macpherson's
Ossianic translations in the years between 1760 and 1763. An interest in Celtic language, literature
and history was stimulated by the extraordinary controversy which followed in
their wake. The Celts went global as Macpherson's work was translated into
numerous languages, and influenced writers in Europe and America. 'Ossian' encouraged a great deal of faking,
but it also stimulated the collection of much genuine traditional Gaelic
material, and a desire to discover as much as possible about the 'ancient
bards'. Eighteenth-century Wales likewise had its own 'creative refashioners',
of whom the best known is Edward Williams, who assumed the name 'Iolo
Morganwg'. Iolo's 'forgeries' have kept
Welsh scholars in business down to the present day, as they have tried to sort
out what was, and what wasn't, actually composed by Dafydd ap Gwilym in the
fourteenth century, rather than by Iolo in the eighteeenth.
After the death of Macpherson
in 1796, the Ossianic question was subjected to an enquiry by the Highland
Society of Scotland, which issued its report in 1805. This enquiry was of vital importance in
laying down some empirical approaches to the study of Gaelic tradition. The
enquiry indicates that romanticism can generate rational investigations into
its own causes; the Scottish Enlightenment, which encouraged the creation of
'Ossian', also had a sceptical element within it which challenged the
authenticity of the alleged 'epics'. In
particular, the later scepticism of David Hume, who was initially a 'believer'
in 'Ossian', strengthened the cry for sources and evidence. Empiricism and rationalism thus went
together, and were by no means mutually exclusive. Nor did rationalism or empiricism, however
strong, banish romanticism. In Scotland
after the publication of the Highland Society's report, it is possible to trace
a steadily increasing interest in the collection and analysis of Gaelic
tradition by scholars who recognised the importance of oral material and the
need to preserve it in written and printed forms, but who did not necessarily
approve of the methodology of James Macpherson.
Thus John Francis Campbell of Islay, who published Popular Tales of the West Highlands in 1860-62 and Leabhar na Féinne in 1872, regularly
condemned Macpherson in his editorial commentaries, while responding to the
urge to gather Gaelic narratives, in both prose and verse.
Alongside the romantic
rationalism and scepticism of Campbell of Islay, whose pioneering labours set
the scene for the professional collecting of our own day, James Macpherson's
reconstructions created a vaguer kind of misty pseudo-scholarship which
affected the interpretation, not only of poetry, but also of much more
specifically philological matters, such as place-names. It influenced perceptions of landscape and
literature, and even of religion, and was internalised within the Celtic areas
themselves through scholars such as Ernest Renan, one of the most influential
Orientalist scholars of the nineteenth century and a native of Brittany. Renan,
in turn, influenced Matthew Arnold, who gave his celebrated lectures on Celtic
literature in Oxford in 1865-66. When
Arnold gave his lecture, one of the members of the audience was a Welshman by
the name of John Rhys, who was to become the first Professor of Celtic at
Oxford in 1877 - a chair founded as a result of Arnold's exhortations. Here we can already see a direct line of
descent from Macpherson, through Renan and Arnold, down to John Rhys - and
there can be no denying the fact that romanticisim aided the emergence of
Celtic Studies. Romanticsim was a powerful
tool for creating enthusiasm, constructing ideologies, and raising funds. It had massive strengths, but it had equally
massive weaknesses, for all too often it encouraged dreams at the expense of
realities. Whether they want to admit it
or not, Celtic scholars owe a great deal to the highly creative work of James
Macpherson.
Sir John Rhys and the science of philology
Through translation into
other European languages, notably German, Macpherson's 'Ossian' probably
contributed to the second movement which influenced the founding fathers of
Celtic Studies after 1870. This movement was indebted to the gradual emergence
in Germany of philological studies based on rational enquiry into the
relationship of languages to one another.
The family of languages known first as Indo-Germanisch, and later
Indo-European, provided a particular focus.
