Читать книгу Lyra Celtica: An Anthology of Representative Celtic Poetry онлайн

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Of the three great modern Scots, it is still a debatable point if Burns was not more Celtic than “Lowland,” that is, by paternal as well as by maternal descent; and it surely is almost unquestionable that, in the geography of the soul, Burns’ natal spot must be sought in the Fortunate Isles of Celtdom. Byron, of course, though far more British than Scottish, and again more Scottish than Celtic, had a strong Celtic strain in his blood; and Scott, as it happens, was of the ancient stock, and not “the typical Lowlander” he is so often designated.[1]

The truth is, that just as in Scotland we may come upon a type which is unmistakably national without being either Anglo-Saxon or Celtic or Anglo-Celtic, but which, rightly or wrongly, we take to be Pictish (and possibly a survival of an older race still), so, throughout our whole country, and in Sussex and Hampshire, as well as in Connemara or Argyll, we may at any moment encounter the Celtic brain in the Anglo-Saxon flesh. In Scotland, in particular, it may be doubted if there are many families native to the soil who have not at least a Celtic strain. People are apt to forget that Celtic Scotland does not mean only the Western Isles and the Highlands, and that the whole country was at one time Celtic (Goidelic), and before that was again Celtic, when Brythonic or Cymric Scotland and the Dalriadic Scoto-Irish of Argyll, and the northern Picts, who were probably Gaels, or of kindred Celtic origin, held the land, and sowed the human seed whence arose much of the finest harvest of a later Scotland.