In 1838 Franz Bopp demonstrated that Celtic belonged to this
family. The basis of his enquiry was the
form of the words themselves, and the extent to which they displayed common
roots, which could be ascribed to a single ancestor language, nowadays known as
Proto-Indo-European. Initially this
encouraged a great deal of woolly nonsense which was produced by romantics who
began to espouse the new ideas without having mastered the correct philological
techniques: witness some of the wild etymologies offered by such learned men as
Professor William Geddes of Aberdeen. In
the long term and in the right hands, however, the new philological method
produced a much more precise approach to the understanding of language than had
prevailed hitherto. With this new
analysis of language came a corresponding interest in explaining the common
origins of mythology, and also of folktales.
The Aryan or Indo-European hypothesis was the foundation stone of the
new scholarly edifice which began to be built in Britain and Ireland from the
1870s. Its impact is very evident in
Campbell of Islay's theories about the dissemination of folktales and their
motifs.
Both romanticism and
philological rationalism can be seen equally clearly in the approaches of
several foundational Welsh, Gaelic and Irish scholars of the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries. The proportions of romanticism and rationalism
vary within the profiles of individual scholars, and that makes the study all
the more interesting. I have already
mentioned the Welsh scholar John Rhys, and perhaps a further word or two about
him would be appropriate at this point, in order to set the other scholars in
context. As I have studied the emergence
of Celtic Studies in Scotland, I have become aware of the importance of Rhys,
as the first Professor of Celtic at Oxford, in establishing a paradigm of
scholarship which could be followed by others.
Rhys (1840-1915), who was a native of south Wales, had interests in Celtic
mythology and religion, producing his Studies
in the Arthurian Legend (1881) and On
the Origin and Growth of Religion as Illustrated by Celtic Heathendom
(1888). He was also interested in
folklore and ethnology. But Rhys was a
philologist, and primarily a philologist. He published his first book, Lectures on Welsh Philology, in 1877,
and, as the entry in The New Companion to
the Literature of Wales puts it, 'he
was the first to use the methods of Comparative Philology in a study of Welsh
from the Brythonic inscriptions to the language of his own time'. His volume on
The Outlines of the Phonology of Manx
Gaelic was published in 1894. He was
thus an all-round Celtic philologist, with an interest in both the Brythonic
and the Goedelic branches of the Celtic family.
Alexander MacBain and Celtic philology
With the Goedelic branch of
Celtic in mind, I now turn to Scotland. Two Scottish Celtic scholars, whose
work I know particularly well, are Alexander MacBain and Donald MacKinnon, both
of whom were native Gaelic speakers.
Both were more or less contemporary with one another and with John
Rhys. In both, one can see differing
responses to the formative ideologies at the heart of the new Celtic
discipline.
MacBain, who was younger than
MacKinnon, was a native of Badenoch, and became Headmaster of Raining's School,
Inverness, in 1880. He produced many ground-breaking writings, of which the
best known is his Etymological Dictionary
of the Gaelic Language, which was published in 1896, two years after Rhys's
work on Manx. MacBain acknowledges the
importance of Rhys's work in his dictionary, citing all his major works,
including his Manx Phonology. He also has a scholarly profile very close
to that of Rhys, since, in addition to his key concern with philology, he wrote
extensively on mythology (in which he sometimes referred to Rhys, alongside
Muller and Tyler), and explored aspects of early Celtic Scotland. Because of this, and the manner in which he
influenced later scholars and provided essential tools for them, MacBain has
the first claim (ahead of MacKinnon, in my view) to being the founding father
of Celtic Studies in Scotland.
MacBain was a graduate in
Mental Philosophy of the University of Aberdeen, but in the 1870s, while a
student, he appears to have drunk deeply of the new Celtic philological
perspectives which were introduced to Aberdeen, and to Britain more widely, by
Iohann Kaspar Zeuss's major work, Grammatica
Celtica, which had been reissued in 1871.
MacBain was aware that the romanticism of the previous century or so,
and the speculation of Celtophiles who were carried away by their own
enthusiasms, had left a very dubious legacy which required to be cleared out
before the new academic premises (in both senses!) could be built. For him, the way to do the 'carting' was to
take up the same tools as the Germans of Bonn and Berlin, and to employ 'the
science of language' or comparative philology, as it came to be known. This was what he wrote in a paper from the
1880s:
'It is needless to remark
that until lately the Celts suffered much from the injudicious and unscientific
theories of Celtic enthusiasts, and it has been only by the patient industry of
the Germans that full recognition has been given to the proper position of the
Celts among the other Indo-European nations.
Even yet, in Scotland, too little attention is paid to the scientific
facts established in Celtic ethnology and philology.'
'The scientific facts
established in Celtic ethnology and philology', no less. The future lay with the philologists,
according to MacBain, and in the years ahead he was to be the relentless
scourge of all 'enthusiasts' who had not approached their linguistic evidence
in a properly 'philologic' manner.
Professor William J. Watson said of him that 'charlatans found to their
cost that he could wield a grievous cudgel'.
The 'cudgel' was employed most strikingly in the review columns, when
MacBain ruthlessly exposed the weaknesses of those who were foolish enough to attempt
explanations of Scottish place-names, without a proper knowledge of the
necessary languages.
Charlatans, past as well as
present, felt the force of MacBain's cudgel.
In a manner similar to his dispatching of onomastic con-men, MacBain
roundly dismissed James Macpherson's 'Ossian', declaring strongly, again in the
mid-1880s:
'The conclusion we come to is
simply this:- Macpherson is as truly the author of ''Ossian'' as Milton is of
''Paradise Lost''. Milton is to the
Bible in even nearer relation than Macpherson is to the Ossianic ballads.'
MacBain also attacked, in
spirited form, the contribution of historians such as William Forbes Skene,
whose volume on the Scottish Highlanders
was given the lash in 1897. Yet, in after-dinner speeches at the Annual Dinners
of the Gaelic Society of Inverness, he could speak in a much more accommodating
and romantic vein. In one speech, given in 1882, he showed how much he was part
of a wider romantic movement, at the same time as he espoused rationalist
perspectives. In his speech, he doffed his cap to Matthew Arnold, describing
him as 'the most refined of our modern critics'. He was even mellow to James
Macpherson. 'And after all', he asked,
'what does it much matter whether they [the epics] are largely composed by
Macpherson himself or not, if the poems are really good and have the true
Celtic ring about them?'
The 'true Celtic ring' was to
be found in many parts of Scotland, but particularly in those societies, such
as the Gaelic Society of Inverness, established in 1871, where a broad
commitment to the even broader notion of 'Celtic' was forging powerful
alliances of landlords, ministers, clan chiefs, school teachers, school
inspectors, and, of course, scholars like MacBain. MacBain, in that context, had to play the
'Celtic game'. In its defence, it can be
said that the use of the term 'Celtic', by transferring the label from a
respectable academic perspective on the languages to a wider, more amorphous
alliance or set of alliances, created its own romance. 'Highland Celts' and
'Hebridean Celts' were spoken of with admiration, and the old stigmas
associated with Gaelic seemed to fall away in a superficial Celtic unity which
helped to rally support for the language and its speakers.
Donald MacKinnon and the integrity of 'Ossian'
The 'Celtic game', which
pooled the intellectual, political and financial resources of well-disposed
'Celts' of various kinds, but commonly of those who had moved to the cities,
was of considerable importance in building the structures of Celtic Studies. In establishing Chairs of Celtic, the 'Celtic
game' was of particular value, as the creation of the Edinburgh Chair in 1882
demonstrates. The Chair became an icon
of Gaelic identity within Scotland, and a test of commitment to the language. My concern here, however, is not with the
Chair, but with its first occupant, Professor Donald MacKinnon. MacKinnon (1839-1914) was a native of the
Inner Hebridean island of Colonsay, and had obtained a degree in Mental
Philosophy at Edinburgh. Similarly, MacBain had studied Mental Philosophy at
Aberdeen. Similarly, too, both men moved
towards Celtic Studies as their main academic pursuit, but they differed
markedly in their scholarly emphases.
MacBain was primarily a philologist, and MacKinnon likewise had an
interest in place-names, particularly those of his native Argyllshire, on which
he wrote important articles in the press.
However, MacKinnon's main concern was with the elucidation and editing
of Gaelic literature, and he has a claim to being the first modern Gaelic
literary critic, writing in Gaelic in the 1870s and producing important (though
now outmoded) articles on the major Gaelic poets. He also expounded the philosophy, as he saw
it, behind Gaelic proverbs and proverbial sayings, and produced a series of
Gaelic essays on this theme. His major
academic work was his Descriptive
Catalogue of Gaelic Manuscripts in the Advocates' Library, Edinburgh,
published in 1912. This in itself demonstrates MacKinnon's commitment to making
Gaelic literary material accessible, in form and content, to contemporary Gaels
and scholars. In other words, while
acknowledging the importance of the new philological science, he tended to lean
away from the profoundly philological position occupied by MacBain, and to
espouse the more 'traditional' side of Gaelic investigation. That was no bad thing, since the discipline
needed both the literary and the philological inputs of its emerging scholars.
What is of interest to us,
however, is the strongly romantic impulse which undergirds MacKinnon's writings,
and in particular his literary criticism.
His yardstick for good poetry is, perhaps surprisingly, Macpherson's
'Ossian'. His appeal to 'Ossian', captured in the qualifying phrase 'apart from
Ossian', forms a leitmotif in his critical writings. When discussing Dugald Buchanan (1716-68),
the Gaelic religious poet of the eighteenth century, MacKinnon made no secret
of his admiration for the man and his verse, but even he had to play second
fiddle to 'Ossian' and to other 'Ossianic' compositions, some of them
bogus. Thus, MacKinnon claimed that
Dugald Buchanan's poetry surpassed 'all other Gaelic poetry that we have -
apart, perhaps, from Macpherson's Ossian
and Smith's Seann Dàna' - the latter
reference being to the Ossianic forgeries and imitations of the Rev. John Smith
of Campbeltown. We may even see a
Macphersonic touch in MacKinnon's enthusiasm for proverbial lore, with its
overt deference to the wisdom of the ancestors from a great Gaelic past. 'The Sublime' was to be found in ancestral
wisdom, and in Macpherson's 'Ossian', which MacKinnon regarded as the
touchstone of how the Highland people once thought: Ann am bàrdachd Oisein gheibh sinn an dearbhadh as làidire a tha againn
air a' bhuaidh a bha aig cumhachdan an t-saoghail mun cuairt daibh thairis air
inntinnean an t-sluaigh o shean ('In the poetry of Ossian we will find the
strongest proof that we have of the influence that the powers of the world
round about them [the environment!] had over the minds of the people of old.').
The natural world of the
Highlands, according to MacKinnon, was also perfectly delineated in 'Ossian'.
Travellers who had written in derogatory terms about the Highland landscape
prior to the publication of 'Ossian' had misunderstood the real beauty of the
region, and 'Ossian' had set the record straight. Even the achievement of
Duncan Bàn MacIntyre (1724-1812), probably the supreme Gaelic poet of nature
who flourished in the eighteenth century, was surpassed by that of
'Ossian'. The question of authorship,
which for men such as MacBain was easily resolved, was still an open question
for MacKinnon about 1875: Coma an tràths'
co-dhiubh is e Mac Mhuirich a rinn 'Oisean' no nach e, b' fhìor Ghàidheal e a
dh' aon chor ('No matter for the moment whether or not it was Macpherson
who composed 'Ossian', he was on any account a true Gael'). The 'true Gael', the essence of Gaelic
integrity, had to be defended to the last drop of Gaelic ink.
There are ironies here, of
the most profound kind. It would be hard
to find, in the whole of Gaelic literature, a poet more different from
Macpherson's 'Ossian' than Dugald Buchanan.
Admittedly, we can argue that Buchanan was influenced by Macpherson's
work and that both operated within an intellectual climate which sought the
Sublime, but the sinuous, logical preaching of Buchanan hardly bears comparison
with the heavily descriptive prose-poetry of James Macpherson. Even Duncan MacIntyre's ornate and well
fashioned poetry in praise of his working environment on Beinn Dòbhrain has a
very different feel from that of Macpherson.
Alongside 'Ossian' and the
proverbs, and in the wake of the publication of Campbell's Popular Tales, MacKinnon acknowledged the importance of traditional
tales as another treasure-house of early Gaelic values. His perspectives on the tales reached even
farther into the remote past. They were, in his view, a repository of the
Gaels' ancient beliefs, and he cited the German scholar, Heinrich Zimmer
(1851-1910), as his authority in claiming that the Gaels had retained the
purity of this aspect of their literature better than any other race in
Europe. He believed, following Alfred
Nutt and others, that the tales preserved a mythology held in common mun do dhealaich Gàidheal is Gall, Greugach
is Ròmanach, Slabh is Innseanach, a choimhlionadh an dàin air faiche mhór an
t-saoghail ('before Gael and Lowlander, Greek and Roman, Slav and Indian,
went their separate ways to fulfil their destiny on the great field of the
world'). The Indo-European linguistic
model was thus extended to embrace and account for perceived similarities in
the themes and mythologies of folktales in different European and Asian
cultures. MacKinnon, however, appears to
have overlooked Welsh and Irish tales as part of the same alleged continuum.
Here MacKinnon is closer to
the contemporary mainstream, but his 'Ossianic' myopia may seem curiously at
odds with the new, corrective vision which was informing the emergence of
Celtic Studies in Scotland. We may be
inclined to conclude that he was trying to hold back the tide of progress,
which was sweeping away ancient values.
Simultaneously he appears to counteract the growing scepticism which, by
the early 1870s, had generally accepted that 'Ossian' was the work of James
Macpherson. Nevertheless, we have to understand that such romanticism was not a
reflection of MacKinnon's personal weakness, his intransigence or his
old-fashioned ways. Rather, it was very
much part of the Celtic academic package as a whole, and it sat hard alongside
scholarly commitment to rational enquiry.
After all, MacKinnon was appointed to the Edinburgh Chair in 1882,
despite his overt 'Ossianism', which had been presented to the Gaelic-reading
public in the main Gaelic periodical, An
Gaidheal, in the preceding decade.
It was neither a dark secret nor a good reason for banning him from the
new Chair; indeed, John Stuart Blackie, who gathered the funds for the Chair,
would have relished MacKinnon's Ossianic predilections. A scholar
could choose which part of the romantic/rationalist package to
emphasise, and when and where such an emphasis was most appropriate. And the scholars made their choices. Whereas MacKinnon was prepared to give house
room to Ossianic romanticism in his writings, MacBain kept his more mellow
views of 'Ossian', including 'the true Celtic ring', for the bonhomie and
bombastic speech-making of Celtophile dinners at which the gulf between the
philological scientist and the 'Celtic' enthusiast had to be bridged for the
wider benefit of the discipline.
'Ossian' may have had little validity as an indigenous Gaelic work, but
it had great mythopoeic and cohesive power.
By the time Professor William J. Watson succeeded MacKinnon in 1914, the
claims of 'Ossian' had receded into the background, and a more firmly philological
and less speculative model for Celtic Studies could emerge.
Kuno Meyer and 'Mad Celts'
The ironies or choices or
blind spots or fond delusions (call them what we will, from our own enlightened
position!) in the perspectives of MacKinnon and others lay somewhere in the 'no
man's land' between romanticism and rationalism, but they were by no means
restricted to the foundational scholars of Celtic Studies in Scotland. I suspect that we could find them in Wales
too without much difficulty, if 'The Book of Mad Celts' recently edited
by Dr Marion Löffler is anything to go by.
This book is based on the photographs taken by John Wickens at the
pan-Celtic Congress held at Caernarfon in 1904.
These show Celtic scholars and Celtophiles of various sorts masquerading
in national costumes and druidic outfits on the battlements of Caernarfon
Castle. Ireland, Scotland and Wales are well represented.
One of those who was not
present at Caernarfon, but who was in both the rationalist and romantic streams
of Celtic Studies and contributed to the creation of the pan-Celtic Congress,
was Professor Kuno Meyer (1858-1919), an almost exact contemporary of Alexander
MacBain. Kuno Meyer, who held a Chair
at Liverpool and later at Berlin, was a German from Hamburg, and his career as
a leading Celtic scholar impinged productively on Scotland, Ireland and Wales,
though he is associated particularly closely with Ireland. As a philologist and brilliant linguist, he
was a meticulous editor and translator of early Irish/Gaelic texts, and helped
to found the School of Irish Learning, which was the precursor of the School of
Celtic Studies of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. Meyer was at the forefront of academic
activity which sought to use the philological science, developed in Germany, to
present the riches of early Irish literature to both scholars and popular
readers, and thereby to counteract the views of Professor Robert Atkinson of
Trinity College, Dublin, who had belittled the richness and variety of that literature. In his edition of the small text, King and Hermit, published in 1901,
Meyer showed that, through engaging with those poems which were ascribed to
nature-loving hermits, such as Marbán in his text, he himself could become
something of a nature-loving hermit.
Indeed, this hard-headed German philologist provided his small book with
what must rank as the most romantic dedication ever penned by a Celtic
scholar. The dedication is to four of
his friends, Damer Harrison, John MacDonald, Walter Raleigh, and John Sampson,
and it goes like this:
'When, a few years ago, we
five, like Marban the Hermit, exchanging for awhile the flockbed of
civilisation for the primitive couch of earth, went agypsying into Wales, and
every evening pitched our tent now by a murmuring brook, now upon the shingle
of the sea, then again among the heather on a mountain-side, or in some
woodland glade, where the hundred-throated chorus of birds awoke us at dawn,
and the hooting owl startled us out of our slumbers at night, - some of you,
town-born and bred like myself, felt for the first time that exquisite charm of
an intimate intercourse with nature which has found such beautiful expression
in these verses of a nameless Irish poet.
In memory of those happy times I dedicate this little book to you.'
It would take another chapter
to unpack the complexities of that passage, and to trace its various allusions.
Some of them are as much Wordsworthian and Arnoldian as Ossianic. Echoes of
Wordsworth's 'Tintern Abbey' may lie between Meyer's lines, but the most
obvious source for his sentiments is Matthew Arnold's 'The Scholar Gipsy'. This rather overwrought poem is based on an
older story, first told by the philosopher and cleric, Joseph Glanvill (1636-80)
in The Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661). Arnold admires the 'scholar gipsy' who opted
out of academic study in Oxford, and whose free spirit, with its heaven-sent
spark of inspiration, is still to be seen in different parts of the
countryside:
And near me on the grass lies
Glanvil's book -
Come, let me read the
oft-read tale again,
The story of that Oxford
scholar poor,
Of pregnant parts and quick
inventive brain,
Who, tir'd of knocking at
Preferment's door,
One summer morn forsook
His friends, and went to
learn the Gipsy lore,
And roam'd the world with
that wild brotherhood,
And came, as most men deem'd,
to little good,
But came to Oxford and his
friends no more...
For early didst thou leave
the world, with powers
Fresh, undiverted to the
world without,
Firm to their mark, not spent
on other things;
Free from the sick fatigue,
the languid doubt,
Which much to have tried, in
much been baffled, brings.
O Life unlike to ours!
Who fluctuate idly without
term or scope,
Of whom each strives, nor
knows for what he strives,
And each half lives a hundred
different lives;
Who wait like thee, but not,
like thee, in hope.
Thou waitest for the spark
from Heaven: and we,
Vague half-believers of our
casual creeds,
Who never deeply felt, nor
clearly will'd,
Whose insight never has borne
fruit in deeds,
Whose weak resolves never
have been fulfill'd...
An English poet as recent as
the massively influential Arnold thus provided one of the visionary
perspectives for Meyer's excursions into Celtic 'hermit' literature and Celtic
countries. This perspective continues
today, not so much in the minds of scholars as in those of the popularisers of
'Celtic Christianity', with its strong emphasis on the benefits of opting out
of the contemporary rat-race and embracing a 'return to Nature'.
Given the overall evidence,
we may justly conclude that whoever accuses our foundational Celtic scholars -
in Scotland, Wales or Ireland - of lacking romantic interests (however we
define these words!), and of being mere eggheads, assuredly does not have the
truth upon his tongue. The discipline of
Celtic Studies, as it emerged, engaged the hearts as well as the minds of even
those die-hard rationalists who might prefer to call themselves 'the scientists
of language'. It is also very clear
that, although their hearts were warmed by romantic impulses which sometimes
had roots in the indigenous literatures of Ireland, Wales and Scotland, the
stimuli were often far removed from these shores and even from the properly
language-based world of Celtc scholarship which they professed. Germany, with its philological scholars and
its strong literary romantic movement, which owed much to Macpherson's
'Ossian', was an ever-present model in their minds. This romantic perspective had both a
softening and a broadening effect on what could have become something of a
philological closed shop. It provided
co-operation and 'inclusivity', while scholarship promoted specialisation and
'exclusivity'. Issues of contemporary
significance to the Celtic languages could be accommodated enthusiastically, if
desired, and there was some degree of flexibility. There was sufficient breadth in the 'Celtic'
concept to allow Kuno Meyer to be closely involved with indigenous Irish
scholars in the creation and maintenance of the Gaelic League. Along with Douglas Hyde and others, he
fostered the desire to increase and enhance the status of Irish in the closing
years of the nineteenth century.
The legacies of romanticism and rationalism
Despite the benefits of
romantic revivalism, however, we must take due note that the evidence does not
allow us to conclude that romanticism alone is sufficient to define Celtic
Studies. Romanticism had its good
points; romanticism helped to found the discipline; it gave it considerable
support and publicity, and some political cohesion. But it had a conceptual
hole at its centre, and it is not difficult to see that hole if one leafs
through the warmly affectionate, but hopelessly imprecise, appreciations of
Scottish Gaelic poetry (for example) which were produced in the nineteenth century
by all sorts of 'Celtic' well-wishers.
In the long term too, the perspectives which informed part of the
literary approach of Professor MacKinnon became empty and vacuous, and failed
to produce literary criticism of a lasting kind, at least in Gaelic
Scotland. After the First World War (a
war which, incidentally, seriously damaged Kuno Meyer's relationship with
British and Irish scholars) and the experience of the trenches, young Gaelic
intellectuals such as the Lewisman, Murdo Murray, who were spared to return to
their homeland, began to reject the soft primitivism at the heart of much
pre-1914 Gaelic poetry and its critics.
However, it was only in the second half of the twentieth century and in
the shadow of another world war, which finally put paid to the grosser excesses
of 'Aryan' theorising, that properly informed literary criticism appeared in
the field of Gaelic literature. Indeed,
it is arguable that the literary critical dimension of Gaelic was the last area
to rid itself of the deleterious effects and influence of 'Ossian'.
For some scholars,
romanticism was, of course, no more than a personalised bolt-hole, which
allowed them to retreat into the past, or to hold back the tide, or to go
'agypsying' with Kuno Meyer. We may
sympathise with such escapism; rationalism needs its counterbalance in
romanticism, and we all need our holidays (or so I am told). However, men like
Rhys, MacBain, MacKinnon and Meyer all realised, in different ways, that proper
foundations were required if the edifice was going to stand the test of
time. These foundations were based on a
critical, rational engagement with the Celtic languages. That engagement
allowed scholars - and the wider world - to appreciate the proper meaning of
place-names, manuscripts, poems, prose-texts and all of those things that are
absolutely essential to the discipline as a discipline. That engagement was what produced the
dictionaries, the onomastic studies, the philological understanding of the how
and the why of linguistic existence. Those of us who operate within the Celtic
academic discipline of the present day are the heirs of that engagement, and it
falls to us to maintain it. Without such
engagement, now as then, Celtic Studies will die.
Languages, past and present
Today, of course, we live in
a very different world, and the issues with which we have to grapple are to
some extent different from those which confronted the foundational
scholars. The languages themselves
continue to be a primary focus of attention for all of us in those areas of
Britain and Ireland where they are still spoken - but we are interested as much
in their future as in their past. We are
concerned as much about the routes that they will take in the days ahead as we
are about the roots from which they sprang.
Earlier scholars, such as Rhys and MacBain, did not have to worry to
quite the same degree about the survival of Welsh or Gaelic. Alongside their desire to correct the mythological
and literary misconceptions which came in the wake of 'Ossian', their aim was
to clean and purify the languages, and to purge them of the misty speculation
which had accumulated over many years.
The living Celtic languages
were thus among the beneficiaries of the philological excursions of the
foundational scholars, although the preservation of these languages through
'revivalism' was not always their direct concern. Rhys was a former school teacher and
inspector, and argued for a greater role for Welsh as a medium of instruction in
schools, but he appears to have accepted that Welsh would soon disappear - and
there are those who would fault him for that today. Alexander MacBain, likewise
a schoolteacher as well as a major scholar, may not have been a tub-thumping
revivalist campaigning for the preservation of Gaelic in Badenoch, but he had
an enormously important role in creating the next generation of Gaelic scholars
and creative writers, and also in supporting and encouraging educational
initiatives on behalf of Gaelic in the 1880s and 1890s. This was vital at a
time when the Scottish Education Act of 1872 made no mention of Gaelic. In his Edinburgh Chair, Donald MacKinnon was
charged to maintain the Gaelic language in its contemporary context, and did so
not only through teaching, but also through his essay-writing in Gaelic. The same charge has been at
the heart of Celtic Studies ever since, despite the popular view that the
discipline is medieval and retrospective.
In Scotland, a century after 1872, the same desire to maintain the Gaelic
language, but also to supplement the number of fluent speakers coming through
the schools, led to changes in the focus of those Departments of Celtic which
were born, along with Celtic Studies, at the end of the nineteenth century and
the beginning of the twentieth. Over the
last twenty or twenty-five years, all three Scottish departments have
maintained their scholarly enquiries into Celtic matters, linguistic and
literary, but they have also developed courses which allow complete beginners,
without any knowledge of Gaelic, to acquire the language and take full Honours
degrees. This in itself is a huge
challenge, since it can divert scholarly interests from the academic enquiry at
the heart of the discipline towards what may seem to be very basic and
unprogressive pedagogy.
At the same time, something
of a romantic breeze, with a very 'Celtic' scent, has been blowing during the
last decade and more. It has brought
gains and losses. On the one hand, it has increased awareness of something 'Celtic'
and has no doubt attracted students to the departments. On the other, it has
had a deflective tendency. To those who
seek iconic consolation in the eternally malleable concept of the 'Celts', it
is not always easy to present of the dangers of potential language loss among real Celts. As I said at the outset of
this paper, enthusiasts are seeing great things on the 'Celtic fringes' of our
linguistic archipelagos, and they want us to tell them of the Celtic cornucopia
just over the horizon. It would be very
easy to play the 'Celtic game', and to go for a generalised romantic Celticism,
which would satisfy palates and fire the emotions. But that would be disloyal to the founding
fathers of the discipline, and it would eventually impoverish all concerned. What Rhys, MacBain, MacKinnon, Meyer and
others tried to do, in the midst of the romantic hazes of their own time, was
to give priority to the Celtic languages and their literatures, and to
recognise their needs at a scholarly level within the emerging Celtic
discipline. The calling is the same for
us today, but there is a greater note of urgency at the very heart of our
calling. The prospect of imminent
language death leaves little room for romanticism.
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